Category Archives: Literature

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

Adam Mansbach’s New Novel Wants You to Wake the F**K Up

Rage_Is_BackAuthor Adam Mansbach talks with John Roderick tonight at Town Hall, 7:30 p.m.

Adam Mansbach says that, at least in part, his new novel resuscitating the heyday of New York subway graffiti, Rage is Back, is a kind of offshoot from the Bolaño tree — remarking on the Chilean writer’s predilection for stories about the aftermath of youthful, idealistic revolutions. It also comes with a mixtape.

It’s fascinating, in that respect, to gauge the relative success or failure of Mansbach’s attempt to rehabilitate the graffiti artists of mid-’80s NYC, you know, the authentic ones:

Don’t ever mention Haring to a graffiti writer, by the way, or Basquiat either. Not unless you’re ready for a tutorial about how those guys were chumps, never hit trains, didn’t hang out at the Writers’ Bench on 149th and Grand Concourse, only painted where it was safe, fronted like they were real heads and made millions while the real heads are real broke heads, some of them with real broke heads.

That last is courtesy of one Kilroy Dondi Vance, who narrates for you the way his life changed when he — a simple, biracial, expelled-for-selling-pot prep school senior — discovers that his graffiti-legend father, Billy Rage, has reappeared after skipping town in 1989. A substantial amount of the story, then, is told in flashbacks, as Dondi (having first given the reader the official, thumbnail version of what went down) fills in the missing details.

Because Dondi is a stoner raconteur, a substantial amount of what is not the story gets told as well. There’s a game he used to play in sixth grade, inventing “doofus superheroes” like “The Salamanderer, who has the regenerative powers of an amphibian: if you cut off his arm, it grows back, weaker and smaller, in about six weeks.” There’s that Uptown Girl he used to date. There’s the group of sketchy roommates he had as a kid and the big argument over rent.

There’s a consistent meta-discourse on how he’s choosing to write the book you’re reading. (He apologizes for the length of the flashbacks, and explains why he’s not using footnotes.) He has a theory about the rise of the montage:

During the eighties, everybody making moves had mad coke and no patience, so they conveyed the passage of time — a boxer training, a romance blossoming, a teenaged werewolf partying — by splicing together a bunch of four-second scenes denoting incremental progress and setting them to peppy power pop. Like the decade’s other defining concepts — greed, crack, arms for hostages, the religious right, new jack swing — it was crude and tasteless, but effective.

This is clever and funny, but it doesn’t sound like an 18-year-old. It sounds like Adam Mansbach, cultural critic, getting a word in. At nearly 300 pages, and also including a 24-hour time machine, an extended Amazon shamanic training freak-out, and a drug feud, the novel can feel like you keep stepping onto the wrong subway train, when all you want to do is get from A to B.

Between A and B lies the spine of the plot, which is that Billy Rage’s return has aroused the ire of former vandal squad jackbooted thug Anastacio Bracken, who in 2005 is running for mayor. This prompts the reunion of the Immortal Five gang of graffiti artists — actually four, since Bracken had a hand in the death of a fifth member, back in the day. The Immortal Four hatch a plan to discredit Bracken while celebrating the power of the pen.

It all begins to sound a bit goofy — adults who have hit upon the same strategy for civic discourse they used when they were 16 can appear that way — but it gives Mansbach the opportunity to let you tag along on a pulse-pounding night out, so you can feel what it was all about. Here’s Dondi watching his father throw down:

The letter E, nasty as fuck, ready to scrap. And this was just a straight-letter. No bar, no bits, no arrows, legible even to the squarest civilian. Its attitude was a matter of minutiae, of math.

“See? Now a few highlights.”

He switched cans and doubled the inside curves in white, the line emerging thin and sharp. Shifted a few paces to the left, and embarked on his S.

Try to read at least part of the book late at night, when the graffiti artists do their work. I don’t know if Rage is Back will change anyone’s mind about the use and abuse of the public canvas, but it does impress to see artists create their own license in taking risks, as foolhardy as they may be. Thankfully, here in Seattle, we have the abandoned Tubs, now an ever-changing graffiti cathedral.

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

Doig Spins a Wholly Original “Bartender’s Tale”

Following on his much-praised Work Song, set in Butte in 1919, Seattle novelist Ivan Doig returns readers to Montana, but this time it’s the ’60s, and the tiny town of Gros Ventre, which, if it’s anywhere, would be up in Glacier National Park.

It’s a father-and-son story narrated by Rusty (the son) about his bartender father Tom Harry, proprietor of the Medicine Lodge saloon. (Gros Ventre is more commonly known as the name of a Native American tribe, who prefer to go by “White Clay People.”)

Rusty is enduring a lightly Dickensesque, misfit childhood with his Arizona relations when Tom swoops in, scoops him up, and ferries him off to the hinterlands of Montana.

The story goes off in many different directions after that: There’s the exploration of his new home and the struggle to fit in; the more consistently pleasant discovery of Zoe, the new girl in town; surprising revelations about family history; and a drop-in grad student-oral historian named for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which allows Doig to delve into the silty history of WPA-era dirt dams.

But for Rusty, things keep coming back to the fragility of his bond with his father, even as their rapport grows. Through his novel, Doig makes the penetrating psychological observation that these kinds of wounds aren’t easily healed, don’t respond to reason. The better Rusty gets along with his dad, the more likely he is to be blindsided by changes that conjure the fear of losing everything he’s gained.

This night was the darkest of my life in every way. I lay under strange old heavy blankets in that musty bedroom, listening to the wind, knowing it was whipping up the snow into a ground blizzard, the absolute worst thing for Pop if he was out there somewhere trying to drive home. My thoughts swirled and whirled as well.

By the end of the book, the town of Gros Ventre and its inhabitants have gained the stature of distant relations. Doig has made a long cast with his narrative arc–Rusty’s curiosity about his origins is a lot to hang almost 400 pages on. You come to appreciate the moments that life, in its episodic carelessness, seems to brush Rusty’s concerns aside, and let someone else’s in.

The grizzled sheepherder clutched the shot glass so tightly he seemed to be drinking out of his fist. “I lost a couple hunnerd in this storm,” he said hollowly, “never had it happen before in all the years. Had them out in bunches like I was supposed to, so the ewes could eat a little new grass to help their milk. It started blizzarding so goddamn fast I only got about half the bunches into the shed. The others, they’re froze under the snowdrifts.” Shoulders hunched miserably, he looked like he was about to cry.

On TV in 1960, you could watch the efforts of the original men working on Madison Avenue. In Doig’s telling, the time is almost entirely free of television. Rusty’s entertainment is listening in to bar conversation through an air vent. “Sensational stuff, isn’t it?” asks grad student Del in another context. “Pure lingua americana.” That’s what Doig has cooked up here.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV, Literature, Theatre

Everything I Needed to Know About Bumbershoot, I Learned from John Waters

(Photo by Morgan Keuler, care of Bumbershoot.)

At Bumbershoot Saturday night, trash auteur John Waters delivered a fast-paced monologue at Bagley Wright Theatre, wearing a great Belgian suit to run through This Filthy World: Filthier & Dirtier and later sign copies of his last book, 2010’s Role Models.

Of course, the appearance also served to get everyone excited for his new book Carsick–yes, the one about his real-life hitchhiking adventures cross-country across America last year. But the best thing about John Waters is all that Baltimore wit and wisdom. A few things that the audience learned along the way:

  • Early on in the set, John claimed he would like to “open for Justin Bieber. That’s okay to say now because he’s legal.” So go ahead and hit on anyone of legal age of consent, but stay away from all that Bumber-jailbait, of which there is plenty. Parents, please know that your fourteen-year-old girls are not wearing the same outfit at Seattle Center that they left the house wearing that morning.
  • But at the same time, don’t be a helicopter parent. All the kids who appeared throughout Waters’ gross-out oeuvre turned out just fine. Yes, even the girl from Desperate Living who had to be put back into a refrigerator in order to get a second take.
  • And no disrespect to those not quite as young as they used to be, because “old chickens make good soup.” When John Waters met Justin Bieber on a British talk show, Bieber said that John’s mustache was “the jam,” and even drew on one himself with a cosmetic pencil. Of course, Waters was over the moon.
  • “Let’s celebrate the new freak show–the weakest man, the man without tattoos…”
  • One should always be tolerant: “Eminem gave Elton John and his husband matching diamond cock rings.” “Dogs have a sick S&M relationship with their owners.” “It’s okay to fuck a racist, if he is cute enough.” “The most hated minority is a hetero couple who can but chooses not to have kids.”
  • But not too tolerant: “Don’t come out as a bear to your parents.” “I’m queer, but I’m also mentally ill. Adult babies? I have my limits. Lock those fuckers up.”
  • Always have a pickup line: “Can you see the netting on my wig?” Follow that up with assurances that you hate it when mosquitoes get in your netting.
  • Elvis was almost as charismatic of a performer as Alvin, of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Divine made pigs horny. Jeffrey Dahmer was the “ultimate top,” because what is more dominant than eating another human being?
  • “Rap music is ex-poor people bragging to currently poor people about not being poor anymore.”
  • America’s had juvenile delinquents for decades, and they’ve always taken different forms: greaser, beatnik, hippie, punk. “But what is a juvenile delinquent these days? A hacktivist. No fashion, just bad posture.”
  • You just can’t win: John Waters often gets mistaken for Steve Buscemi, who often gets mistaken for Don Knotts, who is dead. Not-so-similarly, lesbians or FTM trans men often come out on top of John Waters look-alike contests.
  • John Waters still has a lingering fondness for poppers. He decries the lack of pubic hair to be found in modern pornography. “What you see in Playboy looks like my mustache.” And after he dies, feel free to stop by his grave to drink and/or have sex. Several of the Baltimore actors he’s employed over the years have picked plots in the same cemetery, which they call “Disgraceland.”

So what’s John’s next project? Well, promoting the new book when it comes out, obviously. He’s still talking about trying to get heartwarming holiday film Fruitcake made, which may have been thwarted by an auto-correct that kept changing his initials “JW” into “JEW.” Oh well, there’s always Hairspray on Ice.

Arts & Entertainment, Literature, Music

Everything You Wanted to Know About Calvin Johnson and K Records

Mark Baumgarten reads from his book, Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music, at Elliott Bay Book Company on Wednesday, July 18, at 7 p.m. He’ll wrap up his book tour in Olympia, at the Olympia Timberland Library, on July 27.

When Mark Baumgarten edited now-defunct Sound Magazine and indulged my interest in the city’s grunge-era glory, he didn’t seem as especially interested in what had come before. He had the pulse of Northwest folk artists and fresh singer-songwriter types, and knew the up-and-comers in just about every genre. With Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music, he proves he is indeed tuned in to local music history, immersing us in a richly-detailed and accessible portrait of Olympia’s ’80s and ’90s indie scene and its champion, Calvin Johnson.

Johnson, despite the book’s sweeping subtitle, is the real focal point; it makes sense, as K Records was (and still is) his baby. Around 100 pages chronicle his quirky artistic tastes as a teen, his tendency toward various punk sub-genre aesthetics, his tenure as a thrilled Evergreen State College KAOS DJ, and his blossoming relationships with other punk/pop musicians.

Through Baumgarten’s direct, relatable prose, we learn how Johnson’s ear for rough, odd rock and pop led him to start making similar music. How he valued musical spontaneity and simplicity—in himself and others—being far more concerned with the distribution of tunes than technical know-how, note-perfect execution, and production value. He wanted to share every “jangly,” “wobbly,” “playful,” “juvenile” song with anyone who was interested.

Oddly, though, details on Johnson’s character traits and business acumen (and even appearance) are few and far between. While we learn much about his travels and endeavors—and that he doesn’t play guitar well, sings with a deep voice, and is given to fits of dancing—the man himself remains mostly an enigma. (Maybe that’s Baumgarten’s intent; the book lacks photographs, a fact that feels a little like winking oversight, a little like punk itself.) As a result, it’s a bit of a challenge to connect with Johnson’s portrayal and really understand and appreciate his drive and accomplishments.

And he sure has accomplished a lot, as Baumgarten recounts. Where there was no underage music scene, he created one, almost single-handedly. His quick-and-dirty early recordings and cassette distribution methods helped build a community of punk, pop, and unconventional artists and an enthusiastic audience (however small) to evangelize the music.

Johnson’s K Records released work from artists and bands like Mecca Normal, the Go Team, Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, and, of course, Johnson’s own Beat Happening—and inspired numerous others. Like Kurt Cobain, who, it’s told, would have rather been aligned with K than Sub Pop Records. (Would things have gone differently for the band if that had been the case? Johnson recorded numerous albums only to shelve them for a year or more. And he purportedly rejected Nirvana’s early calling-card tape because it came to him through Cobain’s girlfriend.)

It’s this inspiration aspect that truly fascinates: Love Rock explains how K Records and some of its acts (along with contemporary labels Sub Pop and Kill Rock Stars) laid the foundation for the Northwest rock explosion of the early ’90s. In pursuing his desire to simply get music out there, Johnson rubbed shoulders with similarly driven—and admittedly more technically talented—people and bands like Steve Fisk, Mark Lanegan, Mudhoney, and Nirvana. Key crafters of what would be labeled the Seattle Sound (or benefit from that label).

Those artists appreciated Johnson’s desire to make and share music as easily as possible, but (most of) their fates would be far different than the label chief’s. As the world tuned in to Seattle’s “grunge” bands—acts that fused elements of metal, punk, and classic rock into agreeably melodic music—the eclectic K stable continued to fly under the mainstream radar. Even when some of its bands received critical praise from alternative outlets, major success was elusive.

But that doesn’t seem to ever have been in Johnson’s interests. Like Al Larsen, a singer in Eugene, Oregon’s Snakepit when this scene was coalescing—the man who coined the “love rock” label (not Mother Love Bone’s Andrew Wood, whom I’d solely associated the term)—the K chief was in it for a hopeful “transformation of society,” even in the simplest of ways. He’s always just wanted people to play and listen.

Baumgarten’s Love Rock Revolution is proof that people are still doing that, three decades later. Even if the book doesn’t entirely illuminate Calvin Johnson’s character, it presumably does what he’d hope for: simply share how a scrappy, punk-ethos community rose up around his influential label. Like the K Records catalog, the book won’t amaze the masses, but it’ll thrill a deserving niche.

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

A Poet Reports on Heaven, Hell, and Haystacks

“Peter’s bloody ear restored askew,” is the last line of a Roger Fanning poem in his collection The Middle Ages, and that is a salient detail because, through metonymy, poets are mostly ears and tongues. This is Fanning’s first collection in almost a decade–he lives in Seattle and teaches at Warren Wilson College–and what a decade it turned out to be for the Whiting Award-winner, whose first collection The Island Itself was a National Poetry Series selection.

There is war, marital strife, and mental discord, resulting in Fanning’s hospitalization as doctors try to treat his break with reality. In other hands, this might simply be a gruesome irruption, but Fanning is no dewy-eyed word-jumbler; his interests in tracking his mental decline are less confessional than they are an attempt to bring this into the light–to acknowledge the crazy person who was also called Roger Fanning. “Language remembers. People forget,” he says in “Caul Me Ishmael.”

So what does the reader learn? It’s easy to think of the insane person as their insanity–we almost can’t help it, we believe in personhood so strongly. People shout strange things, strange things don’t shout themselves. Do they? Fanning’s poems show the way the unbalanced mind continually revolves around strange attractors: His imagination is taken over by pornography, his paranoia creates G-men about to “frogmarch” him away. From “My Madness: Sick Minutiae, Ecstasy”:

Meanwhile, on occasion, I
experience
the Aurora Borealis as music, an
inhuman ecstasy rushing over me.

That is Heaven: tears
rolling into my ears.

This is Hell:
its little animals, its little words
scrawling all over
my unhoused psyche.

Some of these poems are of more interest as documentary than as poetry, it’s true. But as the collection progresses, Fanning adds more pieces of himself to the puzzle, and his technical skills return. His words form stronger welds, though there’s a lingering sense of the grotesque that they can’t quite imprison.

Among the ankle-bending beach stones
and sun-bleached beer and soda cans,

…he writes with the musicality of a hobo Keats,

it startled me (like parting weeds
to find two leprechauns fucking
on a pile of gold doubloons) to flip

a starfish…

“Night Needles, Haystack Days,” his poem about the things shared and unshared by him and his autistic son, is of the same lyrical bent: “But I / don’t need to hunt, I have my loves / and hates. Heartward, always, rides / the needle on the rapids of my blood.” Later in the poem, after a spasm of rage, he says, “it is our luck that such picayune states pass. / The cloud-roiled sky clears, indigo, a good clear dark.” Within this collection, this seems to have wider referents.

There is also an email to Allen Iverson, and some thoughts on Mad Cow Disease and the Buffalo Commons. To summarize the breadth of Fanning’s magpie poetry would be a daunting task. The net effect, though, is to become acquainted with this kind of voice, in its ups and downs, its ins and outs of humor, outside of the moment of crisis. Fanning is not afraid to be picayune, just as he is not afraid to detail an unsavory lust or jot a few lines about a dream after Thanksgiving dinner.

“This is how Jesus explains Heaven to the thief,” he sums up, “I will be with you today.”

Arts & Entertainment, Literature, Theatre

Team of Heroes Does Big, Stupid Fun Smartly

The lives of heroes in the pages of comic books are not driven by complex characters or ideals; they’re driven by the bottom line. This observation lies at the heart of Team of Heroes: Behind Closed Doors, currently playing at the Annex Theatre through May 19 (Thursdays through Saturdays; tickets: $5-$15, Thursdays pay what you can). The play covers well-trod ground of revisionist takes on comic book heroes while remaining original, affectionate, and true to the source genre.

This second of a trilogy of plays by Alexander Harris concerns a group of super heroes operating as a for-profit company under the ruthless management of their executive (Angela DiMarco as Melody Knox). This isn’t a spoof of comic books or much of a commentary on them (beyond the corporate critique). It is neither more nor less than a highly successful dramatic adaptation of the form by way of an original plot—original in comic book terms at any rate.

What this production lacks in depth it makes up for in honesty, and a lack of depth is no criticism. Delving much beneath the surface would be out of step in this production that painstakingly honors its source genre in reproducing it on the stage.

Sure, big budget Hollywood pictures can explicitly enact a reader’s fantasy, eliding the panels of broken action into fluid spectacle, but this removes a key joy of comic books. The work that readers do to connect those panels is as much a part of the attraction of comic books as the easy language, vivid images, exciting plots, and sheer escapism of them. Audiences have a need to participate. That work keeps us wrapped up in mystery novels, it seduces us at food movies, it makes rabid fans out of readers.

Special effects aren’t theatre’s strong point (I’m looking at you, Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark). Theatre’s strength is that it’s real and immediate. Drawing attention to these qualities delights and thrills audiences. The Team of Heroes production team gets this and, by and large, doesn’t try for big effects—though when it does it succeeds with simplicity. Shadows, puppetry, and clever staging expand the scale of this show. Most of these effects are rough and self-conscious, as is the show as a whole, and this roughness helps create the pleasurable intimacy of reading.

By rough I don’t mean to suggest that it’s under-rehearsed. Team of Heroes isn’t distanced by the slick production values one sees at Seattle Rep or ACT. Nonetheless this is a really well produced show with some of the best scene transitions of any production I’ve seen. Even when set changes go on too long it’s obvious that the crew and actors are working as a tightly oiled machine. Some of these transitions are covered by video segments styled as interviews with the main characters. To the show’s credit these are not gratuitous curtains of action but specifically support the plot. Still one wishes there were more similar segments covering other scene changes.

There are a few less-than-necessary segments of nostalgia and self-effacing in-jokes. Some of the running send-up of Apple is kind of brilliant, but other pop cultural references feel disconnected.

Costumes are as honest as anything else in the show. They neither hide nor augment and simply let the actors be real people. Overall the art direction is spectacular. Every element of this show is of a piece, from the program to the mis-aligned one-point perspective. There are even a few stunning bits including the set for the scene at Mount Rushmore, that are simple, clever, and elegant.

The plot hinges on a pair of far-fetched turns that strain credulity while reengaging Team of Heroes with the comic book genre. The story leaps back and forth in time (Captain Exposition is thankfully absent from the team), which results in a lot of short, choppy scenes. As with many other seeming flaws the play gets away with this because it reinforces the paneled experience of the comic book. We just need to get those set changes either less visible or more interesting.

Those time leaps also create challenges for Tracy Leigh and Jason Sharp who alternate between playing teenagers and aging superheroes. Sharp handles the transition cannily, affecting his adult voice more than the teen voice. Leigh plays her adult character without affectation and her teenage characters suffers for it. Otherwise acting is pretty consistently sufficient.

Ryan Higgins and Sam Hagen have more fun than really ought to be allowed in a variety of bit roles. Angela DiMarco has a huge challenge in a role that is pivotal but thinly written (even for comic books). Unfortunately she does little to relieve the monotony of her one-note character. The rest of the roles are finely balanced with a mix of strengths and weaknesses that the actors manage to keep appealing throughout.

Yes, the audience Saturday night was heavily populated with young people in costumes having rather serious conversations about super hero match-ups and super power comparisons, but this is not a show for only the ComiCon crowd. It’s big, stupid fun done smartly and with tremendous intimacy. Anyone who loves theatre should see this show. Anyone who makes theatre should go learn something from it.