What Caviglia Did On Her Summer Vacation!: An Introduction

As has been briefly mentioned here, and as everyone is both buzzing and complaining and celebrating about: this June is madness. Theater abounds. Nearly everyone I know is involved in something. People are having birthdays, Same Sex marriage is now legal in Gotham. I'm at work on various projects, some involving pictures, some involving words, some involving both. And then there's the constant business of keeping it all afloat, AKA paying the bills. So there's been little time to spare to write it all up and I'm vaguely overwhelmed with the task, truth be told. But, never on to shrug off a challenge, here I go!

The following posts are a much boozier, artier, gorier version of the typical "What I did with my summer vacation" essay. At left is a picture I drew at Jazz & Sketch last Thursday at the Society of Illustrators (two minute pose, lovely model). Here at The Cabinet, we refuse to be either bored or idle in this City of our Dreams!

Mermaids of New York

Mermaids of New York is a new short film making the rounds which features the legendary and lovely Bambi the Mermaid, Dame Darcy (who will have an entire post devoted all to her, soon!) and other glitterey, finned cohorts. See a clip, below, featuring Bambi:



Dame Darcy sings a sea chanty, of which she has an entire album, which you can purchase here:



As an added bonus, Dame Darcy's lovely illustration, "Dolls plunder and pillage the ship. Then drown the pretty sailor lad." From her book Dollerium which can be purchased (totally worth it) here.

Win Free Tickets to Five Things!

Well, one thing. And that one thing is Five Things.

Recession blues got you down? Have you been pining to see a show with comedy, romance and a song about Nathan Fillion? Want to see a delightful show in The Brick's Comic Book Theater Festival?

If so, today is your LUCKY DAY.

Just head over to my delightful inamorato's blog, and you can have the opportunity to win a pair.

My rave of Five Things is here.

The Comic Book Theater Festival: Five Things

We seem to be going through a phase. And by "we", I don't actually mean "me". I mean people, or really, our culture seems to be going through a phase. We seem to be going through a phase in which in order for any sort of art to be taken seriously, awful things must happen in it. Even art for children! There is death and torture and apocalypse and dystopia of all stripes. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the gloom as much as the next person, but not, dear lord, to the exclusion of all else.

I am of the mind that qualities such as "charm" and "humor" and "good heartedness" are due for a comeback. I mean, they are certainly less plentiful than the gloomier ones, so doesn't that make them more valuable? Which brings me to Jillian Tully's play Five Things which is being presented as a part of the Brick's Comic Book Theater Festival. I saw it's premier performance yesterday afternoon and was thoroughly charmed by it.

On its surface, it's about terribly twee and simple things: a girl and her ukulele ode to Nathan Fillion, her genius, scientist cat who attempts to create a pair of opposable thumbs, a Fairy Dragmother, dates both bad and good, and tap dancing (done by the cat). But, like in Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books, the glittery surface is just a way of engaging larger ideas: those of identity and growing up and of making a real connection to other human beings. As always, in the spirit of full disclosure, Jillian is a friend, and her mode of communication is as much tap dance and pictures as it is words. The comic book aspect of the play is done through thought bubbles and signage of sound effects and wears it all lightly and well. As someone who loves comic books, but has pretty much zero interest in Superheroes, this was likely my sort of Comic Book Theater Festival show. It's very funny and sweet and well worth an hour or two of your life. There is science and romance and tap dancing. How many shows can one say that about, really?

Five Things

The Brick, 575 Metropolitan Ave. Brooklyn, NYC

There are three more performances: Sun 6/5, 6:30pm, Fri 6/10, 7pm, Sun 6/12, 6pm

Purchase tickets here

Below, see Jillian doing research for her role:

Top photo: Ruby (Jillian Tully) and the Girl (Sarah Eliana Bisman), photo credit Beth Hommel

Bottom photo: Ruby (Jillian Tully) communes with a civilian cat, photo credit Beth Hommel

R. Crumb Does Not Make Mistakes (With His Pen)

The second stop on our Saturday gallery hopping odyssey was at one of my usual haunts: The Society of Illustrators on East 63rd Street. It's one of those true New York treasures that not that many people seem to know about. Their gallery shows are always well curated and interesting - and free of charge. Each Tuesday and Thursday the have their Jazz & Sketch nights. They have live music, a bar and models. I've had the pleasure of drawing such luminaries as World Famous *Bob*, Amber Ray and Miss Saturn. And there's all kinds of thrilling art everywhere.

Their current exhibit, up only through April 30 is R. Crumb: Lines Drawn on Paper. Curated by the editor of the Blab! anthology, Monte Beauchamp, it focuses on work from the collection of Eric Sack, most of it from the late '60s through the early '70s. R. Crumb is a monster and a genius, and from the interviews I've seen him give, he seems like an all right person. He's funny and profane and wears his problems and obsessions on his sleeve. Like Dennis Potter, one of my great influences, it's hard to get all that upset at him for his failings, for he is so achingly aware of them.

There really is something to offend and delight most people, but after looking at the 90 or so works contained in the exhibition, something began to dawn on me. I've seen a lot of original comic drawings, and I work in pen and ink fairly often. I've written about it here, about how it is an unforgiving medium. Usually, when you see the original pages from comics, you see corrections. White out, bits pasted in, etc. Particularly as few (if any) of these artists ever anticipated the originals being seen. In the elaborate and beautifully drawn works in this exhibit I saw very, very few corrections.

Robert Crumb is an unerring draftsman and an artist of true brilliance. I mean, he can draw. He can really, really draw. His output is truly fearsome and all of it is all kind of perfect. You can't see one of his drawings without knowing who created it. Only someone trained in a Renaissance workshop or a single-minded obsessive could get this good.

So, yeah. Go. It's also fun to be in a gallery full of giggling people. My only criticism is that It would have been lovely to see more of his recent work: the Heroes of the Blues series or something from his Old Testament adaptation. These are just quibbles, though.

Find information and hours here. And it's FREE.

Renee French: The Ticking

Putting The Ticking by gifted illustrator Renée French in my wordless graphic novel series is sort of disingenuous, mostly because there are words. But not a great many of them, and they appear occasionally as captions, rather than in speech balloons as in traditional comics. Like Shaun Tan's The Arrival, The Ticking is mostly what I refer to as a grown-up picture book.

It was originally released in 2006, was out of print for a while, and now is happily back on shelves. It's not a book I see mentioned particularly often, which I think is a shame. Because it's lovely.

It tells the melancholy and funny story of Edison Steelhead, a deformed child (he has no ears and his eyes are on the sides of his head) whose mother dies in childbirth and whose father, who suffers from the same so-called affliction, takes him to live in a remote lighthouse. There he grows up with an interest in etymology and drawing. He makes masks for himself (and his stuffed animal) and wears them. He discovers his father's childhood was much like his, but he won't talk about it with Edison. His father takes him to a plastic surgeon, but Edison doesn't want the surgery, so it doesn't go forward. It's all so odd and heartbreaking. At one point Edison is introduced to his new "sister", Patrice, a baby chimp. Their relationship turns out to be remarkably sibling-like as Edison begrudgingly takes her out on bug gathering expeditions and then gets annoyed in typical big brother fashion when she eats his specimens.

It's a strange little book full of loneliness and silences. French draws simple little square panels with graphite on paper and they are lovely little pieces of art. So seemingly simple they almost feel like they belong in the realm of the folk. For some reason, I have a dream that The Ticking will one day be an animated film. Maybe Wes Anderson could tell this story as he seems to specialize in fathers and sons. And its odd melancholy whimsical tone would suit him, I think.

In the mean time, follow French's blog and read her other comics. She posts lots of drawings and photographs and works in progress.

Sex! (Museum of, I mean)

Let's see what google search terms bring people here!

The last step of me and my inamorato's gallery hopping odyssey this past Saturday landed us at The Museum of Sex where we viewed (after elbowing our way though the lobby gift shop, jam packed with tourists) two exhibits: The Nudie Artist: Burlesque Revealed and Comics Stripped. I mostly want to talk about Comics Stripped, so more about the Burley-Q exhibit in a moment.

Their comics exhibit is curated by Craig Yoe, an extremely interesting and knowledgeable personage. He's a former Creative Director of The Muppets and over the years has had his fingers in many, many comics and animation pies. He now runs his own design studio and occasionally writes books on the history of comics. Most recently, Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster (with an introduction penned by Stan Lee). I was lucky enough to be at the Dr. Sketchy's event promoting the release of the book about a year and a half ago. You can find some of the pictures I drew that day (of the lovely Darenzia) here.

Yoe charts the history of dirty comics from the Tijuana bibles of the '20s and '30s, through the cartoons that appeared in Playboy in the '50s and early '60s through the work of Italian comic artist Guido Crepax (who also has a Louise Brooks inspired book) on to R. Crumb (more about him this week, too!) and on to modern innovators like Alison Bechdel. The show is comprehensive and well curated and well worth a look.

Sadly, I can't really say the same for The Nudie Artist. I think this is where the Museum of Sex's for-profit status really shows. I have a feeling they don't have the access or resources to put together an exhibit worthy of the subject matter (I think they need curators with the access that someone like Yoe brings to the table). The exhibit mostly consists of a gallery of photographs taken by Leland Bobbé of current burlesque performers which are, you know, fine. But not all that thrilling, especially considering the gigantic and interesting personalities of his subjects. An odd thing: I liked his photographs far more at a smaller size when I was looking at the on line gallery on his web site.

The Nudie Artist also included a room of drawings by sketch artist/illustrator Luma Rouge. I like her work very much, but I thought the exhibit as a whole could have benefited from far more (ironically) variety. It's such a rich and interesting subject matter and with all this renewed interest in burlesque past and present there is so much more that could have been done. I wonder if anyone contacted Liz Goldwyn who has been collecting vintage burlesque costumes for years, or thought about raiding some photo and newspaper archives. There was a small section that did look at Burlesque as it existed in the earlier part of the 20th century, with some (few) photos and a costume that had been worn by Blaze Starr, and to my mind the most exciting thing in the exhibit, a recreation (or preservation - I'm not certain) of Mara Gaye's vanity: but I wanted more, dammit, more!

The main problem with this Museum is likely its for-profit status. It has to pay for itself somehow, so far more attention and care seem to have been taken over the gift shop and the cafe. I don't know that its mission is particularly scholarly, but I would be curious to find out exactly what its mission is. The comics exhibit was extremely well curated and thoughtful, but the people wandering around the Nudie Show exhibit didn't really know what they were looking at. If you didn't know already, you would not learn who Jo Boobs or Dirty Martini are, you would just know that their pictures are on the wall. Which is really kind of a shame.

Vampire Cowboys: The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G

Yesterday was a long and varied day, consisting of a matinee of Trav S.D.'s Tent Show Tetragrammaton (4 shows remaining!), celebrating World Theater Day at Dixon Place, a quick swing by a gallery opening, finally culminating in the opening performance of Vampire Cowboys' The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G at Incubator Arts. And - my inamorato did most of this with what I worry is some sort of mildly broken arm.

But this post is going to be all about the Vampire Cowboys show, which is a rare and perfect thing.

There are many different kinds of playwrights - but I think if you take a look at all of our work, it's all autobiography, isn't it? In some way or another, even if nobody else knows. Even if the play is about pirates or serial killers or ape men or ninjas or aliens or any other fantastical thing that has no literal correlation with the life of the person who is writing, who - chances are, was never a ninja or a pirate. I've written tons on this blog about how I am most comfortable with metaphor, as both a reader and a writer. I've never had much interest in superheroes, but I love fairy tales. I often say how literalism feels sometimes over-specific and unrelatable, and often leaves me cold (but not always). I also think that audiences' perception of theater can be shockingly conservative, and there are people who if they don't see a living room set get instantly nervous.

There are a lot of ninjas and superheros and fighting (awesome, gorgeous fighting) in Qui Nguyen's plays. It's what he does. They're always beautifully staged and realized by his collaborators, and here, too. The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G is a personal, explosion in the genre factory, comic book style battle royale between playwright Nguyen (beautifully played by African-American actor William Jackson Harper) and the story of his cousin and adopted brother's crushingly tragic journey from Vietnam to Arkansas. Writing is hard. Writing truthfully about stuff that really matters to us is brutally hard. So the fight is epic. Qui Nguyen (and "Qui Nguyen") brings out every stylistic weapon in his and director Robert Ross Parker's arsenal.

Genre flourishes abound - noir and western and spy and martial arts rattle hilariously around questions of race. There's a rap war between Qui Nguyen and David Henry Hwang (who wrote a play "Yellow Face" in which there was a character "David Henry Hwang" which in turn parodied the Miss Saigon casting controversy), there's a large muppety creature called the "Gooky Monster" who tries to school Nguyen in what an "Asian" play should be about. The best response to all this is Nguyen's own: "This is a Vampire Cowboy show, bitch!". It's purposely and hilariously full of narrative and racial clichés. I don't know when the last time I saw a show in which I laughed so much consistently throughout. But it's not just a comedy (though, comedy is so fucking hard, calling anything "just" a comedy, isn't fair either), it digs awfully deep.

With all the lovely choreography, all the hilarious meta flourishes (not only is Qui a character, but his wife and Vampire Cowboy producer Abby Marcus appears as well - full disclosure: I know her lovely RL self), the muppet, the rap war, the cowboy shadow play, the spy intrigue, the cannibalism, the slick and pretty design elements, it all comes down to one thing in the end. And that's the simply told and devastating story of Nguyen's family.

I'd be lying if I said this play didn't bring me to my knees in about three different ways. I'm the least prolific of playwrights, something I'm sort of desperately trying to remedy. I have trouble writing without complicated design elements and structures and dance breaks and fairy tales and people rising from the dead in some way or another. I've been questioning some of this recently as sometimes I think I use all the dance breaks and intricate structural stuff as a tool of self protection. Of course, lots of it is stuff that I like, and I am in no way a minimalist by nature, and I began and remain a visual artist first so what stuff looks like matters to me - I mean I think the semiotics of design are important and transcend simple aesthetics. But, I think I may use some of this business because even if this sort of business really matters to me, I think it might be easier for me to deal with stylistic and genre flourishes then with emotional content. I think this is some of what Qui is getting at with this play.

We're all still telling stories round the fire, outside of our caves or tents, even if there are fancy lights and ninjas or clowns playing polar bears or whatnot. And the really basic questions remain the same. Who are we as a species and as Americans and who were we before and how did we get here and who is my family and what does that mean?

Tim Gunn: Master of the Universe

"The costume's all important. Semiotics."
- Tim Gunn

This is such a wonderful video, I couldn't resist reposting it. Below, see Tim Gunn intelligently critique the costumes worn by Spidey, Cat Woman and others. Whenever I see Tim Gunn I think maybe I should have gone to Parsons. C'est la guerre.