These days most thrillers don’t get screened for critics ’til they’re already at the multiplex; in the free and democratic world of indie theatre, I can review a play before it’s even finished.

The Vampire Cowboys company, Brooklyn’s best purveyors of nonprofit grindhouse, previewed part of their next play, The Slasherland Project, for two nights in their post-historical warehouse-district rehearsal space (October 26 & 27 — you’ve got a few hours to catch it if you see this when it posts — with a full premier at HERE Arts Center in 2010).

The first victim is Blair Witch/Paranormal Activity faux horror verite, as the cast informs you you’re witnessing the true story of little-known mass-murders “researched” by Vampire Cowboys’ own ensemble, who then settle into a full archive of casualty-in-waiting stereotypes, albeit mostly in the actors’ own names.

These killings, committed in backwoods Oregon, are teased as being the least reported in the Gacy/Gein/Dahmer pantheon, like some lost greatest-hits of unreleased atrocity. This crassness is one of the Romero-esque meta-horrors author Qui Nguyen sprinkles through the play (along with the red-state/blue-state slapstick of urbanites for whom the biggest terror is small-town life and country folk for whom the worst outrage is being viewed in a bad light).

The troupe of tough-talking tomboy, “slow”-but-lovable ox, oversexed slut and himbo, all-business ringleader with a tragic secret and expendable blackguy — a group one member literally derides as a Scooby Doo gang, so as not to put too fine a point or short a blade on it — interview various local hicks and eternally-spooked shut-ins about a ritually-slaughtering high school teacher of 20 years past. These are a bonus catalogue of inspired character-actor cliches — all played by the same small ensemble — with more of that subtext the discerning gore-junkie demands. Some see the killer as a spawn of hell who keeps the village permanently in fear, and others as an agent of god who put the town forever in line; urban legend perverted as founding myth.

Nguyen’s ear for the spontaneous wit of smartasses outdoing each other and the pomposities of people who don’t know they’re joking remains near-flawless — this time compounded in both the self-important jargon of old-school horror procedurals and the narcissism of actors announcing their process. As the body-count mounts, in lurid flashbacks and in the inevitably ill-fated theatre-troupe’s present, they’ll die and you’ll be laughing.

Slasherland is a bit of a field study for Nguyen himself, who told me after the show that he hasn’t watched nearly as much splatter cinema as he’s read comics and rented kung-fu flicks; his relative newness in town helps him see the highlights and stay tethered to a sense of purpose in a way the genre can’t allow his sacrificial cast of characters to.

William Castle broke the fourth wall and current home-movie horror asks you to forget it’s there; in Slasherland the spectre of scripted pulp is closing in to cast a shadow of imposed narrative on our YouTube culture of self-generated attention. The preview version ends with at least one more act to write and a whole lot of people left to kill, but that show, be damn sure, will go on.

[www.vampirecowboys.com]

(Being an occasional digression from comics to songs I can’t get out of my head)

Meshell Ndegeocello, Devil’s Halo (Mercer Street)

On her eighth album, which as always feels as fresh as a first and as skilled as a hundredth, Meshell takes a little over half an hour to knock both the frontiers and foundations of contemporary music into a new direction for decades. In her farthest detour from state-of-the-art hip-hop since Bitter ten years ago (which intercepted the orbit of modern-classical), Meshell mines the timeless ear-candy catalogue for the closest thing to a pop album she can or would want to do. But it’s done her way, with irresistible yet unprecedented signatures suspended in abstractly scattered but flawlessly structured patchwork compositions — the Platonic Hook, floating in nebulae of sonic textures.

No one but Prince can squeeze as many majestic-spacey, religious-experience sounds out of synths and studio treatments; she’s a one-woman national park on wax. Meshell weaves between dimensions, from vintage bubblegum to next year’s R&B, from distant Caribbean inflections to metallic crunch and rural plunk, and from gauzy atmospherics to stark demo-ish hyperrealism. That last trait, with naked vocals proved as true as the processed ones, is one signal of the intense personalness of this collection, which is also the most specifically lesbian in its references since Peace Beyond Passion and the best showcase for the bassist she started out as since maybe ever.

The subject is true love, false love, passionate self-sabotage and unrequited narcissism — and like the cursed paradise of the title, you’ll want to run as fast as you can in its direction.

www.mercerstreetrecords.com
www.meshell.com

(Being an occasional recommendation of the lit without the graphic)

Jonathan Lethem is a name which should be known to all geeks for his connoisseurship of our interests in his essays on comics and their formative impact on the late-20th century psyche, and his injection of our subject matter with the deepest personality and meaning, from the gloomily sardonic retired-crimefighter story “Super Goat Man” earlier this decade to last year’s masterpiece of abandoned, workaday spacemen and women in an all-too-near future, “The Lostronaut”. It’s earned him your support and makes him worth your while even when he isn’t talking about guys in costumes or women in rockets, as with “Procedure in Plain Air,” in this week’s New Yorker magazine (Oct. 26, 2009).

It’s a very literal — and thus, utterly surreal — confrontation with the global crime-and-punishment tactics we’ve spent at least the last eight years putting as far out of our minds as we can manage.

An aging slacker in gentrified neighborhood New York is personally deputized for the ill-defined war on terror in a weirdly routine and civil transaction between docile prisoner, pliant and wanly self-important citizen and bland, barely-identified public servants, sliding into complicity with a now self-perpetuating, strangely antiseptic atrocity largely as a welcome break in his predictable daily schedule and a variation from his own lack of purpose.

The writing seems structured to recall the absurdist abstractions with which Iron Curtain satirists used to sail under the communist radar, and styled to sound like it’s been translated from ornately polite Polish or Czech. (The implicit point that the USA “defeated” the old Soviet Union only to in some ways take over from it is not new, but has not been said enough.)

It’s a wryly mannered staging of a quietly urgent problem, the extralegal system of state power and eroded individual rights left intact from the previous presidency if deemphasized by the current one. I always felt that Dave Eggers’ “Another” was the story of the first Bush term, in its scenario of an American tourist and an Arab guide racing horses in the tabula rasa of a remote desert, bridging a human gulf in an unreal but insistent way before returning to the armed camps of their respective cultures; T.C. Boyle’s “La Conchita” was for me the story of the second half-decade, with a crass, sardonic California organ-seller finding meaning (and inflating his ego all over again) when forced to help dig victims out of a sudden mudslide, a post-Katrina tale of buried redemption that fit our fragmented national family with sad exactness. “Procedure” could be the story of this era, summing up the unfinished business of the compromised American character. When stuck in the physical and metaphorical holes the story deals with, it’s unwise to expect too much too soon — but it’s best not to get too comfortable either.

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I’ve lived to see the day when I don’t have to hide a comic in my textbook, but can travel to a lecture hall to enjoy comics as the entire point. The week before the Baltimore Comic Con Ben Katchor brought his traveling syllabus of visionary cartoons closer to my Jersey home, narrating slideshows of his Metropolis Magazine comic strips at Princeton’s school of architecture. Ostensibly based on architectural themes for a magazine devoted to that field, Katchor’s strips are vignettes of a civilization being lost, rebuilt and vanishing again on the impulse of modern hurry and churn.

Of course there’s an amiable pace to Katchor’s observations themselves, seeming to be made at a celestial remove taking in the whole panorama of human existence and reliable impermanence. Prolific, eclectic and historic (the only cartoonist to win a MacArthur “genius grant” and one of the few with thriving second and third careers in the theatre and on the lecture circuit), Katchor remains best known for the retro-feeling Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer strip, and his other works are often explicitly or spiritually situated in an antique world.

The Metropolis cartoons are up-to-the-minute, but there’s an instant memorial quality to Katchor’s work; as concentrated as he is on the structure and design of buildings as a kind of superskeleton which maps and guides human thought and routine, an archaeology school rather than an architecture classroom might have been the closer fit. Katchor doesn’t exactly create the towers and monuments of an imaginary city, he conveys an overlapping interpretive one. He’s drawing psychological traces and elaborate metaphorical conceits caught in a quick, sketchy style that’s just a bit faster than fleeting thoughts and passing lives.

In tales of high-end apartment towers whose tubs are wells reaching to hot springs near the Earth’s core or entire plastic forests erected for the allergic, he’s both satirizing the subordination of natural resources to human whim and creating unnatural wonders that seem like legendary monuments we’ll never see. In books like The Jew of New York he re-created an early 19th-century metropolis that’s almost utterly unrecognizable by the standards of our lifetime; as such, he is a tribune of the forgotten, and in the modern area, where we don’t bother to notice things in the first place let alone forget them too fast, he can give an elegiac feel even to futuristic themes.

Some of the best comics I read this month were neither in a book nor really read by me; use the magical, surely fictional medium of the internet to flash straight to Katchor’s site, where you can see the Metropolis and other strips and get on the email list for the next time Katchor’s lectures, plays and readings will come close and pass before your eyes.

[www.katchor.com]

The ACT-I-VATE Primer is now available from IDW Publishing in a beautiful, densely-packed hardbound volume. The Primer is an anthology of never-before-read comics by the creators who can be found at act-i-vate.com, the “webcomix collective.” IDW’s online preview of the book is easy to read and shows the vast diversity contained in the pages. I was explicitly told that while these same strips and characters have a presence online, the stories in the book cannot be found in 1s and 0s, only on paper. I’ll be getting this one added to my pull list, but if you’re interested you can find it online or ask your preferred bookseller.

ACT-I-VATE
IDW’s Preview of The ACT-I-VATE Primer