CCdC’s private email list was unusually active today as we shared and discussed the news of Disney’s purchase of Marvel Entertainment, which seems to have taken much of the business world and certainly popculturedom by surprise. Our compadre Ian jotted some early thoughts in his blog over at PopMatters. Sure, sure, it’ll end up being just fine in the end, but for the moment I really enjoy that people everywhere are talking about Iron Man and Spidey.

(Being a random appreciation of not-necessarily-comics-related offerings from the best of the illegitimate theatre)

Willy Nilly; Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie St., New York City, 8/22/09; www.pipermckenzie.com

Blood on the Cat’s Neck; The Brick Theatre, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, 8/22/09; http://collisionwork.livejournal.com

Everywhere you look this month, Charlie Manson seems to have slipped in to murder the dinner guests at the anniversary party for Hair, for Woodstock, even for freakin’ jeans. No surprise, since he’s been hypnotizing the camera eye for 40 years. Playwright/composer/actor Trav S.D.’s song-and-dance dissertation on the phenomenon, Willy Nilly, will put an eerily detached smile on your face from start to finish.

In tuneful jumpcuts from career convict to cult leader to legend, “Willy Nilson” hits Hollywood, assembles a harem of hippies, does battle with Black Panthers, spellbinds a Beach Boy into letting him cut an album and orchestrates mass murder. That a time-honored one-size success-story template so easily fits aspiring vaudeville troupers and messianic madmen alike says something about the real-life Manson Family’s actually seamless progress from products of American mainstream culture to fixtures of it.

Absolute rulers are usually epic buffoons, and the manic rants, stoned slapstick, prehistoric hipsterism and period-pastiche score make this the most hilarious show about brainwashing and ritual slaughter you may see all month. Laughter is the best therapy and the surest subversion; still, it’s all *so* funny you can be fooled into thinking that history reprocessed as farce is the production’s only purpose. But when the climactic massacre comes, in a showstopper of B-movie gore and youthsploitation SFX, it’s clear we’re seeing a flash-forward montage of the following four decades of pop culture, in which Manson has proven more admired and influential than any of his flower-power contemporaries. You don’t need Willy’s self-serving closing courtroom speech to agree he’s had a countryfull of accomplices in the ensuing media carnival, but taking any of these people too seriously has been every previous pundit and producer’s big mistake.

In the lead role, Avery Pearson does a great job of both erratically speaking in the tongues of medicine-show jester, charismatic prophet and streetcorner psycho, and portraying an endlessly shifting personality that passionately believes each contradictory thing it’s saying, for the moment it’s being said; the ultimate actor, in no search of a script, because it finds him.

The artisanal hysteria Hope Cartelli’s been honing all decade finds its highest expression yet in her role as Willy’s founding follower, the famously glazed Manson-clan affect allowing her to come closer than ever to the complete liberation of reaction from reference. The kamikaze clowning of Maggie Cino, as another disciple, passes astounding new limits here as well, and if the billboard good looks and radiant self-importance of Adam Swiderski’s ego-addicted pop star (a Dennis Wilson doppelganger from “The Beachnuts”) were not proven to exist in this performance, it would be necessary for neo-pop comic artist Mike Allred to design him.

Trav S.D. specializes in testing what human truths can manage to seep through a canvass almost entirely collaged from caricatures, and thus special honors go to the most omnivorous epicures of chewed scenery — and for sheer bravura bombast the Shatner goes to: Mateo Moreno for his otherworldly, whingeing shtick as a doped-up Queen Elizabeth (don’t ask, just get the last few tickets) and effete filmmaker “Poland Romanski”; and Daryl Lathon for his finely-wrought exaggeration and well-timed outbursts as the murder-blues-crooning jail janitor who’s Willy’s secret father, and an aspiring pitchman turned militant revolutionary (as opposed to the order those things happen in real life).

Director/ringmaster Jeff Lewonczyk once again keeps clockwork looking like chaos; Becky Byers’ exuberant down-with-people choreography stomps nails in theme-park Broadway’s coffin with expert deployment of its own talent-show cliches; and you couldn’t ask for a realer band to make fake pop history than musical accompanists The Four Hoarses.

Trav S.D.’s ability to metabolize mass-culture touchstones is infinite yet discerning; he appears as the Jack Webb-like control voice to narrate (and eventually participate in) the proceedings. It’s a standard G-Man vs. dropout trope of the times, but also raises the unwelcome shade of a pathologically uptight Tom Snyder’s tabloid-TV exhibition interview with an antic, aging Manson 20 years later. So too we’re treated to a grotesque reanimation of Laugh-In’s go-go interludes (a cheekily damning distant-replay of the T&A on which middle-aged hipsters and Manson could agree); and Trav doubles as a Tiny Tim clone infiltrating the clan to make sure they first do the crime and then get locked up for it (somewhere the ghost of Malcolm X is nodding, but not smiling).

Even an anguished allusion to the pseudo-hippie Star Trek parable “Miri” makes it into the square narrator’s tortured dialogue. Perhaps all that’s left is to mount a sequel in which stand-ins for Warhol’s Factory march through Times Square and demand to take over the Ed Sullivan show. But there just might not be the audience for it. The Warhol kids never killed anyone but themselves (and except for Valerie Solanas, didn’t even try) — and that’s box-office suicide.

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I ended up at two different dinner parties that turn to slaughters in the same evening when I headed over from the Nilsons’ on the Lower East Side to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Blood on the Cat’s Neck (a.k.a. Marilyn Monroe vs. The Vampires) in Brooklyn. Written in 1971, the play takes the fading pulse of postwar, bureaucratized, organization-wo/man malaise in, it so happens, metropolitan Germany, as seen through the monitors of “Phoebe Zeitgeist,” an extraterrestrial here to observe human social orders.

Mostly mute and resembling a life-size music-box ballerina, Phoebe (played by an inspiredly animatronic Gyda Arber) gets alternately ignored and projected onto like a pinup Chauncey Gardiner by a superb ensemble cast of soliloquizing mainstreet archetypes (butcher, cop, office-drone, professor, war widow, gigolo, etc.). Fassbinder channels these quiet-desperation monologues with a compassion, and an apparent personal familiarity with the subject-matter, quite uncommon for midcentury lefty moralizing, and director Ian W. Hill choreographs the drain-circling narrative structure and alternating character interplay with the kind of assuredness that gives avant-garde asymmetry and simultaneity a good name.

It’s not spoiling any more than the online synopsis does to say that, at the end, Phoebe has heard enough and goes on a vampiric rampage amongst the party guests that Roman Polanski would be proud of. Was she sent here to measure our weaknesses all along? Is she a judgment engine which has assessed us unworthy? Should we be thankful that the real-life human psyche, unlike hers, can somehow reconcile and sustain all this disappointment and cruelty? Either way, the late-’60s/early- ’70s was a time when it seemed surely that a millennium was at hand, and whether that meant deliverance by a bohemian saint or merely being dispatched by an antichrist or alien, it would at least be, y’know, something different.

Someone over at Slashdot pointed out this article from Scientific American that describes a project to create an artificial intelligence that is evil. Really. From the article: “[Scientist] Bringsjord acknowledges that the endeavor to create pure evil… does raise ethical questions.”

Although one can imagine some (creepy) benefits from studying evil in a petri dish, this feels like the sort of ethically challenged science that runs rampant in comics — can this mean that real comic-style heroes are on the way to battle this evil that will undoubtedly fall into the wrong hands one day, or will we remain the sort of reality that has only supervillains? The article is almost a year old; perhaps a better question to pose is what sort of evil could the AI have cooked up by now?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=defining-evil&print=true

(Being an occasional reading of and into current films)

I have seen the future of music, and it happened three decades ago. “Soul” has been a dirty word at the multiplex, it seems; three of the most vivid re-creations of black culture and its impact on all civilization (and three of the most entertaining movies, period) in recent years — Talk to Me, Cadillac Records, and Dreamgirls (notwithstanding its one polite Oscar) — have tanked at the box-office or quickly sunken from memory. Maybe after four years (can I get an “eight”?) of a black presidency, there will be more recognition of these themes as *American* history. You’d think good music would make it harder to argue with (and all three above were music-related in some way; volatile deejay, groundbreaking record-label, struggling would-be stars); billed as a straight concert movie, maybe Soul Power has music enough.

Even so, alert documentarians give it as good a storyline as any fiction, and it still seems a bit stranger. This is the flipside of When We Were Kings, focusing on the music festival meant to coincide with the famed 1974 Ali-Foreman fight in the former Zaire (they were actually separated by more than a month). Surfacing 35 years later, the film plays like the timewarp Woodstock of the decade it’s been released in. The gated suburb of mid-’70s mass-media would’ve dismissed this as a laughable footnote and chitlin’-circuit curio had it come out when it was actually made and its participants were at their peak; with the internationalization of music now well underway and the primacy of the black canon to modern culture a long-settled fact, it feels like a standard text.

We see the Spinners as the most professional men in show business; Bill Withers breaks your heart with every note and shows what singer-songwriters should always be; Miriam Makeba and Celia Cruz, now dead, show how much more than alive they always were anyway; Congolese legends Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau get long-overdue platforms; and James Brown, endlessly inventive and able to incarnate any new idea or musical ideal, is the elder-god of modern sound. Between and around sets, the camera captures the well-oiled pomp of the proto-blockbuster machinery that distant funders and concert-industry fixtures put in to make this happen; the ebullience of impromptu jams in the streets; the subtle ubiquity of Zaire’s then-dictatorship (as opposed to Congo’s now-chaos); and, above all, the camaraderie of the black, Latin (and some white) creators, revitalized by returning to humanity’s homeland and centered on Muhammad Ali, out of the ring for most of this account and fully recognizable now as not just a master Warholian self-promoter but a truly courageous spokesman, statesman and model citizen, speaking truths to racial power that are still too true, whether you’re on your first beer or your third.

On the other hand, progress is the art of adding up the one-steps-forward while keeping track of the two-steps-back (Makeba, after all, kept facing ahead and outlived her own land’s dictatorship). For all the celebration onstage this could be a sad film, considering how many involved didn’t live to see other days like January 20, 2009. But their triumph, and our debt to them for a lot more than an hour-and-a-half of pop perfection, is that every one of them could see it coming.

Due to logistics I only pick up my new comics once a month. Last weekend’s visit yielded three issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, including #600. Amazing is relatively new to my pull list; I got in long after “One More Day,” and then only because I heard somewhere (maybe around here) that Fred Van Lente would be jumping on board for writing duties. Though he wouldn’t remember me, I’ve had the opportunity to shake Fred’s hand once or twice at SPX near Washington, DC, and Fred is among the most personable people I’ve ever met at any sort of comic gathering. This was enough to make me want to read his outstanding Action Philophers books (with Ryan Dunlavey) and it was enough to have Amazing added to my pull list.

Fred’s arc doesn’t begin until #602, so I got in a bit earlier than I intended. Even so, the issues these past few months — even at three a month — have been a delight to read. The stories have been fun, intelligent, engaging, and refreshing, everything I want from a superhero comic. Of particular note is #600 — Dan Slott’s lead story (with John Romita Jr) managed to sneak in some simply brilliant elements. My favorite (and this is kind of a spoiler) is that Peter Parker, not Spidey, saves the day. Dan Slott’s Peter Parker is a genius scientist who prefers web-swinging adventure to labs, but he still has brain chops (which sounds a little yucky written that way) if he needs them. This serves to recast Spidey as the hero who has almost everything: brains, brawn, girls… and gobs of bad luck, because it just wouldn’t be Spidey if Murphy’s Law didn’t follow him around like gooey black stuff on Venom.

The other stories in the book are good and entertaining, and I felt like I got my money’s worth for my $4.99. There’s even a teaser at the end (which I won’t spoil) which forecasts a long-reaching arc that may chase Spidey into next year.