[Trav S.D., “Tall Tales (and Counterfeit Codices)”, Dixon Place, NYC, 2/22/10]

He had me at “smithy,” one of several words so archaic there was no need for a free-associative filibuster of misspeech to turn them into automatic laugh lines. But Trav S.D. held me on every word like the medicine-show spellbinder he played in a brisk first set of flimflam from the front porch of an America so bygone even those who lived through it weren’t there.

Trav took us through tales of carnival freaks, two-fisted lawmen and the shellgame of the New York public school system, tripping on point over every term, conjugated into a multiverse of illuminating malapropism. Thinking spherically and snowballing sideshow nonsense with modern-day senselessness (in one memorable bit the traveling trickster tries to secure a grade-school artist’s residency for his flea-bitten trained monkeys and dog-biting men), Trav showed that the classic con-man is as undying an American type as the stuff we need escapism for.

Flailing his points home like a charismatic receiving divine bulletins or a prophet undergoing a series of lucid strokes, Trav channeled the likes of P.T. Barnum, who fleeced urban bumpkins in the fringe theatre of his time not far from where Trav was plying his trade.

Halfway in, he ditched some of the folksy drag for an adventure into the self-imagined sophistication of those same urban bumpkins, with a satire of spy-thriller literature that extended the genre’s over-exposition into intricate descriptions of its own arbitrary coincidences and ethical failings.

Some jokes you could see coming like the meteor you’re dying to watch whack the earth at a summer multiplex; most left you hysterically wondering at the license number of the truck that just hit you so you could get it to back up over you again. In these United States there’s always another one coming — but get on the road, because there sure ain’t a Trav S.D. born every minute.

[http://travsd.wordpress.com; www.dixonplace.org]

Cover, erm, shot

The genetically-engineered assassin “Chase Variant” is named after a marketing category but is actually a flesh-blood-and-then-some sentient being struggling against industry clichés and commercial imperatives, her weird Darwinian battles with other made-to-order mutants taking arbitrary twists as two unseen enthusiasts direct her life itself in an RPG cardgame.

The Image Comics debut, Chase Variant One Shot (Is All I Need), is the kind of hyper-narrative that could easily come apart — or not come apart enough, like writer Rich Johnston’s airlessly in-jokey Watchmensch last year. But avoiding specific referentiality and setting up a clever conceptual framework, Johnston frees himself to tell a ripping yarn with riveting unpredictable action and inspired runs of free-associative absurdity.

Greatest superhero Bagwells

Chase has a surefire killer instinct, a handy personal arsenal, four arms and several backup vital organs for emergencies (in a wry nod to critical decorum from the heart of extreme-fiction excess, Chase has somehow only been outfitted with two boobs, though there’s material for at least four).

Her survival struggle at the frontier of evolution as the horizons of humanity recede, in an arms race where she and her fellow monstrosities are both the conscripts and the commodity, is a state-of-the-art skim of paranoid cyber-fi that never feels derivative (though with Chase’s Kaliesque look and special-op occupation I do welcome the sense of getting as close as we’re ever likely to to seeing a kickass solo series for Grant Morrison’s The Bride).

Tenuta brings the paint

Like any resident of a meaningless universe, Chase harbors fourth-wall-weakening suspicions about the fabric of her reality but suppresses them to stay alive. Well-known comics columnist Johnston’s script expertly balances mastery of and commentary on the medium, and the post-Corben painting and sharp animation/illustration art on the two stories by Saverio Tenuta and Bagwell, respectively, is perfectly poised between graphic sheen and stylistic personality.

A one-shot that deserves many more, Chase Variant is a thrilling look inside the fantasies fanboys find so important, and the reality we all try so perilously to hold on to.

[Saturday Night Saloon series, 1/9/10, Brooklyn, USA]

Finales aren’t a plot point, they’re a genre. You can save a lot on comics and invest it in a lot of popcorn-counter runs if you just get the planetary-blowup last issues of comic companies’ crossover events and skip the scenes leading up to the big dance-competition throwdown in the average multiplex pageant. Hence, while the leadup episodes of Vampire Cowboys’ Saturday Night Saloon series of monthly episodic plays were each their own reward, every company knew what they were there for when it all came to an end.

Dustin Chinn’s “Let’s Ninja Science Ranger Team Get!”, which had proven four previous times that there’s no longer any limit once you’ve gone too far, concluded its tale of time-traveling martial-arts action figures by launching right into that dance-competition you craved, with bonus cross-millennial rap battle as the Rangers travel to the early-’70s Bronx in a final conflict for the past and future of hip hop that’s too complicated to go into and too immaterial to matter as the crew convert the real-life audience into their block-party grandstand and gleefully get buried under their own fallen fourth wall.

Brent Cox’s “Jack O’Hanrahan and the Troubulation of Doom” pushed the plunger on a matching self-referential implosion, as the play’s unseen narrator stops explaining and starts interrupting for some deus-ex-machina plot wrap-ups to complement onstage eminence Kelly Rae O’Donnell’s tour de force demonic-possession solo, an occult-madonna set piece that makes Mike Mignola’s comics seem not so unfilmable after all.

Payoffs can be emotional as well as pyrotechnic, so Mac Rogers’ “Mother Sacramento” and James Comtois’ “Entrenched” each pulled the surprise ending of authentic pathos, the latter with a depressingly redemptive scenario of eternal sacrifice by a time-manipulating scientist who will never know he’s a savior; the former with a downbeat private armageddon for the ecclesiastical melodrama’s faithless-cleric heroine and her fallen former-lover antagonist.

The jewel of this evening’s logical conclusions was Crystal Skillman’s cybotage potboiler “Hack,” an entire narrative cobbled from coming-attractions-style outbursts giving way to action-flick afterthought serial epilogues, all seen through the interface of Skillman’s masterful eye for archetypal cliché and suicide-mission self-invention. The dramatis personae of shadowy e-terrorists, teeth-gritting commando spooks, and those who play them on their Facebook page go through a gauntlet of real-time jump-cuts, faked fights, echoing gauzy flashbacks and other actually-absent production tricks that both make you aware of how helpless contemporary movie and TV performers are without their FX bells and whistles and how irreducible are the talents of this definitively game-faced ensemble.

Having thrown everyone clear of the blast at the end of each month’s bill, Jeff Lewonczyk’s “Lady Cryptozoologist: Season 2” settled for no less than crescendoing its cliffhanger about a madly propagating mutant fungus with a Lovecraftian quantum orgasm and climactic mountain cave-in. And then a singalong. Because nothing ever ends, and even if the world’s blown up and the theatre’s dead, the true artists are always up for renewal.

[www.vampirecowboys.com/events.htm]

The High Cost of Living
(A nod to Neil Gaiman, of course)

The intrinsic understanding the dream world had availed me of its physicality allowed not only the ground rushing up towards me to fill me with the fear of death, but also to put me at peace with the knowledge that I would not actually die. This was a dream after all, and I would only wake as I slammed into the canyon floor. (Freud was wrong.)

I opened my eyes. The dream had ended. It was dead. It was nothing more than a memory: a photograph on the back of my eyelids. Is this then what death is? Is death when something is left only as a memory? Is death when the thing can no longer speak for itself? The dream was gone, and I lived to tell the tale. Then what happened to the dream? Did Morpheus retake his creation to recycle it as someone else’s nighttime fantasy? Did it simply vanish? Or did it retreat to the Dreaming to live out the rest of eternity in indescribable peace? Not one person or thing can know. One person or thing can only guess.

By trade, writers are guessers. They pontificate wildly upon topics that erect a protective wall of mystery before the intrusive eyes of science and religion. It is all a guess. Some guesses are accepted by scientists, and some are accepted clergy, but it is still all a guess.

To Gray’s Anatomy, death is the ending of all vital functions or processes in an organism or cell. To the Bible, death is the final state of the unsaved, and “…he who keeps My word shall never see it.” To the scientists, Gray’s Anatomy is indisputably correct. To the Christians, the science is incomplete. Neither views are wrong. Science cannot disprove faith, nor can faith disprove science. Writers accept this fact, thrive off of it, and then make names for themselves with it.

To young Raymond Douglas Bradbury, “Death is your little sister one morning when you look into her crib and see her staring at you with blank, blue eyes… When you stand by her high chair four weeks later and realize she’ll never be in it again to make you jealous of her because she was born…”

To Neil Gaiman’s character, Robert Gadling, “Death is rubbish… The only reason people die is because everyone does it. You all just go along with it.”

Abbe Faria, Dumas’ heroic mentor to the Count of Monte Cristo, views death as “…sole consolation of my wretched existence… God grants that there no longer exists for me distance or obstacle.”

Then what defines death? Each writing exposes a different view on the subject. Each writing is just as arguably correct as the next because each writing draws expertise from the same vast uncertainty. Upon reflection, we come to the conclusion that death is logically indefinable but by one overlooked trait: nothing may die without first living. Death is the price paid for life. Whether it is a cell phone, chivalry, or a person that has died, it is innately understood in any philosophy, that these things were once alive. Death, in all its incarnations, is the high cost of living.

This blog is housed on a site dedicated to an artform often centered on heroics. It’s a harmless fantasy, but when it’s just a fantasy in real life it can do a lot of harm. There’s been a strange turn in the Obama Administration in recent days, in which the rhetoric gets tougher the less effective the policies really are. The President called major bankers to the White House — those who managed to show up — for a woodshed photo-op *after* which he talked tough about what would be expected of these captains of an industry everyone’s tax dollars disappeared in the general direction of. He himself hit the climate-change summit toward its end and gave rousing speeches about getting meaningful work done — emerging with a completely nonbinding and open-ended compromise statement, brokered by the U.S. and our partner architect of the Iraq War “coalition,” Britain. Then there’s healthcare… or it seemed there was going to be.

To quiet right-leaning members of their own party (or essential defectors like Joe Lieberman), Senate Democrats flensed their own bill of anything that would cause expense or effort from the insurance companies (and that goes for the proscription on pre-existing-condition exclusions too, since there’s nothing to keep them from jacking up our price for this protection). This was with the full encouragement of the White House, to which all 60 nominal Democrats in the Senate were called for another of these sleeve-rolling seminars, which make a show of tough choices and tenacious principle but from which everyone emerges with sweeping unilateral compromises.

The president gave a contentious speech after that one, and the automatic emails I get from the White House have since talked about the urgent need to get this “historic” legislation passed. Unspecific mention is made of compromises that had to be made, as in all legislation. The “compromise” in this case, however, was an abandonment of the president’s own stated principles — including a public option to provide real competition for unrestrained insurers — with all his administration’s energy directed toward moderating allies of this plan in Congress rather than pressuring those breaking ranks and siding with big-business Republicans. Not getting all you want and not fighting for any of it are two very different things. Sadly, the “reality” we’re being asked to accept is one broader and more discouraging than the president intends.

It has to do with accepting business-as-usual from even the most rhetorically idealistic of politicians. To an extent, rhetoric alone can be revolutionary. Obama had been uncommon, almost unprecedented, in the level to which he would confront critics’ claims and counter-arguments head-on. The very passing acknowledgment of “compromises made” in current White House spam is a disappointing step back to the mere deletion of opposing viewpoints and recently reneged positions we’re more accustomed to.

The decade now ending was uncommonly overt in its affirmations that popular will doesn’t matter. Millions of people taking to the streets — many of whom never had before — against the Iraq fiasco months before it started was just the most vivid example. There is a feeling of foregone conclusions and timetable-driven policy at work in both that misadventure and the president’s and Senate’s rallying around a bad healthcare bill. The Bush Administration was explicit about the ability to wage war in a time of year with favorable weather constituting the deadline by which weapons-inspectors must find a reason for going to war at all or go home; Obama has become fixated on the face-saving grail of getting a healthcare bill done within the year, whether or not it meaningfully addresses the issues he raised in introducing it.

The majority of Americans who still favor a public option — and the majority of Democratic voters who say they’ll stay home in 2010 if the current version of the bill becomes law — have waited several lifetimes for truly affordable, fully available healthcare, and could wait a little longer for the right fight to be fought. If it’s already lost, though, they shouldn’t stay home — and next time a lot of them should try being on the ballot themselves.

Obama understands well the power of symbols — his oratory remains stirring, even when there is no accomplishment behind or proceeding from the words (and he’s calling us to fervor about positions opposite to the ones being promoted before; a worrisome Clintonian definition of unity and victory without even Bill Clinton’s honest high-handedness toward his base). Symbols drive us — the sacrifice of Martin Luther King, the vision of Thom Paine, etc. — but it would be nice if some leaders would be more than symbols while they’re alive (as the guys I’ve listed were). It’s still early in the administration, but some major ground is being ceded already, no matter how rousing the rhetoric and disciplined the stagecraft.

We may just have to settle for what Obama represented — determination, principle, and a connection to common experience. Most of us need no schooling to understand the growing privation and powerlessness of the many, and increasingly have no choice in trying to do something about it. The 2008 campaign — and the movements since — released a spirit of participation and persistence that no one should — unilaterally — seal back up. He started it, and we have to finish it; even he never said anything different (though there was no expecting how soon he might not go there with us). Obama was a great idea, and a valid one. Maybe he’s not “The One” after all. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t Another One somewhere. Or another 300 million.

“Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury”
The Brick Theatre, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, 12/17/09

www.pipermckenzie.com

True to the action ethos of its kung-fu title, you’re dropped right in the middle of a staged fight and a laugh riot, its wordless cast projecting a polyglot of stage-hypnotist zoo-mime, Keystone Cop drills, interpretive jazzhands, Shaolin playbook and Vedic sex manual. But let’s back this up and tell the players apart:

After gathering several years of evidence on writer-director Jeff Lewonczyk’s unerring inappropriateness and actor-director Hope Cartelli’s method-seizures, when the two took joint credit for “Craven Monkey”’s concept I parked in the front row and girded my lap for an oversloshing keg of crazy. But the clashing elements of their creativity seem to moderate each other (and what better definition of marriage can I come up with?), achieving an equilibrium that eludes most of the characters in this Darwinian fable.

A dawn-of-time quest myth from before the continents drifted apart and any of the world’s folkloric traditions got unmashed, “Craven” concerns the first hominid to be ostracized from the tribe, thus entering the necessary ordeal to ascend to singular humanity.

Existing on the fringes of acceptable culture and having explored the pre-Biblical disaster story of the king of gods calling down a global flood to silence the racket of human rutting in 2008’s “Babylon Babylon, scriptwriter Lewonczyk has a keen sense of history pivoting on the primal faux pas, and the titular Craven Monkey’s transgression entails offending the tribe’s sense of tradition by doing it biped-style. A dirty joke slips into poetry, as Craven Monkey and Lady Monkey become “the first to look into each other’s eyes and see themselves reflected.”

Nonetheless, Craven is ejected onto a Scapegoat’s Journey that at first mainly involves a plan to scale the tallest nearby mountain and drop its teetering boulder on his hated hometown. But a more meaningful ascension becomes his destiny, shoved along by two prehistoric parent figures in a kind of archaeological out-of-town tryout of the God, Lucifer and Job story.

Cartelli (”The Vital Spirit”) is a bioengineer earth mother fashioning a worldwide menagerie of children species, setting boundaries of extinction when they don’t know what’s good for them and holding a few limited-edition behemoths in reserve to send natural-order transgressors like Craven Monkey to a permanent time-out — leave it to this show’s brain-trust to give evolution a creation myth and come up with a scientific rationale for mythic monsters (though the pre-Abrahamic pantheons Lewonczyk and Cartelli draw on did nature’s work with a much more modern grasp of basic biology than the guys who took over from them). Art Wallace (”The Sensei”) is a celestial game-warden the Spirit conjured in her image to manage creation but who becomes a Prometheus-like troublemaker, coaching Craven Monkey to walk upright, use weapons, and defy the goddess.

Left behind with the tribe who won’t try anything once, Lady Monkey runs away to rejoin her lover and they become an earthy Adam and Eve struggling to escape the garden, with the Spirit and Sensei two poles of commanding common sense and nurturing aspiration that no one can think are either fully right or wrong.

But remember, when it comes to most of the dramatis personae, they ain’t heavy — they’re monkeys! The only member of the company who gets to speak let alone lecture is Lewonczyk as the offstage narrator, delivering the profane text in deadpan nature-documentary locutions that disclaim weightiness while the nonverbal cast stomps home a timeless semaphore of love, striving, and projectile poop.

Cartelli mimes an imperious, reality-weaving dance of destruction and creation decked in a good-fairy armor that calls to mind some holiday department-store window diorama of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”; Wallace radiates all-fatherly warmth with serene arm-sweeps and a shaggy conical cloak that suggests a cross between a walking fir-tree and Silent Bob.

Adrian Jevicki and Jessi Gotta as the two lead Monkeys and the ensemble of Becky Byers, Fred Backus, Mateo Moreno and Melissa Roth as the tribe and various monsters are a whirlwind of learned frenzy, igniting the stage to a story told mostly in fight-choreographers Qui Nguyen and Adam Swiderski’s Jack Kirbyesque ballets of brutality.

That team, best known for the Vampire Cowboys troupe’s stage-combat-centered high kitsch, stretches some unaccustomed but expert muscles of delicate harmony as well as acrobatic carnage here. Craven and Lady’s most crucial heroism comes as lovers, not fighters, when a blockbuster cataclysm leaves them alone and obliged to get down to the business of repopulating the earth, this time with the new human species. We all know how that worked out, but the play ends before the, erm, honeymoon is over.

This is all part of the self-explanatory Fight Fest, a season of sports entertainment to mirror our coast-to-coast shouting match and international pastime of perpetual battle. But in the elegant interplay and affirmative physicality of “Craven Monkey”’s considered slapstick is a vision of passionate impulse bestowed with purpose, and essential conflict tamed as art.

The Wii-G: A Wii from the Dark Side

Why plan to plunk a plain `ol Wii under the tree or by the menorah when you can get a near-nefarious version for the spiritually irresponsible loved one in your life? Nintendo insiders have revealed a new version of their popular console: the Wii-G combines hip wireless video gaming with a creepy means to contact the “other side.”

I met with one mystic scientist who would agree to speak only under condition of strict anonymity.  He explained how it works: “Once the game begins, the wireless remote will seem to move your arm of its own accord, pointing to the letters and words on the on-screen game board.”

I had to ask the obvious question. “Since it’s on a screen, why point to anything at all? Why not allow the spirits to simply magically place the messages right on the television?”

“We did create a version like that,” the scientist explained, “but instead of answering our questions it kept typing up teleplays for unaired episodes of Charmed. So back to pointing it was.”

The Wii-G is only available from the following stores: Everything Under A Pentagram; Ambercrombie & Crowley; Cauldrons-a-Million; and select Wal-Marts.

Good causes are an elusive concept. They’re often the opposite of good feeling. They imply a lack of good times now, and sacrifices on the way to achieving a worthy goal and a lasting relief.

President Obama’s Afghan War escalation rationale last night was a good speech. What the cause is, though, is a shifting target. The goals, as articulated, are a cordon against terrorist staging-grounds and nuclear takeover, a model of principled global policing and sound humanitarian and civil support that makes all sides feel safer in partnership with each other, not secure in each other’s demise.

The purpose, as understood by all and stated by everyone but the president, is to underwrite his image of leadership so that he and his party can remain in power long enough to advance an agenda of relief and uplift for our own precarious country — affordable and available healthcare, nominal checks on corporate grand theft, steps toward reversing our industrial decline with new jobs and technologies which might reverse ecological collapse.

These urgent needs — and the consequent importance of limiting our overseas commitments in relation to them — were addressed toward the end of the president’s speech; those goals, and the abstract ideas of a world stable enough that they can be pursued by all, were the only lines that got applause from what was otherwise the most solemn audience of teenagers and very young twentysomethings I’ve ever seen.

In articulating those ideals, the speech was positively Gerson-esque. George W. Bush’s original speechwriter produced some of the best progressive oratory this country has heard in a long time. It was entirely unconnected to its speaker’s intentions, whereas the Obama speech last night was merely disconnected from reality. Afghanistan has no duly elected leader, and no government to speak of. The badguys strolled out the backdoor at Tora Bora eight years ago — the ones who attacked us, I mean; the ones who used to control the country are strolling back to fill the vast void around Karzai. As even early war supporter Thomas Friedman points out, the Afghan people need no “training” to become a fighting force; we’re not stuck there because we’re needed, we’re failing there because we’re not wanted. Afghanistan’s been kicking out superpowers for thousands of years. Alexander the Great gave up on this place, but then, he didn’t have to worry about being re-elected.

What *could* make us wanted? If anything, taking this project out of the Defense Department and putting it in the State Department. Many of our soldiers on the ground have pacified what areas in Iraq and Afghanistan they have not with bullets but with micro-diplomacy and door-to-door economic aid. We’ve given militias jobs and turned them to our side, we’ve brokered local disputes with warlords and their populations. It shouldn’t be a soldier’s duty, but most of them do it with dedication and sincerity. They also do it with pragmatism and emotional common sense: they realize it’s what will most help keep them and the ordinary people around them alive. They don’t do it with professional training, a master plan or any overall resources and authority. A Marshall Plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan (the latter of which the president is at least attempting to some degree), including economic development for the Afghans (who have world-class marble reserves they can’t excavate as easily as heroin poppies), would show what America can do for them (which fosters cooperation), not who can subdue them (which triggers resistance — and has resulted in an eight-year, daily defeat for the strongest country in the world).

Americans thought of Afghanistan as the good war of our two current ones. That’s evaporated along with all the stated objectives that sent us in. And with dwindling memories; Obama now has to contend with the belated pacifism of a Democratic Congress cynically second-guessing the action they gave a blank check to to begin with. Deliberating only after deciding is of no more use than, say, planning an occupation only after executing an invasion. That’s Congress’ problem, and Obama’s is trying to fight the war of 2002 in 2009. What could work — and yes, what might even have worked in the rush to retaliate and revert to old rules after 9/11 — is to fight on terms our enemies can’t comprehend but every ordinary person does: to present the better alternative. Our soldiers and citizens, on every side, are those ordinary people. Our leaders and commanders never are.

The president read off a list of the ways he has confronted the costs of war when his predecessor concealed them — visiting wounded troops and bereaved families; honestly accounting for the tax moneys being drained from a bankrupt country for the nation-building abroad to continue; traveling to the flag-draped coffins at Dover. This was his way of emphasizing that he’s ready to accept the consequences of his decisions. But each time the camera swept over the look of utter terror on the faces of most of these kids, it was a reminder that he, like every president, and we, like every civilian citizenry, are really only ready to accept *their* consequences.

No leader wants to be the one who backed down; no everyday person wants to be the one to abandon fellow human beings to a deadly fate they feel they should have tried to stop. But everyone learns by making mistakes, and learns to make less of them by admitting they happened. Obama faces a restless electorate and a loud lunatic fringe. What he wants to do for all of them could be in danger if any overseas conflict becomes “his” lost war. But he’s done very well so far by calling our country to face reality and to escape bad times by going through them, not thinking there’s a way around. We have lost Afghanistan. We can still win America, and serve as an example that does people everywhere good. It’s not the best news. But it’s the fight worth facing.