Monday, January 19, 2015

The pope stumbles over Charlie Hebdo


     So what's the take-away?
     From the whole Charlie Hebdo atrocity.

     What's the lesson? The moral of the story?
   
     Naive questions, since in this, as in everything, at the end nearly everyone learns what they already believed at the start. The fearful have another reason to condemn Muslims en masse for the actions of a few. Free speech advocates can point to the popularity of freedom of expression, thanks to all those millions in the street in France. Terrorists have a textbook example of how a couple AK-47s can rivet the world's attention.
     
     How about this lesson: respect religion — all religion — or suffer the consequences?
     
     Did anybody learn that from the killings in Paris?
     
     The pope, apparently.
     
     "If my good friend Dr. Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch," Pope Francis said last week, on the way to the Philippines. "It's normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others."
     
     You cannot? Since when? I would argue that you can and, at times, you must.
     
     But only at times. I don't mock the Catholic Church often only because it does such a good job of mocking itself, of undercutting Jesus' teachings in ways so clear that no commentary is necessary.
     
     But were I to decide to mock the church, I'd like to reserve the right.
     
     It's only fair.
     
     After all, the church mocks me.
     
     Where do Jews end up? Hell. Our children? Hell. Damned to eternal torment in a fiery furnace for the unforgivable crime of being ourselves. That isn't a doodle on a magazine, that's the official line, softened with various throat clearings to make it appear less vile, but here nonetheless. The fact that the pope isn't emphasizing it every Sunday is the sort of false politeness he seems to be demanding.
     
     I should have seen it coming. The Catholic Church being also subject to the crude derision of the French weekly, Catholic leaders were quick to try to use the slaughter as a teaching moment.
   
      "Killing in response to insult, no matter how gross, must be unequivocally condemned," said Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League, on the day of the attack, as if reminding himself of a sad necessity. But that was throat-clearing before he rose to his true task. "Muslims have a right to be angry," he continued, citing some vulgar examples of Charlie Hebdo satire. "What they object to is being intentionally insulted over the course of many years. On this aspect, I am in total agreement with them."
     
     I bet you are, Bill. Frankly, I could shrug off Bill Donahue. He no more represents the main current of Catholic thought than some imam in a cave in Afghanistan represents all Islam.
     
     But Pope Francis, on the other hand, is a disappointment. He seemed so promising, out of the gate.
     
     Though it shouldn't have been a surprise either.
     
      The biggest bullies cry the loudest when touched. The weak learn to get along. If you saw "The Book of Mormon," you know a more obscene, wicked, hysterical and spot-on lampoon of faith could not be conceived. Yet the Church of Latter Day Saints didn't shoot anybody. They didn't cluck sympathetic noises at those who shoot people. They took out advertisements in the "Book of Mormon" Playbill. They realized that a church, like a person, gets respect by earning it. Not by silencing critics, through murder or through a hypocritical appeal for tolerance that you yourself don't practice.
     
     What we are seeing here is a clash between two systems. Not East and West, not Islam and Christianity. It is between the ancient tribal notion that your faith, whatever it is, is the One True Way and anybody else is blaspheming in error, at best to be tolerated and converted through suasion, at worst to be destroyed. That philosophy gripped the globe from the dawn of time until, well, now, though it has weakened in places by the very modern idea that the world is made up of many equally valid — or invalid — approaches to sanctity and God, and that which one a person follows is up to the dictates of that person's heart.
     
     Tolerance doesn't mean everyone coos sympathetically at every conceivable moral system. Tolerance means you don't demand that others ape your deeds, words or thoughts. You can believe something without imposing it on others. If you've ever been in a synagogue, you may have noticed something missing. No stained glass portraits, no statues of God with a big beard. Like Muslims, we believe it is wrong to depict God — we aren't even supposed to say His actual name.
     
     In our view, every New Yorker cartoon of God on His throne is blasphemy. But we don't shoot up the New Yorker. We subscribe instead. Jews don't go around slapping cheeseburgers out of people's hands.
     
     Paddle your own canoe. Practice your own beliefs. Put the passion that you apply to forcing others to do things they don't believe into doing the good that your supposedly superior faith system supposedly represents. Why isn't the pope teaching that?

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Puppetry Week: #7 "Everyone can't be Derek Mantini"

Moses (photo by Lorna Palmer)
    Most art—movies, books, plays, paintngs—is entirely forgettable. You experience it, shrug, and never think about it again.
    A great work lingers, however.
    Or even a very good work. I'm thinking of "Being John Malcovich." I haven't seen the Spike Jonze movie since it came out 15 years ago. Yet so many moments resonate. Floor 7 1/2 in the Merti-Flemmer Building, with its five foot ceiling, such a perfect metaphor for the cramped imposition of business life upon the human spirit. The small door that leads, improbably, in to the mind of John Malcovich, languidly ordering towels over the telephone, the epitome of haughtiness and celebrity, free to obsess over the smallest details of his success.
    And John Cusack, the unemployed puppeteer. Performing a complex classical set piece on the streets of New York, his delicate marionettes pantomiming frustrated ecstasy on either sides of a wall, sublime, erotic, earning him the applause of a punch in the mouth by an enraged passerby, offended for the sake of his young daughter. 
    Cusack, sprawled on the couch, watching Derek Mantini, "the greatest puppeteer in the history of the world," performing "The Belle of Amherst," operating a 60-foot Emily Dickinson puppet  off a water tower, a pure image of crassness rewarded.
   "Everyone can't be Derek Mantini," his wife says, trying to comfort him.
    Which is why I'm finishing out puppet week, despite complaints from the cheap seats. "Is it because you're getting too many clicks, too many readers?" my brother insinuated. "A way to thin the herd?" No, Puppetry Week is a concept, and, having invoked it, I'll ride it to the end. No point in bailing out now. If you're tired, well, tomorrow I tweak the pope, rolling up my sleeve and shoving my bare arm into the cage of the Opus Dei crowd. Come back then.
     And I have a duty. I'd feel wrong, cowardly, if I didn't applaud Blind Summit's "The Table," which opened Friday night at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and is running next week as part of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. 
     "The Table" almost defies description or, more precisely, will be impoverished by my attempts to describe it. We are presented with Moses, the Biblical patriarch, but Moses as a two and a half foot tall crabby, randy British homunculus with a cardboard head whose world is defined by a table, at first. 
     Moses is operated by three performers in black, in the Japanese bunraku tradition—Mark Down, the director, who had Moses left arm and bum, Sean Garratt, who had the other arm, and Laura Caldow, who had the difficult task of working the feet (yoga helps, she explained afterward).
    Though they don't cover their faces, the better to interact with the audience in a performance that is more vaudeville than high art. They bring a surprising physicality to the puppet, plus a balled-up anger, a rage at the constraints of his little table that'll resonate with every member of the audience whose lives are not as free as we'd like, which is all of us. There's something about puppetry which, to me, punishes serious stabs at high art — they seem ponderous. But when awash with humor, as "The Table" certainly is, with artistry and beauty in supporting roles, you can have a work of surprising resonance and power. 
     "The Table" makes for a great introduction to this kind of puppetry because it was so self-aware: Moses talks about himself, presenting a puppet show. The performers are gifted comics, great improvisers—when a helper, pressed into service from the audience, managed to yank off Moses' right hand, it became one of the highlights of the night, with Moses cringing in horror, waving his maimed limb. Tuesday at 10:30 p.m., when they get on stage with Second City, there's no question they'll easily hold their own. 
     The moment that will stay with me, however, is when they were illustrating how the puppet is manipulated to give it presence, to animate it, a process that doesn't really rely upon the puppet itself. They eased Moses into resting on a corner of his table and three puppeteers deftly lifted out -- what? His soul? The essence of performance?—and manipulated the air, basically. The audience's attention easily shifted from Moses, now an inanimate lump, to the void the three were putting through easy-to-understand paces. It was a magnificent piece of performing magic, literally creating art out of nothing. 
    At the end, they announced they would be trying out 10 minutes or so of a new piece, "Citizen Puppet," wanted audience feedback.  Almost no one in the sold out upstairs space at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater took the opportunity to leave. We all lingered 10 minutes, and then returned to our seats to a brilliant encore that began with Tina, a sour old lady observing, "Well you can call it a bean stalk if you like!" and mixing a babbling brook of small town village gossip with observations of this surreal giant green fairy tale phallus that has suddenly thrust itself into the sky. We meet Howie, a tiny elderly man on a bench, and Suki, a nasal teen. I thought of "Spoon River Anthology" meets "Jack and the Beanstalk" and would have happily watched 90 minutes of it.
      Blind Summit is performing "The Table" all this week at CST, adding a taste of "Citizen Puppet," which debuts in the United Kingdom in March, on Friday and Saturday night. If you go, you'll never forget it. If you miss it, you'll have to haul yourself to London to see them, or wait two years until the festival returns and hope they come back. That is not a risk I would suggest taking.


Photo atop blog by Xue Quian

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Puppetry Week: #6 Surprise bonus! "Puppetry of the Penis"



     I know I said Puppetry Week ended yesterday. But someone reminded me of this column, which is about a sort of puppetry, and with the Saturday Fun Activity solved, I figured I would toss it up for your entertainment. It's only Saturday, the week isn't technically over. And this is one of my favorite columns—you can feel the shock of what I witnessed in the Georgian Room at the Drake Hotel. 

    Oh, Lenny, Lenny, we're so sorry. Come back. All is forgiven. 
     I keep thinking about Lenny Bruce. Arrested for obscenity at the Gate of Horn in December 1962. He held up a photo of a woman's breast, and the Chicago cops hauled him away.
     I'm thinking about him because of a show--I almost called it "a play" --called "Puppetry of the Penis," that opens next week at the Lakeshore Theater, on Broadway at Belmont. In case you missed the burst of publicity surrounding its sneak preview at the Drake Hotel (the Drake!), "PoP" consists of a pair of Australian gentlemen manipulating their privates into various shapes. They call it "genital origami," though, having witnessed the marvel with my own eyes in the Georgian Room of the Drake (the Drake!), I'd say it's closer to balloon twisting.
     And, as with balloon twisting, the performance is not particularly interesting (voila, a giraffe!) once the initial surprise of penises on parade in public wears off, which took all of three minutes in my case, though, to be charitable, I suppose a bachelorette party or group of Halsted Street boys out on the town might have fun. If they were drunk enough.
     What lingers is not the show, per se, but its reception by the city--a raised eyebrow, a shrug, and it's on to other things. Those with any sense of Chicago history, however, must shake our heads in awe. Look at where we are. Penises happily wangling every night at the Lakeshore.
     Should there not be a ceremony? A moment of silence? Something? Let's bow our heads for "Les Ballets Africain," a troupe of Guinean native dancers whom the Chicago police forced to cover their bare breasts with brassieres when they performed at the Blackstone in 1959. Let's light a candle for the 1948 production of "Mr. Roberts," whose producers had to have a long conversation with police censors over exactly what expression of approval a sailor would yip after spying an attractive woman through his telescope.
     Chicago was the bluenose capital of the nation. Why else do you think Nelson Algren was so bitter? We were censoring silent movies in 1906. "The James Boys" was banned as too violent in 1909. The heart breaks. Fifty years later, we were still at it. Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder" was banned here because one member of the police censor board, a Mrs. Honey Fischman, found it obscene.
     Lest we get too self-satisfied, we have to remember that "PoP" is anatomical, but not sexual. If those penises were put to their intended uses, this would be a different story. Nor is it political. If those elastic members were formed into mocking images of the Bush Cabinet, perhaps our dormant civic outrage would have stirred.
     Not like the old days. Besides a fixation on sex, Chicago was not averse to banning anything that simply cast the city in a bad light. In the early 1930s, we banned newsreels that showed labor riots here. We banned the original "Scarface" because it suggested there were gangs and crime in Chicago. (Reminds one of our current mayor, who raised a stink about a film that suggested inner-city youth swear a lot.)
     We extended a similar courtesy to our friends, the Nazis. In 1938, we banned a "March of Time" newsreel because it suggested that Jews were being persecuted in Germany. "It was rejected because this country is friendly with Germany," explained police censor Lt. Joseph Healy.
     What happened? How were we saved from the simple-minded bowdlerization of the censors? Thank the rest of the country, which dumped police boards years before we did. Thank all the pornographers who stood their ground, from Hugh Hefner to the anonymous managers of the old "adult" theaters. Thank the ACLU. Thank the courts. Thank Roger Ebert, who helped lead the chorus of mockery that finally--finally--killed off our police censorship board, around about 1969.
     There is, of course, a price to pay. "Puppetry of the Penis" opens next week, and anyone who wants to part with $38.50 for a ticket can see it. Cable TV is a smutfest, and obscenities are seeping into that second-to-the-last bastion of morality, broadcast TV (the last bastion, sadly, is newspapers).
     I feel true sympathy for those raised wearing white gloves and hiding copies of "Peyton Place." This must be hard to take. Feel comforted by the fact it can sometimes be hard to take if you're younger, too.
     But isn't our current state vastly preferable to the past? To 1949, when Mayor Martin Kennelly banned Jean Paul Sartre's one act play "The Respectful Prostitute" sight unseen. "The title alone would be enough to ban the show," Hizzoner said.
     Remember the coercion that world required. You needed lots of police censorship boards and cowed theater owners and revoked liquor licenses to keep it working. Remember the hypocrisy. When the police were slapping bras on "Les Ballets Africain," the ever-irreverent Sun-Times sent a reporter out to the various clip joints to note the strippers, including Miss Lila Turner and her flaming, tasseled brassiere.
     Remember that Chicago would not allow Disney's "Our Vanishing Prairie" until after the scene of the birth of a baby buffalo was cut.
     Half a lifetime later, we have "Puppetry of the Penis." Mourn or celebrate, as you will. But the irony is almost too delicious for words.
     Lenny Bruce would have loved it, loved where our prudery eventually led us. I'll bet, wherever he is, he's having a good hard laugh at our expense.

    —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Feb. 14, 2003

Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?


     There's nothing like a factory. Wander around a little, discover the most amazing devices.
     When I came face-to-face with this dripping ... contraption this week, my first thought was "Yuck," and my second was, "This'll stump 'em!" 
     Which is fanciful, because nothing seems to stump you. But this ... thing ought to give you a run for your money. It's in Chicago, located in a place of manufacture, and there I had better leave it.  You're too good to require tips. 
     The winner will receive one of my brand new 2015 blog posters, made in a limited edition of 100 in Nashville, Tennessee. They're already flying out the door. But you can win one of your very own by identifying the place where this messy apparatus can be found. Remember to post your guesses below. Good luck. 
Win me!

Friday, January 16, 2015

On law, facts and yelling about gay marriage


  

     “When the facts are against you,” the first part of the old legal saying goes, “argue the law.”
     That means, when evidence undercuts your case, the way it does for those who oppose gay marriage on religious grounds, then try to win by finding a loophole in the law, such as the notion that states have the right to control marriage within their own borders. Hang your case on that.
     Which is necessary, because there are no facts to suggest gays shouldn’t get married. They don’t make worse spouses, or worse parents. If society wants people to form families, in order to raise children and create a stable world, then the only reason gays shouldn’t participate in marriage is religious intolerance, or simple fear that causes one to invent reasons against it.
     Not to underestimate bigotry. It was enough, for years and years, to keep gays from marrying. But the truth will out — another old saying — and over the past few years we’ve seen extraordinary progress in the United States, as old biases melt away.
     On Friday the United States Supreme Court agreed to consolidate four gay marriage ban cases from four states — Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee — and then decide once and for all whether gay marriage, already legal in 36 states, should be the law of the land.
     You could argue that this is the Big One, which will resolve the issue definitively, from a legal point of view. Although, for the shrinking minority against it, a legal decision will only cause them to rail about unelected judges, as they do whenever a ruling goes against them.    

     You could also argue that any Supreme Court decision is moot, that the issue is already resolved, since 70 percent of Americans live in a place where gay marriage is legal, and given the practice’s ample benefits, improving the lives of previously marginalized people, and their children, and complete lack of drawbacks, other than ruffling the moral sensibilities of zealots, we’re never going back, no matter what the Supreme Court decides.
     
"When the law is against you,” the second part of the saying goes, “argue the facts.”
     Those facts are that 14 states still do not have gay marriage. Most of them in the Bible Belt — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas. The same states that clung to racial segregation until the Supreme Court pried it away from them, to the degree that it has. They won’t give up this fight easily either. Which leads to the third part of the saying:
     “When both the facts and the law are against you, yell like hell.”
     That is a certainty. Oral arguments will begin in April, and a ruling is scheduled for June. Until then, expect a lot of bluster, a lot of false statements loudly made, and empty claims that gay marriage somehow undermines traditional marriage in a way clear to those who want it stopped, but not readily apparent to the increasing number of Americans who see the dignity, certainty and security that legalized gay marriage brings to their parents, their children, their brothers and sisters. Justice Antonin Scalia will no doubt issue a blistering dissent — assuming he isn’t in the majority. But either way, the change has been made, and the high court will either seal it, or delay that inevitability for another day.
 

Puppetry Week: #5: "A puppet mocks being human"

 Puppetry Week lurches to a conclusion today — there there, take comfort, it'll be back in two years, perhaps, when the festival returns—with this interview with Blair Thomas, who created the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. 

     Were I to live my life again, I'd be a puppeteer.
     My puppet theater would be called Punch & Judy's. It would be semi-legendary in Wicker Park, a modest hall, wide-slat wood floors, elaborate gilded stage with a red velvet curtain. The line would stretch out the door, the long tables, groaning with ale and spiced meat pies. Once an hour, a bell rings, the curtain flies up, and for 10 minutes Mr. Punch, with his pointed chin and jester's hat is once again locked in eternal battle with wife Judy, the shrieks and whistles and rude jokes, the baby ejected from the stage as if shot from a cannon, the crowd, red-faced and roaring while I sit on a stool in my admiral's hat, counting the gate, greedily fingering the thick rolls of wet bills.
     Alas, I'm stuck doing this.
     But I can admire those who do devote their lives to puppetry, that eternally low-rent art form whose rare splashes of success — the Muppets, Avenue Q, "Being John Malkovich" — only mock  the shabby desuetude of of the art form in general.
     Not to be a downer at the advent of the first International Chicago Puppet Theater Festival, which began Wednesday and runs until Jan. 25. If it weren't so obscure, I wouldn't care about it. Video games do far, far better than puppetry, but don't expect a lot of updates on them here.
     The festival is the hard-earned brainchild of Chicago puppeteer Blair Thomas.    
     "It's true, it's been a lot of work, a lot of great things happening," he said. "There is not a major international puppet theater festival."
     Well, there is now, or could be, if this catches on. What does he hope to accomplish with his festival?
Mr. Punch
     "One thing I'm interested in, as a puppeteer, is to advance the form," he said. "One of best way to do that is to get the audiences to see what is going on in the contemporary puppetry movement. Once they see that, they will be astounded."
     I told him that the "Theater" in his festival name struck me as a stab distancing itself from the grim 4th birthday party machinations that come to mind for many at mention of "puppetry," and a grab at Steppenwolf-ish respect.
     "We are in a way attempting to align ourselves with that, rather than a lesser form of puppet theater," he said. "My goal is to redefine what puppet theater is for Chicago audiences."
     For me, puppet theater is the thing I never go to. I admire puppets as lovely, often strange objects, and puppetry as a concept, perhaps because it's the rare profession even more ill-favored than my own. But the last puppet show I attended was while herding a pair of toddlers. What advantages, I asked Thomas, does puppetry bring to a dramatic effort?
     "I think of puppetry as being a form of performance using sculpture and performance together in a unique way," he said. "You're watching material objects. It looks like a human but it's not, and ends up being able to do things a human being can't. A human being can't come apart, but a puppet can literally come apart in front of you. Fantastical things like that. In puppetry, the fantastical is normal."
     I told him there was a bit of synergy, his festival arriving right after the Charlie Hebdo tragedy in France.
     "[Puppetry is] extremely good at mocking authority, because authority is the humans, in terms of shows in the festival actually doing that...we don't have anyone doing that directly."
     Pity.
     I told Thomas I didn't think that puppetry could ever be popular again, assuming it once was. That puppets are like hats; their renaissance is constantly being announced without ever actually arriving.
     "You can open up a puppetry journal from 1930, and they're like, 'Puppetry is having a renaissance!' " Thomas said. "The reality is puppetry always exists on periphery of dominant culture. It's an amalgam form, not a pure form like poetry or playing the piano. This position on the periphery allows it to comment. That's why puppetry lends it self to satire. It can mock. A puppet itself mocks being human, appears to be alive, but can't be alive. We're the people who're alive. That's really a disturbing thing, when it's really well done, it's shocking, that uncanny thing ... taps into our reptilian brain, and we think this is a real thing. That's actually a thrilling place to be, sweeping us away with its wonder and otherworldliness. This is what I think contemporary puppetry is. Hardly anyone know this."
     The secret's out now. I've got tickets to a production Friday night — you kind of have to. I'm hoping that it's wonderful.
     "'The Table' is a great introduction," he said. "Really funny and good theater too."
     You can learn about the festival at chicagopuppetfest.org.
     By the way, in that alternate world, after the crowd at "Punch & Judy's" drains their beers and staggers out the door, after the lights are turned up, showing horribly the swill and God-knows-what-else soaked sawdust on the floor, I stand, let out a long sigh, set my admiral's hat on the stool, put on my jacket, look at the empty puppet palace and think, "I devoted my life to this? I could have been a newspaper columnist ..."

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Puppetry Week: #4 Sometimes it's just a puppet


     You can, of course, think about this stuff too much.
     I was reading Kenneth Gross' artful critique Puppet (University of Chicago Press: 2011) and as much as I admired his turns of phrase, the "fundamental strangeness" of puppets, their air of "something very old and very early," as I neared the end of the book, I felt he had sort of missed the point.  A writer, of course, is entitled to define his subject, and if you want to wax poetic about puppets by giving far more attention to Russian puppeteer Sergei Obraztsov than you do the Muppets, so be it. 
     But just as, at some point in your exegesis on chocolate cake, even the most scrupulous scholar should admit it simply tastes good, so one shouldn't unspool a puppetry week—or a book about puppets—without a nod to their essential goofiness, their inherent sweetness, so that even under glass, with no animating hand, like my pal Kukla above, with his dark tomato nose, cherry cheeks and matching gown, well, he's funny. You shouldn't speak of the "wild, monomaniacal appetite of the Cookie Monster," as Gross does, without at least whispering that he was a riot to watch. Otherwise, it seems a willful obfuscation. No matter how sophisticated your analysis of the social-mechanical dynamics of schoolyard play, it's still hopscotch.
     Puppets are also commercial. As sweet as Kukla and Ollie were (Fran, being human, we'll leave out, for now) as manipulated by Burr Tillstrom, they were also designed to get kids to pester their parents to buy television sets, and they worked very well. 
     While puppetry can be accomplished with enormous skill, as those attending the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival will no doubt discover, puppets can also push product, do the heavy lifting and cover for a lack of talent on the part of the puppeteer. I'm thinking of the Puppet Bike, a crude moveable stage spied around town where basically threadbare hand puppets bop to recorded music. That's it. Their central skill is dancing with each other and encouraging children to get money from their parents and stick it in a slot. My buddy Mark Konkol caught up with the Puppet Bike's inventor a few years back, describing the project as "a way to help an out-of-work friend make a few bucks."
     No shame there. Not everyone can be artists, and more puppets are adjuncts to beggary than cultural touchstones. Somehow, I thought perhaps local puppet acts would be buffing their shoe button eyes, practicing their best stuff and attempting to shine in the festival, looking for their big break, puppetwise.That is the romantic in me. The truth is, it's a hard world out there, and if putting a sock on your hand makes the passerby stop and maybe fish for a stray buck, well, that's what you do.