Snark Patrol
A punk tribute to the ubiquitous boy wizard raises the question of whether there is such a thing as too much sincerity.

Location: Williamsburg's Northsix
but Harry and the Potters will be making subsequent appearances in NYC and metropolitan areas all over the country during their current tour
Cost: $13
Bohemian Factor: High
Geek Factor: High

May 14, 2006

In The Tipping Point, literati darling Malcolm Gladwell speculates as to why longtime institution Sesame Street began to lag behinds its competitors in sustaining the fickle attention spans of today’s tots. One of the reasons he offers: irony and sly self-awareness. The effort to simultaneously speak to adults, in the form of punning, pop-culture references and other attempts to be “clever” (e.g. Me, Claudius; Waiting for Elmo; and Twin Beaks ) may have tragically afforded little Georgie or Tammy those critical nanoseconds to ditch high culture and go check out Teletubbies. At any rate, if a healthy smattering of irony jeopardizes the attention of children, is the converse true? That an overkill of earnestness and sincerity imperils the attention of adults?

I came to the conclusion this may well be the case at Williamsburg’s Northsix, during a concert featuring two bands whose unstoppable joie de vivre seems to stem from the incessant repetition of simple ideas and catchy musical hooks. The main attraction? Harry and the Potters: a band made up of two brothers, Paul and Joe DeGeorge, whose unruly black hair and commitment to taking the words of J.K. Rowling’s hallowed series very, very literally make them, apparently, perfectly suited to dressing up as Harry Potter and producing a sort of teen-angst fueled musical homage. Because they both claim to portray the same fictional character, Paul and Joe sport the additional quirk of singing and speaking in the second personal plural, as in: “We wrote this song on the day we found out we were a wizard.” The logic of this, as they explain it, can be accounted for through the magic of time travel, as George portrays Harry in the (yet unpublished) book seven, while Joe portrays Harry in book four. Of course.

Suffice to say, it was the first concert I have witnessed where 8-year-olds, their parents, teenagers and twenty-somethings all waved their hands in the air during the anthem “Voldemort Can’t Stop the Rock." The commercial potential of this broad demographic is indeed harnessed: as we walk in, my friends and I have the option of getting in line to buy keepsakes, such as toothbrushes that instruct their owners to “Rock the Plaque Off!”

Before they began, however, my companions and I wait patiently as Jason Anderson, a.k.a. Wolf Colonel, performs the warm-up act. While Wolf Colonel’s relentless energy and puppy-like eagerness for audience involvement leave much to be admired, my worries regarding the Lack or Irony Problem were elevated as their repertoire quickly blurred into endless permutations of “Whoa whoa” “yeah” “oh oh oh” and “sha la la.”

“CAN I GET A ‘YEAH?’” the band requests; successfully rousing a segment of Northsix’s audience into a sort of frenzy that reminded me of a junior high “Battle of the Bands,” while the rest of us sip Coronas, inert with apathy. Wolf Colonel apparently specializes in witty wordplay, such as rhyming “Jason” with “Are you still waitin’” and “night” with “mosquito bite.” They offered insightful advice like “Don’t forget to live!” and - my personal favorite- a tribute to Texas that, if I heard correctly, pleads for the day when there will be “clouds instead of guns and robots and fascists." (“El Paso is a lot of things,” noted my friend Sarah, a former Texan, “but fascist isn’t really one of them.”)

It’s not particularly fair for me to pick on Wolf Colonel, which clearly is not aiming to be the Silver Jews. I am succumbing to a growing fear that I will be stuck in a room full of unmitigated saccharine earnestness for another two hours. The weight of expectations continues to mount; I spot a young woman wearing a T-shirt which bears the words “My Wizard Scar Still Burns For You.” Could the much ballyhooed Harry and the Potters, who boast such straightforward lyrics as “We’ve got to save Ginny Weasley from the basilisk!” possibly entertain for more than ten minutes, without some inkling of snark?

Fortunately, as they say, “It’s not what you do; it’s the way that you do it,” (Ah, yes, how dare I accuse artists of invoking clichés when bloggers can be just as trite? How I love hypocrisy.)

“Our songs are about sticking it to the man” they announce, “the man” being Harry Potter’s nemesis Voldemort, who is also the enemy of, apparently, “pizza, babies and rock music,” conveniently equating the series’ villain with every authoritative parent who unjustly denies our right to junk food, innocence and well, partying in general. Having instilled the children present with a healthy sense of rebellion before they reach their ninth birthday, they proceed to buoyantly run in and out of the audience, and expound, ballad-like, upon the various adolescent plights our Hero is subjected to, in painstaking detail: alienation, the desire to be like everyone else, the pain of rejection, the yearning to make out with a hot girl.

Paul and Joe steer clear of cynicism and emanate nothing but reverence for the Harry Potter series so revered by their young fans. Wearing the attire of prep school nightmares, baggy gray sweaters over neckties, they are savvy enough to reserve the mockery for themselves. 18-year-old Joe is particularly impressive, pounding histrionically on the keyboards and channeling a kind of charming Woody Allen-esque nebbish-ness. He banters in meandering soliloquies about the profundity of their mission, feigning sheepish awkwardness, as in “Music comes straight from your heart because...um, that where the most rockin’ things are forged.” The acknowledgment of the inherent nerdiness of their agenda becomes, well, cool, and they both seem to know it. (As a random aside, the elder Potter is a PhD candidate in chemical engineering.) Although they have told MTV that their aim, in part, is to promote reading, which I do not doubt, they do not seem to have any trouble picking up girls.

After their encore, they’ve even made a few converts. “I’m going to buy one of those toothbrushes!” my friend announces, and we head back to the souvenir stand, because that, apparently, is where the most rockin' things are forged.

Manhattanhenge:
Not Exactly Artsy But Cheap

Druid Convention

Location: Somewhere in Upstate New York
Cost: Unknown
Bohemian Factor: I can only begin to speculate.
Geek Factor: Unknown

Manhattanhenge

Location: Manhattan, Everywhere north of 14th Street
Time: May 28, 2006; 8:16 pm
Cost: Free
Bohemian Factor:n/a
Geek Factor: n/a

May 29, 2006

And here I thought the Comics Convention was a good exercise in modern cultural anthropology, but clearly that was merely the tip of the iceberg. Recently, All Things Considered revealed a fabulous tidbit of information in passing (god bless NPR). This weekend, a group of committed pagans are coming to upstate New York for a Druid convention. A perfunctory internet search was not very fruitful, although I suspect anyone a tad industrious about plugging in various permutations of “pagan” “May 2006” and “upstate New York” into Google will be more successful than I was in tracking down when and where these neo-Celtics will converge.

The convention, sadly, lies enshrouded in mystery, which I find truly unfortunate, as I think it would be fabulous to see what kinds of activities are on the agenda. Are Druid conventions like a social networking occasion for an otherwise underserved minority? (And here we thought everyone just used JDate …) Is it more like an academic conference, where people present papers: Iolo Morganwg and Eisteddfod: Was the Disintegration of Celtic Culture a Result of Proper Nouns that No One Could Easily Pronounce? Or, most curiously, are they all about ritual, like the end of Norma, where everything just deteriorates into a conflagration of self-immolation and redemption on the funeral pyre? (Although, come to think of it, an Italian opera about a homicidal high priestess is probably closer to Days of our Lives than actual druid theology)

The “Arch Druid” interviewed for the story on his cell phone was rather mild-mannered, with a voice that was more suited to being someone’s accountant than sacrificial rites. He’s probably a number cruncher at Morgan Stanley who just happens to lead a double life as a Arch Druid on the weekends.

His testimony was not, in fact, about the covert activities of a Druid convention, which he happened to be en route to, but rather on what NPR calls a “cosmic coincidence” more accessible to New Yorkers. On Sunday night, May 28, the rays of the setting sun “align perfectly with the cross-streets of Manhattan,” allowing any of us privileged enough to be looking westward a view that illuminates both the North and South sides of the street equally, with no shadows.

While this is not necessarily an artsy event per se, watching the sunset is in fact, free, and apparently there is deep cultural and spiritual signficance, if you have any druidic inclination. It might be worthwhile to make the effort to head north of 14th Street during the next one, on July 13. I was in the West Village during the hour of reckoning, so I’ll have to settle for this:



Of course, every City with an East-West grid of streets will have a similar opportunity twice a year, though not at the same dates. Although the NPR guy did note that “’Manhattanhenge’ may be a little more catchy to us New York-centrics than, say, ‘Salt Lake Cityhenge.’”

The Object of My Affection

PUNCH Puppet Slam
Location: Galapagos Art Space
Cost: $5
Bohemian Factor: High
Geek Factor: Low to Moderate

April 26, 2006

“You can do it!” yells a female audience member encouragingly, as if to an athlete about to attempt a double axel. The object of her attention, Bolzo, is attempting to leap over progressively taller wooden planks in a sort of side show with a Germanic theme. Was her exhortation in vein, given that Bolzo is a red rubber ball?

Yes, that’s right. Controlled by a single string, Bolzo (which sounds, to my American ears, suspiciously like Bozo), is a marriage of marionette and minimalism, like what we might see if the artist who created “White Square” and “Black Circle” delved into puppets. (Sorry to be obscure, I had to look this guy up; I was hoping it was something with more instant recognition like “Van Gogh”). Bolzo, I should add, also has an inner life that can be inferred from his voice, a sort of baritone Swedish chef, that becomes more of an alto when anxious or exerting himself (himself? Should I use a pronoun? Oh the grammatical dilemmas presented by such rubbery androgyny). This is clearly the kind of vulnerability that earns many female, soft-hearted sympathizers for Bolzo.

Bolzo is one of several personalities to make their debut at PUNCH, a monthly "puppet slam" where artists experiment and try out their latest "puppet-flavored fare,” according to its curator, Gretchen Van Lente. PUNCH is held on the last Tuesday of every month at Galapagos Art Space. Van Lente's company Drama of Works had impressed me a few years ago with its innovative take on the Shakespearean gore-fest Titus Andronicus, and I was eager to find out what kind of work she was bringing to the series.

The voice in fact, comes from Bolzo’s maker, Nate Wilson, who is either making a clever statement on how little technical wizardry is needed to project humanity onto, well, rubber balls, or else…he is simply having a good time. The beauty of events like PUNCH is the fact we might as well give him credit for both. Admission is $5 at Galapagos, and no one need differentiate, at these early stages, on whether the puppeteers strutting their wares have exhausted the limits of their innovation within a ten-minute sketch, or whether they are on the verge of a three hour gesamkunstwerk.

Other performers on tonight's performance (April 25) are two contributions from Sarah Frechette that rely on music: a feisty marionette lip-sync and a lazy husband who is a spud, both literally and figuratively (entitled “Warning: To All Things Potatoe"). The program also includes a bit of shadow puppetry by Wilson and an excerpt from Die Hard, the Puppet Musical that seems to belong to the same oeuvre as fringe festival productions like Silence! The Musical and SUV The Musical.

One piece already on its way to an more fruitful afterlife is an excerpt from the upcoming Bride, created by Kevin Augustine and his company, Lone Wolf Tribe. Lone Wolf Tribe was the source behind the haunting 2003 production Animal, an invective against the future of gene therapy and the country’s obsession with antidepressants. It looks like we can expect more moral and spiritual messiness in Bride, billed as a riff on the Frankenstein legend. The teasingly brief excerpt forecasts the return of Augustine’s impressive anatomical virtuosity, as he mobilizes his creations with toes, legs and elbows. The presence of a much-bandaged and immobilized central character signals we can also expect more beautiful, sensitive, big-eyed foam puppets prone to injury, illness and other paths to harm's way.

Pathos, thy name is puppet.

If the sample from Bride plants more questions than it answers, than PUNCH is at least succeeding in whetting the audience’s appetite. Faster and looser than HERE’s Puppet Parlor (in which almost everything will be expanded upon into a larger show, whether it has the robustness to do so or not) PUNCH’s freewheeling cabaret aims to provide a "safe place for performers to experiment and play," according to Van Lente. The brainchild of Galapagos' artistic director Travis Chamberlain, PUNCH was inaugurated a year-and-a-half ago to fill a void, given the paucity of regular puppet cabarets in the New York City area. Although puppet theatre is the ideal medium to present flights of fancy that are too absurd, too fantastical or too perverse for naturalistic theatre, it requires a good deal of upfront investment, and the cabaret format provides a convenient intermediate stop between raw concept and finished product.

So Bolzo here is not one of the gesamkunstwerks. But the crowd has bought into the sheer ridiculousness, and the artist uses this fact to his advantage. As Bolzo balks at his seemingly Sisyphean task, his operator diagnoses the source of our hero’s lapsed performance in a Germanic accent: “Ladies and Gentleman; every night I give Bolzo a massage. But tonight I forget.”

I don’t really think I need to tell you what it looks like when a grown man gives a rubber ball a massage.

Defying Convention: Magma Demons and Renegade Produce

New York Comics Convention
Location: Javits Center
Cost: A friend with an Industry Pass (Sorry, I know this is rather undemocratic for this blog)
Bohemian Factor: Moderate
Geek Factor: Very High

February 26, 2006

Fashion week may be over, but for fetish-hungry New Yorkers of a different breed, the opportunity for crowds to ogle over unnatural bodies, covet limited number of admissions tickets, pay homage to over-the-top spectacle and wear ridiculous costumes comes in quite a different form.

I am referring of course, to the New York Comics Convention which took place this past February at the Javits Center, attracting thousands of New Yorkers who, while spoiled with access to many of the most avant-garde international arts groups and the world’s highest density of gourmet grocery stores, have, until now, been deprived of the pilgrimage known as ComiCon. Entire families and couples dress up in carefully coordinated costumes from Farscape and other obscure mythologies. Wheelers and dealers negotiate over rare issues of The Incredible Hulk. Obscure tongue-in-cheek superheroes come out of the woodwork, from the benign to the phallic (e.g. “The Giant Flaming Carrot Man and his Baloney Gun”)

Once beyond the Javits doors, I couldn’t entirely deny the existence of the oily-skinned, Dungeons & Dragons playing, wiccan-loving stereotype. Yet many of us know that this is not necessarily the norm. Friends who are otherwise rational professionals care passionately which character in “X-men: Evolution” has the power to teleport, feverishly argue about with whom Buffy should be hooking up with, and can identify the series that hosted the first interracial kiss on television without batting an eyelash. And of course, some of us ARE those friends.

Although I have long harbored a soft spot for the Japanese anime series Robotech and Joss Whedon’s sci-fi/Western series Firefly, I was clearly a novice compared to the multitudes of fan-fiction reading, cape-wearing, quote-spewing fellow convention-goers, all of whom seem seemed much more practiced at the whole idée fixe thing.

Or was I just being a snob, denying that I might, in fact, be one of them?

Of course, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. I soon found myself a potential consumer of contact lenses that would transform me into one of the mutant-like, man-eating bad guys from certain blockbuster fantasy movies, and their brethren from much more low budget entertainments, at least from the nose up.

Deliberating between "Magma Demon“ and "Black Orc Death Dealer," I ultimately opted to tell the vendor I'd be going for a custom made pair. As I began describing an elaborate color-scheme for my impending conversion to Klingon-hood, I realized, that I should, as a doctor’s daughter, be asking if there might be any adverse medical ramifications after turning my eyeballs into glowing red and yellow orbs.

“Of course not! Just don’t wear them for more than two hours a time, dear.”

Narrowly escaping a brush with Demon Makeup-induced Blindness Syndrome, I found the perfect distraction in a beloved female Joss Whedon character immortalized in impressive charcoal print several booths over (granted, with a drastic increase in cup size). Finally! Something I recognized.

Upon complementing the illustrator on his taste, I found myself engaged in a conversation on what shade of blue my eyes were. Now, here, I must issue the warning that if you are a girl, and you are not a sixteen year old Goth Chick, and you lack any obvious limb deformities, going to ComiCon is like going to Hooters. I mean it. Concerned about where this was all heading, I lied, “These aren’t real, actually. I just was at that booth over there” (pointing to the space-alien eyeball woman) “and I’m trying on a pair of ‘Sea Nymph Phantasm.’ Do you think I should buy them? I think ‘Death Dealer’ is more my speed.”

Suffice to say, our fine illustrator realized he was being toyed with after a few minutes of this, and diffidently broke away to interest a group of teenage boys in a sexed-up waif-like elf woman from “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Next up: a booth selling all manner of computer games, where a bearded vendor patiently explained to a picky eleven year old boy the intricate rules of a role-playing simulation full of buxom, gun-toting female sidekicks (are we detecting a theme, here?) and egregious bloodletting. With a furrowed brow, the boy asked for ornate details, contemplating whether or not this was a wise purchase, like a tester for “Consumer Reports.” Waiting out this exchange, I discovered my personal favorite. At first I thought I had misread “Dark Tower," but, in fact, no.

“Each character is assigned a specific obsession, and to win the game, you have to collect as many items as you can relating to that obsession!” explained the bearded man.

“I can’t imagine anyone here ever being able to relate to characters like THAT,” I noted with sufficient snottiness, watching convention-goers fill up shopping bags with artwork, vintage editions, dolls, board games, and graphic “On the Making Of…” coffee table books. The man, to his credit, laughed.

After two hours of this, I fell victim of that specific kind of crankiness most often channeled by four year olds who spend ten minutes too long at the mall. I kept circling back to the same booth with the Buffy dolls. The Marvel Comics illustrator who’d secured my pass had disappeared. And everyone I singled out for directions to the exit kept speaking to me only in character. A very flirtatious man in a giant faceless banana costume and a cape -perhaps a cousin to the Carrot Man?- tried to be helpful, but only ended up frightening me (Where’s a Baloney Gun when you need one?) I ran in an arbitrary direction, happily stumbling upon the exit. But not before stopping to buy three Firefly comic books, relieved by the certification that Joss Whedon himself had penned them.

After all, I had my own obsessions to feed.