Achtung, baby

What's the deal with fascists? Do they have bad taste in art or what?

OK. You'd think the stormtrooper set would go for Frank Frazetta-style warriors and gore. Nah. The actual brown and black shirts went in for art with a classic vibe. Clean cut stuff -- weirdly sexless and austere -- ranging from Norman Rockwell purity, to knock-offs of Greek and Roman classicism. It's as if Klingons had a taste for Vulcan art. Why is that?

From "Chaos to Classicism" at the Guggenheim attempts to answer that question -- a retrospective of Europe's classic revival from the end of World War I to the start of World War II.

This movement began as a reaction to the bad scene of the Great War -- which people didn't realize was part of a numbered series yet. Europe came down with a continental case of PTSD. The shattered visions of the Cubists suddenly looked too much like random arms and legs on the battlefield. People wanted wholesome art -- in the literal sense of art that was whole and complete in itself. They wanted Aristotelian stasis -- formal balance, not nervous kinetic energy. Picasso started painting like Ingres -- as the critics were fond of saying at time. Lots of people did.

This art didn't start out as Nazi art. The goosesteppers just took a hankering to it and adopted it as their own. Those poor damn Futurists over in Italy were cranking out fractured fascist art that looked like David Bowie album covers. Out of nowhere, Il Duce went on a Roman holiday and fire them. They all had to find real jobs.

This exhibit has some arresting images, ranging from some of Picasso's more chunky women (with their eyes in the right place) to Nazi Olympic posters to some weird busts of Mussolini -- including one that looks like a 360 degree motion blur. He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake ...

This creepy perfection hasn't gone away, of course. All those wholesome, perfect bodies survive in the world of advertising. The Ubermensch lives on, selling us crap. Today's Aryan Superman works for the Mad Men.

Is wholesome art is necessarily fascist? Intellectually, I don't think it has to be. Emotionally, the art of Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell and their ilk gives me a strong totalitarian vibe. Give me R. Crumb any day.

A dude plugging his wiener into a light socket?

Now that's the art of freedom.

Android Dreams

OK, just in case you've been on Mars for the last few decades ...

Blade Runner (a movie by Ridley Scott) was an adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (a book by Philip K. Dick). Saying Scott "adapted" the book is a polite way of putting it. It's kind of like saying you adapted the Bible and made Satan the hero. Scott's movie turned Dick's core concept on its head. (More on that in another post.) Short version: Dick's "androids" were heartless, soulless bastards; Scott's "replicants" were sympathetic slaves fighting to be free.

Now that's out of the way, here's the point: Playwright Edward Einhorn has adapted Dick's novel for the stage -- as in really adapted it. His play is a fresh take that forgets Scott's movie ever existed. (Such was the promise.) Up in NYC, an entity called Untitled Theater Company #61 (UTC61) is producing Einhorn's play at the 3LD performance space. Einhorn is also the director. By an improbable chain of events and the personal sacrifice of Su Byron, I caught the opening night.

First, here's my take on Einhorn's take on Dick's book. As promised, Einhorn's version is much closer to the novel, though he does some retooling of his own. No big thing. The book is a subversive black comedy. The play is, too. It's a book of ideas. Einhorn keeps most of those. Most importantly, he keeps the book's heart: Empathy.

That's right, kids! Einhorn returns to Dick's obsession with empathy as the defining human characteristic. Specifically -- in the context of the original novel's fictional universe -- empathy is a stubborn decision to care for others when not caring is the most logical survival response. In Dick's scenario, Earth is hell. It's a rotten, post-apocalyptic world full of radioactive dust and "kipple." (Dick's private word for random junk.) The humans who qualify are deserting the planet like rats off a sinking ship. The humans who remain stuck (because they don't qualify or can't afford escape) find salvation in a religion called Mercerism. (Devotees enter a virtual reality box and experience the martyr's pain). Stranded humans can also take comfort in owning animals. Most of the real ones are extinct, so most people buy robot beasts. (Electric sheep, etc.) Real animals are expensive status symbols. Androids are too -- but they're a perk reserved for colonists on Mars and illegal on Earth. When they escape to Earth, bounty hunters kill them. That's Deckard's job -- and he's torn up with moral conflict about it. As in the movie, he's forced to confront what it means to be human.

Einhorn's adaptation does justice to Dick's brilliantly dense source material -- without any force-fed exposition. His dialogue sounds like actual people (or androids) talking. His scene construction is good, too. What's happening, what's at stake and where the action is going are all crystal clear. (As they aren't in the novel. No disrespect. Scene-setting wasn't Dick's thing -- any more than it was Joyce's.) 

Scott's movie modified Dick's ideas, then blasted them into the cosmos (or greater LA) like an exploded bolt diagram. Dick's original book was much more inward -- claustrophobic, gnomic and hermeneutic -- an exercise in ratmaze philosophy. This production distilled that nightmare into a dense, multimedia stew, complete with vid screens, an opera singer and a dude playing electric cello. The play's mood remains the same: a really lousy mood, with a tiny drop of hope that's probably bullshit. All credit where credit is due: Dick's complicated and possibly crazy ideas may be depressing, but this production makes them easy to follow. That's not easy to pull off.

Einhorn gets some of the credit, but not all. Henry Akona created the haunting, original operatic score. Neal Wilkinson's set design neatly evokes an entropic world full of decaying consumer junk. Kudos also to the actors, who include Alex Emanuel (Rick Deckard), Yvonne Roen (Rachael Rosen/Pris) vocalist Moira Stone (Luba Luft), Christian Pederson (Roy Baty), Ken Simon (Isidore) and neo-vaudeville performer Trav SD (Buster Friendly). Excellent work all around -- a total investment in their characters. They brought Dick's waking nightmare to life -- and brought me to tears several times.

I loved the book and loved the play -- to the extent you can love a bizarre allegory of suffering and redemption based on the private religion of exactly one believer. Am I entirely happy? Eh ... no. I wish Einhorn had stuck closer to Dick's harsh vision. The playwright couldn't resist making the "andys" sympathetic and dropping broad hints that Deckard himself was an android. Cool ideas from the movie. They ain't in the book -- and they blunt the point of Dick's twisted gnostic parable. 

OK, OK. Aside from my objections as a Philip K. Dick fundamentalist, yeah, I dug this play. Einhorn twisted a few elements around, but left most of the plot and characters intact. The mood of the source material remains. It's gutsy and honest -- if unrelentingly bleak. The play keeps the promise most plays break. It takes you to another world. Hey, it's a lousy world -- what'd you expect? You want laughs, see Pee Wee Herman. You want irony ...

The taxi that took us to the play skirted the open wound of the World Trade Center. Couldn't help but think of Dick's propecy of a ruined world.

An as an added jolt of PhilDickian irony, technology threatened to sabotage the opening night multimedia production. The waiting audience wound up cooling its heels for about 45 minutes after the theoretical opening time. Various nervous actors (voices cracking with stress) came out to explain that the show had a snag. One of the vid screens wouldn't work; then they all died. Eventually, they got most of 'em working -- and the show went on.

Tech hasn't enslaved us, yet. But we haven't mastered it either.

Somewhere up in heaven (or perhaps VALIS) I think I can hear Phil laughing.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
A UTC #61 production
Through Dec. 11
3LD Art & Technology Center
80 Greenwich St., New York, N.Y.
212-352-3101
3ldnyc.org
Untitled Theater

GM Hy-Wire Car

Apocalection 2012

Just wanted credit for the phrase.

Dr. Strangelove's Rainbow

"I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."

Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is an exegesis of Stanley Kubrick/Terry Southern's Dr. Strangelove.

If I had the money to go back to graduate school and write my thesis, that'd be it. Since I don't, this'll be the short version. The really short version.

The message of Gravity's Rainbow — if you boiled it down to a fortune cookie — would read: Technocratic society has a hard-on for death.

To expand it a little — what's wrong with Western European society is a form of sexual perversion.

Cutting through the multitude of subplots, there are two central narratives:

1) Dr. Blicero, an evil Nazi rocket scientist, runs a weird S&M cult on the side at Peenemunde during the Blitz. At the end of the book — and after the war — one of his sex partners willingly enters the nose cone of a V-2 rocket as a living, sexual sacrifice. The evil Nazi scientist fires it off into a movie theater and ruins the show. (It's a V-2 rocket — but it clearly implies the Cold War nuclear missiles the V-2s would spawn.)

2) Tyrone Slothrop, a horny American out of an R. Crumb comic, was conditioned as an infant by Dr. Jamf, an acolyte of Pavlov. The conditioning created a sexual response to a mystery stimulus — which turns out to be Imipolex G — an erectile plastic, an artificial, dead thing that mimics the most organic of responses. In the book, this fictional substance is an essential V-2 rocket component. As a result, Slothrop has precognitive erections when he's stationed in London during the Blitz. He bangs a lot of women. Inevitably — a short time later— rockets bang down on the site of his sexual assignations.

OK. So let's compare that to Dr. Strangelove:

As with Gravity's Rainbow, the fortune cookie message is: Technocratic society has a hard-on for death.

The movie opens with a sexual image of planes refueling in mid-air. In case there's any doubt, every character's name is a sexual pun implying some sexual deviance or excess: Merkin Muffley, Jack D. Ripper, Buck Turgidson, etc.

The plot: The USSR has a doomsday machine designed to destroy all living things if they're attacked. They keep it quiet -- saving the surprise for the upcoming party conference. Jack D. Ripper, a rogue American general, sends a wing of B-52s into Soviet airspace because he thinks the commies are polluting "our precious bodily fluids" with fluoridation. (The reason he thinks this — he's impotent.) Top representatives from the USSR and USA meet in the underground "War Room" and collaborate on recalling the American planes. An evil Nazi rocket scientist — Dr. Strangelove — dominates the meeting. The American president and the Soviet premier negotiate on the hotline in a Jules Feiffer-esque parody of an old married couple having a tiff. The effort succeeds — all the planes return, except for one that can't communicate. Against all odds, it gets through. Major Kong rides an H-Bomb down like a rodeo cowboy — triggering doomsday. Down in the War Room, Dr. Strangelove pitches a scheme to preserve the world's elite in salt mines — in a ratio of one man to fifty women, supermodels all. His paralyzed legs are miraculously healed.

The movie ends with an orgasmic montage of atomic bomb blasts, to the tune of "We'll Meet Again."

It's a brilliant movie, but ultimately, it's pop satire painted with a broad brush. Pynchon took its basic concepts and expanded on them, reaching a complexity worthy of Joyce's Ulysses. But the core ideas and images are all there:

• The phallic symbol of the rocket.

• The orgasmic symbol of an exploding rocket.

• The equation of a highly militarized technocracy with sexual perversion.

• An evil Nazi scientist who epitomizes this sexual perversion. The name of the character literally spells it out — Dr. Strangelove.

Gravity's Rainbow is Dr. Strangelove's lovechild.

I could beef this up to a 20-page paper. But that's basically it.

Republican sweep

Gee. This is sorta like dealing with the 1930s crime wave by electing Al Capone mayor of Chicago.

Fugate's 104729th Law

Ugly is truth, truth ugly. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.