12/27/04


There was once an Emperor of a large prosperous country. He was a good if somewhat ineffectual leader, but because he was a little insecure he always had advisors around to tell him what to do and why to do it. These advisors were very charming and persuasive men and women with great gifts of gab and the ability to seemingly prove any argument they wished. The Emperor believed that they were the wisest and most able people in his country, and he relied on them to aid him in his every decision, and praised them in public at every opportunity. The advisors in their turn always told the Emperor how good and wise he was, and praised him publicly as well. So they were all very happy and very pleased with their lives.

One day, two very cunning and wicked swindlers approached one of the advisors and told him that they were fashion advisors, and that they had come to warn the Emperor that he was shockingly out of style. They told the advisor that if the Emperor continued to be so terribly unfashionable that the people would laugh at him and he wouldn't be able to rule effectively. Now, it was true that the Emperor did not dress in an up-to-date manner. In fact, he was somewhat dowdy. And things had been going a little rockily of late. There was that fiasco with the treasury guards, and the new tax that the peasants seemed to dislike so much. Why not give the beloved leader a new look, just to smooth things over? The advisor, who was a little insecure himself, thought that these two self-styled fashion experts might be just the thing to perk up the Emperor's image a little, and he brought them to the other advisor's attention. It wasn't long before they all agreed to introduce them.

So the advisors brought the two men to the Emperor, and in their best advisorial fashion explained that they were going to improve the royal image. The two swindlers praised the Emperor even more floridly than any of the advisors had, and told him that in the perfection of his governing the only thing he needed was a better wardrobe, which they were ready and willing to provide. "It's not just a matter of pride," they insisted. "The future of the country depends on the people's perception of their leader!" The Emperor was so flattered by their clever words that he assented to their offer to provide him a brand new suit of au courant clothes.

The two frauds went straight to work. They installed themselves in one wing of the Emperor's castle and ordered enormous quantities of clothing supplies as well as looms and tailoring equipment, plus a small army of weavers and seamsters and assistants and secretaries and publicists, all paid for out of the Emperor's treasury. They issued proclamations declaring that the Emperor's new outfit would surpass anything ever seen in the country before, that it would be the most beautiful and becoming clothing ever, and that the whole country, even the world, would soon be adopting their style.

There were some businessmen in the country who manufactured or imported clothing, and at first they were skeptical and even hostile towards the purported new style, but after the two rogues signed them to lucrative distribution deals they all became much more amenable. Some of the fashion magazines printed very flattering cover stories about the two after they took the magazine editors out for lavish lunches and bought them expensive gifts. Soon all the papers and magazines were running stories about the latest trend, the new Emperor Style, and they breathlessly counted the days until it would be revealed in all its glory.

At last it was time for the Emperor's fitting appointment. He came with all his advisors to the two con artists' chambers, where they were all given an extensive tour of the facilities. The two explained that the cloth they were weaving was made of especially fine and exquisite materials, too fine to be seen by the naked eye, and the clothes made from the fabric were also especially subtle. So the Emperor and his advisors saw looms seemingly strung with nothing and tailors hard at work cutting and sewing what appeared to be empty air. But the advisors, remembering that it was they who had advised the Emperor to take this route in the first place, all praised the quality of the fabric and the clothing to the skies, and the Emperor himself, who as we might have mentioned was a little insecure, saw no reason not to go along with them.

When the Emperor displayed himself before his people, dressed in his new fashion, all the commonfolk had been well-prepared by all the newspaper and magazine articles praising the new style and explaining how subtle and special it was, and they all wanted to appear knowledgeable and up-to-date. So as soon as the Emperor appeared, they all began to cheer for all they were worth, even the ones who could see clearly that the Emperor was naked as a jay bird!

But then, one little child began to shout "The Emperor has no clothes! The Emperor has no clothes!"

Immediately, of course, the palace guards arrested the child, and his parents, and all their relatives, and anybody in the immediate vacinity, and took them away and threw them in a dungeon under the palace. And proclamations were issued charging anyone who questioned or doubted the Emperor or his taste in clothes with treason. And the newspapers and magazines and the fashion editors and everyone else with a piece of the action all printed banner headlines about the wonderful New Fashion, which everyone immediately adopted as the official national garb.

And when winter came, most of the population froze to death along with the Emperor, dressed in their fine and stylish new clothes, all except for a few rebels, warmly and completely unstylishly dressed, hiding in the mountains.


12/20/04




12/13/04


In its golden age, vaudeville and music hall entertainment were more than just a pleasant night out at the theater, they were tv, radio, records, the movies and Broadway all rolled into one, frequently on Broadway. The advent of recorded and broadcast media was a heavy mallet and a wooden stake aimed at the heart of variety showbiz, but somehow it evaded the blow, barely, surviving by hook, crook and Vegas to the point where a new generation of fools could be infected.

It's a moot point whether the cockamamie Nu Vaude I got mixed up with in the 70's was a true child of the older form or just a charming if addled case of volitional convergent evolution. While the folks I worked with and stole jokes and routines from were no more authentic than I, we all had at least a thief's reverence for the great motherlode of tradition whose threadbare coattails we rode. Peculiarly enough, I think we may have ended up achieving what we set out to do: there is now a TNG of aging showbiz kids, familiar with enough of the canon to be tarred with the epithet of "professional," along with another TNG of bright young faces just champing at the bit to put on their own silly spectacles, novices for the new old dogs to sneer at and show the ropes.

One of the truisms of life is that if you don't die, eventually you become experienced, and both my cohort Howlin' Hobbit and I seem to have achieved this dubiously exalted condition, as performers if not survival technicians. Our side-project duo Snake Suspenderz tends to percolate right along on the strength of that background irregardless of whether we gig or even practice regularly. It's an advantage of doing dated material -- all the hard parts have already been worked out by better men and women than we. All we do is apply the ol' jumper cables and make with a little reanimation. When Hob invited me in on a job he'd landed, two nights opening for a collection of charming brats doing updated burlesque, our meticulous preparation consisted of a couple hours strolling through the proposed songlist with numerous interruptions for cigarettes, coffee, cat-fondling, profane remonstrations against absent colleagues and such, in all probability not unlike our forebears of yore.

Next night, we piled our fell tools of musical mayhem into my trusty Voyager and set off for the first show, deep in the heart of darkness of remotest Bellingham. At the scene of the crime, a pool table-strewn rock tavern temporarily usurped by the forces of sleaze, we were greeted by our fellow cultural workers, the numerous and tasty confections of the Lucky Devil Girly Show, all well and affectionately acquainted with the diminutive, portly Hobbit. I accused him of being a chick magnet, a charge he hotly denied.

In keeping with our temporal positioning to the entropic side of fem lib, the Girlies come in diverse sizes and shapes, from slim and slight to fully endowed, one even blimpaliciously preggers. The show they present preaches the gospel of Empowerment whilst still giving the audience what they advertise as "A Little Something You Can't Get At Home." As such, they seem to embody a somewhat (but only somewhat) more salacious cousin to the Political Clowns On Drugs esthetic my own gang embraced back in our eager formative years, and an alliance of convenience between our camps seems not only utilitarian but artistically righteous to (long black leather) boot. Even in their contemporary, politically correct incarnations, there's still a natural synergy between baggy pants comedians and beautiful wimmins, one which may yet presage a stay of execution for stage revues in the face of those pitiless foes of all live entertainment, online pr0n and video games.

But before we could even get started, we were beset by another eternal counterpart to the Roar of the Greasepaint, infrastructural incompetence. As that master of satire Frank Zappa so subtly put it, "Don't it ever get lonely when you're out there on the road/ when the PA system eats it/ and the band is playing the most terrible shit you ever heard?" In this case, however, the problem was less mechanical than chemical, specifically neurochemical, more specifically the hostile antics of the seemingly coke-addled sound man. He spent his entire salaried shift refusing to set up or operate either the club's own PA or a substitute rustled up by the troupe after the house system tossed its cookies and quit, thus belying the old saw that one monkey don't stop no show. The jerk may never know how close he got to a multilateral heyrube full-body massage out in the alley.

In consolation, we of the old dog brigade demonstrated our mastery of really acoustic music by bashing out a set of unamplified jass and hokum for the refunded-but-untitillated audience in true Pike Place representation. Exeunt omnes to a cast party at a local writer's house, where we drowned our sorrows in beer and more untrammeled musings, after which the intrepid Suspenderz wended their bloody-but-unbowed way home down the treacherous midnight highway.

Thankfully, the second night, staged here in town at the utterly professional Tractor Tavern, was more rewarding, monetarily as well as musically. Everyone got their hot wack moment of glory, and the Furry Footed Fellow and I proffered perhaps the best set ever of our admittedly thus-far limited career, covering each other's mistakes and finishing each other's jokes like we'd been doing it for years. Which of course we have -- just not with each other. The crowd was vastly appreciative (it didn't hurt that Girlies in the audience cheered lustily -- can a burlesque star cheer any other way? -- after every number) and we even sold a couple CD's.

It's vaguely disturbing to look up and discover that you're not only a professional, but one in an occupation that's been threatened with obsolescence twice and survived. But hey, what's being in a body for, anyway?


12/5/04


One of the chief difficulties of a society founded by immigrants on the premise of equal opportunity for all is reconciling the need for universal forbearance and respect with that most basic of hooman traits, xenophobia. You can pass all the laws you want to in defense of civil rights, but while it may be possible (albeit reprehensible) to legislate morality, you can't outlaw plain cussedness. Not and make it stick, anyways.

Most prejudice, o' course, has nothing to do with physical features of different sub-breeds of h. sapiens sapiens (except maybe as a sensory cue) and everything to do with cultural variance. When two human social groups are flung together in rough familiarity, any contrasting opinions regarding behavior or niceties swell up like dualing warthogs just out of proximity. It's simple survival instinct, but a software instinct embedded in the perceptual frameworks of the participants.

Such conflicts are the rich dark soil from which towering forests of internescine warfare spring up, seemingly without possibility of respite. Philosophers and religious leaders (the peacemakers, not the other kind) have bemoaned the vicious circle of kill-me-kill-you down through the bloody ages, and short of turning everyone into little tins saints, nobody's ever implemented a top-down solution that carried any water. Even the holy tin tends to wear thin, and the best laid plans of the sane and enlightened devolve with frightening rapidity into jihad and inquisition.

But here in A-ca, we who pride ourselves on our ingenuity have put our yankee and other heads together and found a new and better method to promote cultural unity, one with the singular advantage of depending neither on people's innate goodness, assuming they've got any, nor on draconian governmental interference. I speak of course of advertising, and the commercial culture that it represents.

It's fashionable to disdain sales and the literature and media that it engenders as crass, lowbrow, manipulative, deceptive and ignorant. Now, they say that like it's a bad thing, but whatever overhead commercials take in wasted time and energy and creativity, they more than make up for in minting a currency more precious than gold or even silicon: common culture.

It is not our ten thousand religions or lifestyles that bring our great and multifarious people together, it's McDonald's and Coke and Disney and Ford, it's chain franchises and mainstream media campaigns, it's jingles coast to coast like hits on the old top 40 before it devolved into a dozen sub-genres, it's "Where's the beef?" and "Can you hear me now?" It is advertising, not schools or churches or sports, that unifies us. Cynics and critics bemoan the proliferation of malls, the endless sameness of all suburban areas, but they're missing the significance, the overarching value of that endless sameness. That continuity of landscape is what lets a displaced worker move from Vermont to north Texas and not experience terminal culture shock. In a country with no indigenous culture, buying and selling provide the crucial mushroom soup to glue our casserole of leftovers together.

Even further: despite their origins and support from the crass cash and carry world of merchandising, advertisements are as progressive and high minded a source of inspiration to positive change as can be found. Whether it reflects well on our culture or no, there are more positive images in commercials of women, children and minorities posed in attitudes of confidence, self-regard and sovereignty within their circumstance than you'll ever see in the nightly news or sitcoms or copdrams. In tv ads, women do carpentry, Blacks run businesses, Hispanics boogie at swank clubs, Asians wear sneakers, and everyone eats fast food in happy harmony. In their desire to provide us with positive self-images connected to their products, feelgood ads do the unintended side-work of providing those images to everyone, customer or indifferent bystander.

Ah, but every silver lining has another cloud. In the midst of our feelgooding here, we should remember that there's a downside as well. Those stupid critics aren't all wrong -- commercial culture is inevitably bland and unnutritious, comfort food for the soul that leaves you hungry half an hour later. You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant, excepting Alice. If you want a nation of life-starved seekers, ready to chase down and pummel into submission anything promising to fill that big empty hole in their hearts, that's just about the way to go about it. Hey -- it sells cars, don't it? What's not to love?

There's a principle of governance at issue here, too. Consider the noble instinct of governments to improve the quality of their citizen's life. Consider their unselfish and exquisitely executed programs of enlightenment and enrichment, their supremely enlightened missives of learning and beauty. Okay, now stop laughing: are you sure you prefer having your cultural values spoonfed to you by manipulative merchants instead? It's a devil's choice: let the friendly bureaucrats of the Department of Cultural Unity hold you down and hit you with a brick of Correct Social Conduct, laughing all the way, or line up and sign up for a big heaping plate of Smarmy Manipulative Image-mongering, with a thoughtful towelette provided at the end to wipe the grease off. O-or think! With a little friendly fascism mixed in, you could get both at once. Co-o-o-l!

Great choices, huh kids? Only choice you don't get is that uniquely human process of little tiny groups of people wrangling out a common social language through the time-tested techniques of whining, bullying and bargaining -- y'know, like, life. And the reason we don't get that choice anymore is because anymore there aren't any little tiny groups of people, just great mindless mobs, endless herds roaming the endless plains of megaculture. Any individuality, any atomic atavism gets buried in the effluvium of that ceaseless consumption and excretion.

No you can't have any culture. Shut up and eat your grease.