Killy Dwyer in “Not Show Business”

I was so grateful Kelly “Killy” Dwyer flushed me out of my hiding place yesterday to come see the last performance of her work Not Show Business in the Frigid Festival at Under St. Marks. We’re longtime fans of Killy’s, not just as an artist but as a person; we love her so much we asked her to officiate at our wedding.  Little did we know that she was going through tough times then, which I only make bold to mention because she talks about it openly in her work.

What do we admire about her work? Well for one thing, she can’t be pigeon-holed. She’s a singer, comedienne, storyteller, musician, autobiographical performance artist. The word “collage” occurred to me looking at the stage yesterday, a piece built of cut-up fragments. In addition to the performance aspects, she was working with found objects (real physical items from her childhood) in this show, as well as video (home movies).

She is extremely bold and brave. I know this because I have been watching her for a long time and I catch quick glimpses of what’s behind the mask. She does a high wire act. Once you’re on the wire, there’s only one way to do it and that’s with the confidence that you can. But there’s that second before you step off. She doesn’t hide that second from anybody before she climbs up, but it’s there. She’s whistlin’ in the graveyard. She mines a lot of humor from mock insincerity in the show biz tradition (after she finished a song yesterday, she said, “Let’s hear it for that, huh?”) and that’s endearing. At the same time, she bares all, about her mistakes, about her foibles, and in particular (in this show) about struggles with mental illness. She switched up her meds six months ago because she was afraid she was losing her memory, and this show is all about memory. Hence the giant baby-jammies, and the box of keepsakes full of old photo albums and yearbooks and the projected home movies on stage.

Now, I have seen shows just like what I just have described that have been insufferable, and you have too. What sets Killy apart, aside from honesty that’s not bullshit, is a high level of craft that allows her to turn the mess of her life into art. She is a great legit singer in a very old school way (like, really, I don’t know, Doris Day or something) and that impression is reinforced by the fact that her physical raw material looks like the Ohio mom she probably would have been if there wasn’t an exploding genius inside fucking up her brain. (I know I’m not alone in that impression because she gets cast as moms all the time in TV commercials.) But in reality she is a feral free spirit, and that comes out in her songwriting and arranging which is modern and technological and would not be out of place at a party (unless you made a point of listening to the dark and funny lyrics). In the show I saw she sang a song about her high school romance with Jack Daniels (the kind that comes in a bottle), an abusive romance which resulted in her breaking her nose at her 18th birthday party. She blended the song and the story perfectly into a seamless performance although it was presumably performed spur of the moment as the result of an audience member choosing it by spinning a “Wheel of Destiny”.

Killy’s work is inspirational to me and it was heartening to see it at Under St. Marks, a space I have been coming back to for almost 20 years now, a place that has hung on to its mission of presenting such work when the whole city seems to be becoming a brothel of high-priced sell-outs. This is pure work. It’s kind of the only work that matters. Made me want to jump on up there and try to do a show just like it, and that’s the highest kind of praise I got.

BTW, Killy’s been doing a terrific prime-time radio show on Radio Free Brooklyn, Friday nights at 8pm. You should check it out!

Troll Museum Resurrection!

Great fun last night at the Chinatown Soup gallery for the gala opening of the one-week re-appearance of Rev Jen’s Troll Museum. The Museum (which contains more trolls than you will find any place outside their natural Scandinavian stomping grounds) was formerly ensconced in Rev Jen’s pad, but both she and the trolls were evicted a few weeks ago. They need your support; an easy and pleasurable way to do it is to swing by the gallery on Lower Orchard Street and make a donation or buy some of Rev Jen’s art. Here’s some of what and whom we saw last night. All art is by the cosmically brilliant Rev Jen:

Old friend and long-time supporter CC John is the guy with the brewski. He took most of the photos and videos of my American Vaudeville Theatre’s earliest years

Me and Michele Carlo

Porno Jim was there with his pooch in a bag, Bowie

 

Pay the toll to the troll!

Portrait of the Artist as Out of Con-TROLL. Though I’ve known and occasionally worked with her for going on 20 years these pictures we took last night are the only photos I know of that contain us both. We decided to make them count. ALL POWER TO THE REV!

 

Satan, Hold My Hand

Rev Jen, Face Boy and Jonathan Ames. Photo by the Duchess!

The Art Stars came out in profusion for last night’s world premiere of Satan, Hold My Hand at Anthology Film Archives. Written by the Sainted performance Goddess Rev Jen Miller, produced by Jonathan Ames (author of countless awesome books and creator of HBO’s Bored to Death) and directed by Courtney Fathom Sell, the film features burlesque stars Reina Terror and Scooter Pie as a couple of Catholic school girls bound to be sacrificial victims of a rock band helmed by Robert Prichard (The Toxic Avenger and proprietor of the legendary alt comedy club Surf Reality, 1995-2002). Their aim is to harness the unholy power of Satan (Faceboy, longtime star of Faceboyz Open Mic and star of lots of previous Rev Jen movies); Satan’s secretary is played by Janeanne Garofolo. Rounding out the cast, a gaggle of Art Stars familiar to devotees of Rev Jen’s long-running Anti-Slam: Hank Flynn, Pete Gerber, Angry Bob,  John King, Don Eng, et al.  And let us not forget Rev Jen, Jr, the most talented chihuahua in this or any land, including Mexico.

The movie was dedicated to the late Taylor Mead, and that was fitting, for the entire proceedings from soup to nuts seemed infused with his gonzo spirit, from the underground rawness of the movie’s assembly, to the absinthian cocktail of humor and anarchistic free-for-all, to the neo-Warholian constellation of bona fide “characters” who not only populated the film but the screening and the before and after festivities that book-ended it. We started at the before party, where we spent time with cast members and other notables: Jason Trachtenburg (his daughter Rachel wrote some of the music for the movie), Lisa Levy, Brer Brian Homa (who wrote the movie’s theme song), Michele Carlo and her boyfriend Larry Desgaines, C.C. John, Jennifer Glick, et al. The carousal was in high gear by the time of the showing…at one point during an impromptu Q & A, which was being run by cast member John King for some reason  (the Rev being too overcome with, um, “emotion”), a man in the row in front of me stood up and threw his shirt off, revealing his tattoos and an enormous beer belly. Did he start dancing? I think he may have started dancing. At any rate, by then it was like 1:30 in the morning.  That’s like 5am in Trav S.D. time.

Anyway hopefully it’ll be screening soon a theatre near you (or available in some electronic fashion). Here is the movie’s web site: http://satanhmh.tumblr.com/

Elf Girl (Rev Jen’s New Book — Out Today!)

Well, it looks like Saint Reverend Jen has finally made the Big Time. Simon & Schuster, a major house, has brought out her latest book Elf Girl and it goes on sale today. To them, as to us, she gives nothing less than a life: her autobiography, from soup to nuts (I use the term advisedly), as opposed to a collection of anecdotes as she has done in the past (see my review of Live Nude Elf here).

In poring through the new book one is struck by how this compulsive art-maker gives life to everything and everyone else, too. Every inanimate object around her she anthropomorphizes, deifies; every friend (human or chihuahua) becomes mythologized and caricatured; every event chronicled and raised to the level of history like a Viking singing her own Saga. Every person who attends her Anti-Slam becomes a star. Her house is a Troll Museum. Her dog is a superhero. It’s like she were she were feathering her nest, armoring herself against pain by investing the entire world with color, humor, personality and romance. And for those not close enough to witness this miraculous alchemy personally, she writes.

Another thing that occurred to me while reading this book is that Jen is unique in playing both sides of the street. Most performance artists who slip into an assumed persona do so by creating a Hyde to their Jekyll. In other words, the twain don’t meet. The persona is designed as some kind of escape vehicle; we never hear about the “real” person beneath the make-up. But Jen wears it on her sleeve; the two run together, and the relationship is clear. Description of her childhood explains why. Her father, a lawyer by day, was a frustrated artist–he actually painted a mural of Jen’s favorite cartoons and comic book characters on her bedroom walls when she was growing up. At eight, she contracted spinal meningitis, had to have a painful spinal tap, and suffered memory loss. As a result, the precocious elf-child was always encouraged in outlandish artistic schemes; she’s never NOT been what she is: art school, acid and trafficking with a thousand other lunatics only turned up the heat on what she was already doing. It’s a delight to accompany Jen on her droll and merry adventures. And also to get the inside skinny. (For example, I long knew she had been in a relationship with No Wave film-maker Nick Zedd; I’d never known that she’d previously dated Christopher X.Brodeur, former mayoral candidate and Giuliani-stalker).

At any rate, if you don’t buy the book right away, to my mind it’ll make a perfect Christmas gift a couple of months from now — it even comes with festive elf feet right on the cover!

But if you just can’t wait and just gotta have it now, she’s launching it with a bevy of local events. Tonight she’ll be at St. Mark’s Bookshop with her pal Jonathan Ames; tomorrow night on her home turf at Bowery Poetry Club; and on November 5 at Bluestockings. Go see the real Elf Girl in person!

What We Saw on Saturday

The Countess and I had a rather a pleasant run of good experiences on Saturday.

It all started with (wait for it) Nosedive Productions‘ production of the Blood Brothers Present Freaks from the Morgue in Endtimes Productions’ Vignettes for the Apocalypse V. You got all that? Good, because I ain’t typing it again. I’ve lost count…this is either the third or fourth “Blood Brothers” show I’ve seen and reported on — and by far the best. The caliber of scripts was very high. Mac Rogers’ “Final Girl”  — about a serial killer who feeds live, paralyzed meth whores to the starving stock on his pig farm — was my favorite. I also enjoyed Brian Silliman’s two entries (which were illuminating about how much can be accomplished in a play with little or no dialogue), as well as those of Nose Dive stalwarts Stephanie “Queen of Gore” Cox-Williams and James Comtois. More than the other playwrights on the bill, the latter two seemed to be writing specifically for the Guignol, the scripts devised specifically for their unsettling effects (not surprising, since Cox-Williams is the lady who devises them and Comtois’s been at this genre a while now). The horror effects are the best the group has ever done, and they are present in greater abundance than ever before — a much welcome development. Cox-Williams starts the show off with a bang with “Bad Samaritan”, treating us to arterial spurts, severed limbs and decapitation before we even have our coats off. Then it’s off to the races through the whole show, each of the tales bearing close resemblance to stories we have read about in tabloids…but never thought we’d see. As always, the show is hilariously hosted by Pete Boisvert and Patrick Shearer, who chew the scenery along with the flesh of their victims.

After this, we swung by nearby Gallery 151, where we witnessed horrors of another sort…paintings by rapper Fab 5 Freddie. The show can roughly be broken down in thirds: one third, paintings of boxing matches, with the boxers’ trunks covered in rhinestones; one third, paintings of pole dancing ho’s; and one third paintings of graffiti tags. I call them “paintings” because the artist and the curators do: in reality they are photographic prints onto canvas. If you happen to already be directly in front of the gallery (as we were), you can step inside and be in and out in two minutes. Otherwise, don’t trouble yourself.

Of much more interest is a window exhibition at NYU’s Jack H. Skirball Center curated by my friend David Leopold. Its a series of blow-ups of caricatures by Al Hirschfeld, drawn from the many productions of Eugene O’Neill plays he’d attended over — get this —  70+ years. (The first are from the mid 1920s, the last from the late 1990s.) How is that possible? Well, I got to meet Mr. Hirschfeld in the early 90s when he inscribed a bunch of books for an event I was working on, and I’m here to tell you, he was still drawing and he was still sharp as a tack into his 90s. And he started young. So that’s how! At any rate, the pictures are charming, and you get to see his impressions of historic plays like Anna Christie, Ah, Wilderness, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Iceman Cometh, etc etc, with Hirschfeld’s witty eye capturing the likes of Jason Robards, Colleen Dewhurst and dozens of others, in his patented economic style.

From here, we zipped over to the Duplex for another incredible show by the terrific Tammy Faye Starlite. In Chelsea Madchen, the character comedienne portrays the late bohemian chanteuse Nico, having her cake and eating it too by doing serious, accurate covers of her tunes, then doing a broader comic take in mock interview sections with MTV rock journalist and former Rolling Stone editor Kurt Loder. To add to the magic of the evening, she bantered with Danny Fields, who happened to be in the audience. Fields was a regular of Warhol’s Factory, an early supporter of the Velvet Undergound, a publicist for the Doors, and the guy who discovered the MC5, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and the Ramones. It must have been a weird experience for him to watch this ribald impression of Nico, whom he actually knew.

The band was quite incredible — they did the rather tricky feat of approximating the Velvet Underground’s sound (any musician will tell you how hard that is), and then playing in more conventional later styles. Of course, it wasn’t perfect — this band was more in tune than the Velvets ever were, and Tammy’s voice is not quite as masculine and definitely not as shaky as the real Nico’s. It was cool to actually be able to hear and understand the lyrics of many of the songs from the notoriously murky Banana Album. The show included Nico’s three songs off that record, three off Chelsea Girl (the title track, an early song by Jackson Browne, and Dylan’s “I’ll Keep it With Mine.”) She also did the Door’s “The End”, Bowie’s “Heroes”, and a version of “My Funny Valentine”. The latter is off her last record from the mid-80s, Camera Obscura. At any rate, it was a pleasure to catch this perfect set by the versatile Starlite, who also does Mick Jagger in a Stones cover group called the Mike Hunt Band, as well as her famous stints as a potty mouthed Christian country singer from Nashville. Somewhere underneath the layers, I believe, is a real girl from the Upper West Side, but I dare you to try and find her!

Well, as I said at the beginning this was Saturday and the news about the gay marriage law had just broke…and we were at the Duplex and about ten feet away from Stonewall so, as you can imagine, a festive atmosphere prevailed out on the streets when we got back outside. To cap it all off, Michael Musto walked by. We’d only just seen him the other night at the Emperor’s New Codpiece. Proof enough that the Countess and I do know how to be in the right place at the right time.

The Extra Man

I have enjoyed Jonathan Ames’ writing since the late 90s, when his New York Press column was filled with harrowing accounts of his experiences with Mangina, as well as his woebegotten career as a pugilist. Recently I read all of his books, and The Extra Man immediately jumped out at me as a potential movie (so fie on the Post critic who had the opposite opinion — we’ll get to him in a minute). Written in 1998, The Extra Man tells the story of a disgraced private school teacher who moves to New York and rents a room in the very shabby apartment of a former man of means who squandered what was left of his inherited wealth and now supplants his meager salary as a playwriting professor by escorting wealthy dowagers to social gatherings. The strength of the book is the three dimensionality of the latter character, Henry Harrison, evidently drawn from life, and a hilarious, sad example of shabby nobility, reminiscent of Chaplin’s Tramp, Falstaff, Micawber, and a dozen others I could name. The character is so vivid and well wrought you carry him around in your head with you. The other main character, the narrator, is by design more passive, a sort of Nick Carraway or Boswell, relieved of being a complete cipher in the tale by the fact that he has a secret life as a cross-dresser and patron of prostitutes.

Aside from the transvestism, I found that I related strongly to the experiences of the protagonist, who straddles the worlds of extreme (if genteel) poverty and the society of rich folk. (In the book, one of his adventures even takes him to the New-York Historical Society where I used to work and met more than my share of Henry Harrisons. And I once met Marian Seldes, who plays one of the dowagers in the film, when I was earning $300 a week at Theater for the New City. She kissed me on the cheek!) . The takeaway from such schizophrenia, baneful as it is, is that when you’ve met enough rich people with B.O., nervous tics, eczema and other similar vulnerabilities, you begin to recognize them as members of your own species and relax a little.

The book is wonderfully realized for the screen by co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, the couple responsible for American Splendor, which is about a similarly tawdry subject, comic book author Harvey Pekar. They co-wrote the screenplay with Ames, who has a brief cameo. One of the interesting changes, which seems to work, is to switch the narration from first person, to an omniscient one, modeled on the authorial voice of the main character’s beloved Fitzgerald. The main character, as played by Paul Dano, is also a deviation. Lacking Ames’ real life (and the novel’s character’s) baldness, a source of insecurity, Dano more resembles a lesser known member of the Monkees. I would imagine this is an attempt to get young viewers to embrace the character, whom as realized here also lacks the noirish/beatnik aspects of Ames’ personality, making him a seeming naif in the big city.

The highlight of the film is Kevin Kline’s performance, which may be overall the best thing I’ve seen him do. (I used to be enamored of his fireworks in Sophie’s Choice, but these days it rings false to me). Generally I find him too artificial for the big screen, his Julliard diction and manners spoiling the plausibility of any character not written before 1910. The role of Henry Harrison seems made for him; he wears it like an old, fingerless glove. Unfortunately, the film contains no money shot or Oscar moment that’s likely to garner attention. But as a sustained, full, memorable performance, he’s done some very fine work. I hope it gets recognized. (Also I should mention that John C. Reilly is hilarious as a large, bewhiskered handy man who speaks in a high-pitched, falsetto voice, except when he sings). (Also, a shout to Alicia Goranson, who was in one of the Brick’s Baby Jesus festivals and has a small part in the film).

In general, the critical reaction to the film has been nothing short of idiotic. I feel the need to pick on a couple.

One of the critics for the New York Post who is ordinarily very smart bemoans the fact that “nothing happens” in the movie. I would argue that, so what? The book is a self-announced picaresque. As in Don Quixote (on which Ames partially modeled his book) and Huckleberry Finn and countless other similar works (including many popular Hollywood films from the early 1970s), MUCH happens in the moment-to-moment, and the time spent having all of those little adventures together constitutes the arc.

I must take the same critic to task for implying that the writers arbitrarily threw in the drag scenes for cheap laughs. As I see it, the role of the critic is interpretation. He instructs his readers (who are presumably less learned than he on matters of art) in appreciation. To do his job properly he must have at least a glancing familiarity with his subject (i.e., the artists and their art). This is where modern critics, especially at the dailies where they are always under the gun, fail to a degree that amounts to malfeasance. At any rate, if he’d known anything about Ames’ work (which ranges from the autobiographical to the semi-autobiographical) he’d know that a morbid, unhappy obsession with cross-dressing and other forms of sexual experimentation occur thoughout his work. It is neither just thrown in, nor is it necessarily for laughs.

Over at the Daily News, their film critic misses the boat three times over in claiming the film is too low-budget to depict the “opulence” to which the characters “aspire”. First, she’s merely wrong. The film clearly depicted that world to my satisfaction, containing several scenes at the Russian Tea Room, Carnegie Hall,  an art museum and a mansion. What more do you want? Second, since when has a budget been a legitimate subject for criticism?  And lastly, it’s by no means been established that the characters “aspire” to the wealth of their aged  lady friends. The way I read it, it is what it is. They aspire to nothing much more than what they already have, the pleasure, as Henry says, of music, a meal and pleasant surroundings to offset their unbearably bleak reality. And, as for them “giving up” something to “pursue” this wealth, in case you haven’t noticed, these characters are at the bottom of a very deep barrel.

Lastly, this movie scores VERY big points for painting New York living as it really is. 80% of the people who live here live in what the rest of America would consider very shabby circumstances indeed. Films generally gloss over that — no one would believe the reality. This film shines a very bright light on it. For this, and for reasons listed above, it scores high marks from your correspondent.

As an added extra bonus, here’s a recent interview with Jonathan Ames concerning the graphic novelization of his book The Alcoholic, conducted by the indefatigable Adam McGovern: http://www.comiccritique.com/cgi-bin/gcolumn.pl?id=525

A Fish Out of Agua

First: note well — an urgent call to action follows this review. If you like what you read here, please follow the requested steps!

Michele Carlo is a Spanish onion — red on the outside, and composed of many layers. (Oh my God, she’s gonna kill me for that!) When I first knew her in the Surf Reality heyday she was strictly Carmen Mofongo, spiritual grand-daughter of Carmen Miranda, and distant cousin perhaps of Carmelita Tropicana, complete with outlandish hats custom designed for her by her then-hubby. I booked her in that guise many a time back in the day.

Then suddenly one day — a new layer. She shifted gears majorly a few years ago, and started presenting evenings of curated story telling called “It Came from New York”. In contrast to the cartoony, stereotype take-off Carmen Mofungo, Michele allowed herself to project herself as herself, in three dimensions, telling true-life tales that were often funny, sometimes poignant, and always  vivid, taking us to the Bronx of her youth like Melville takes us to the South Seas, or John Updike to WASP suburbia.

And now she’s taken a bunch of those narratives and woven them into a book, FISH OUT OF AGUA: My life on neither side of the (subway) tracks, from Citadel Press. But she’s done more than string together a bunch of eloquent, entertaining anecdotes, as pleasing as that would be. Instead, she sticks to the theme announced by the book’s title like a creative lifeline, making the sum of her related adventures add up. A bespeckled, persimmon-haired and artistic Puerto Rican with a taste for Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, New Wave and Heavy Metal, Carlo was simultaneously blessed and cursed with several levels of alienation. To fellow Puerto Ricans, she was an outsider because of her Irish-looking attributes. When she gets lost at the Puerto Rican Day parade, the organizers yell into the P.A.: “Will the family who brought the little redheaded white girl please come to the bandstand to pick her up?” She depicts her life as a string of such moments, causing her plenty of pain (but usually providing stories that can be funny from a distance in retrospect).

I say she has been blessed as well as cursed because, to be such an outcast, to be continually forced to try to make yourself understood across endless gulfs, while it may suck on a daily basis, has to be very good for the artistic muscles. As a consequence, Michele has gotten to be very good with language. She speaks white, she speaks black, she speaks red, she speaks hoodlum, she speaks Christian, she speaks artist, etc etc. This makes her book very universal and very accessible.

Also, she writes with an unflinching, devastating honesty. Many may claim to be doing that, but my alarm bells tend to go off when the artist paints herself as a victim — seems like partial, skewed truth at best. Michele has far more wisdom than that. It is the wisdom of that Wise Fool Curly Howard, whose frequent defense was: “I’m a victim of circumstance!” Plenty of people made her life a hell, but she’s always big enough to step into their shoes and see that those people had problems of their own. Life is a chain of people knocking each other over like dominoes. So she’s the red domino. What’s that make her–special? Well, yeah, she clearly was and is — endowed with brains, talent and a heart, when all of those things are in short in supply, whether you’re in a tough school in the Bronx or a Manhattan ad agency.

Her journey is an amazing one, from the Bronx childhood where she hung out with kids with names like Nikki Boom-Boom and Janey the Waste…to her time at the School for Visual Arts (where one of her teacher’s was Mad Magazine’s Harvey Kurtzman!)…to the beginnings of her performing career at Surf Reality (very cool to see the performance comedy scene of the ’90s immortalized in a book. Let’s have more–much more of that!) And the stories are amazing. The boy who gives her her first kiss is gunned down in the streets a week later. She gets into a horrible car accident on the way to her father’s funeral and delivers the eulogy with her face sewn shut. Her kid brother accidentally destroys a $10,000 copy of Playboy he found in their father’s closet. And on and on. “

Now, then: the call to action. If you feel disposed to buy this book given all that I’ve told you, a very good time to do it would be between 11am and 12pm today. That’s right, between 11am and 12pm today. On Amazon.com. Sorry for all that pressure,but through some technical detail no one understands, if Michel sells a certain number at that hour, it will improve the book’s ranking and boost sales.

The book is officially released August 1 (Sunday), but that won’t prevent you from being able to order it today. Also, there are a couple of book/ signing events:

BROOKLYN LAUNCH: TUESDAY, AUGUST 10th, 7pm-9pm
FREE drinks & snacks; including Michele’s world-famous Triple X Coquito
Powerhouse Arena, 37 Main Street, DUMBO, Brooklyn
www.powerhousearena.com

MANHATTAN LAUNCH: WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 25th, 6:30-8-30pm
Hosted by H.R. Britton, with FREE drinks & snacks; including, again, Michele’s world-famous Triple X Coquito
Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 97 Orchard Street, off Delancey Street
www.tenement.org