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Mama’s Got a Squeeze Box
I’ve recently been rewatching the short-lived and fondly remembered teen drama Freaks and Geeks. (If you haven’t, you really should. It’s great.)
In one episode, Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini) is trying to convince her parents to let her go to an upcoming concert by The Who. They decide to listen to one of the band’s albums first to see if they approve and, inevitably, find themselves interpreting the lyrics to Squeeze Box.
“Mama’s got a squeeze box, Daddy never sleeps at night / She goes in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out…”
Her father isn’t impressed: “Just keep those boys away from your accordion!”
It got me thinking, though, about all the ways to secretly describe getting some in song. First some rules, though, because what’s sex talk without rules? (Chaos, that’s what.) If we’re just talking about the sex act itself, then we disqualify other kinds of dirty euphemisms. All those songs that are bragging about a particular body part, for instance.
And we also discount artists who seem happier letting their lyrics stand naked than dressing them in metaphors. Missy Elliott’s Work It? Prince’s Mad Sex? I’m looking at you. I mean, hip-hop seemed to run out of metaphors – and spellcheckers – even before it reached Nelly’s Hot In Herre. “It’s gettin’ hot in here,” he crooned. “So take off all your clothes.”
(That’s just cause and effect, baby.)
What’s left is often A) edible, from 50 Cent’s Candy Shop to Warrant’s Cherry Pie. Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer asked us to “Open up your fruit cage / Where the fruit is as sweet as can be.”
Or B) automotive. R. Kelly – whose Bump and Grind became a part of everyday speech – gave us the unforgettable gift of Ignition. “Girl, please let me stick my key in your ignition”. “Girl, back that thing up so I can wax it, baby.” And Grace Jones’ post-disco classic Pull Up To The Bumper is hilariously dirty: “Pull up to my bumper baby / In your long black limousine / Pull up to my bumper baby / And drive it in between.”
If wikipedia is to be believed, Pull Up To The Bumper was used on a children’s TV channel in 2002, and no one seemed to care. The thinnest metaphorical veil is usually enough to get away with anything. Remember Madonna’s performance at the Haiti telethon? It marked the moment where the whole world seemed convinced that Like A Prayer is actually about, you know, praying.
Once enough time has gone by, you don’t even need to disguise your lyrics. Familiarity turns everything to muzak. I remember hearing Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side playing in my local supermarket. No one heard: “But she never lost her head / Even when she was giving head…”
Everyone heard: “Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo…”
Coppélia: Dolls Tired from Dancing
So The Australian Ballet’s latest is the rather bizarre ballet Coppélia, and they were nice enough to ask me to write for their programme about how modern special effects were leaking onto the stage in 1870s Paris. Primitive automatons! Magic shows! Uh… exclamation points!
Coppélia (Leanne Stojmenov) and Dr. Coppelius (Damien Welch). Photography by Branco Gaica.
Mostly, I focused on the ballet’s villain, Doctor Coppelius. He’s depicted as a sad and lonely inventor, surrounded by his odd mechanical creations – some half-finished, some almost human. In the original horror story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, though, he’s an alchemist suspected to be ‘The Sandman’, and is much more monstrous. (Like stealing-childrens’-eyes more monstrous.)
Yet he’s not the most horrific thing in the story. That role belongs to his beautiful, artificial faux-daughter, Coppélia. In the ballet’s programme, I write:
“The existence of a lifelike doll in Hoffmann’s original tale is not a charming curiosity. After the truth of his creation is revealed, Hoffmann describes lovers forcing one another to sing and dance off-key and out of time, just to prove they are human. Otherwise how can they be sure?”
Popular culture has provided us with more supposedly scientific ways to test if someone’s human, like the Voight-Kampff machine made famous by Blade Runner. The movie’s production designer described it like this: “Basically it was a lie-detector machine. The lie is, I am not a replicant.”
In fact, as I saw the frail Doctor Coppelius appear on stage, I was reminded of J. F. Sebastian, Blade Runner’s old inventor, living alone except for his toys. The nursery rhyme his toys sing to him – “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig” – still plays in my head with alarming regularity.
Blade Runner – and a gazillion other science fiction stories too, of course – are designed to make us wonder if we’re human after all. How can we really tell? Singing out of tune and moving off the beat? Close analysis of our pupil dilation at embarrassing questions? Maybe it’s just as the theme song ‘Coppélia’s Coffin’ from the anime series Noir says:
“People are dolls tired from dancing / Sheep on the altar / The mechanical dreams / Where are they headed?”
We’re all just dolls, tired from dancing. Coppélia tries to dismiss these question with the light-hearted farce and energetic dancing at its beginning and end – but they remain bubbling under the surface of the stage while we’re in Doctor Coppelius’ lair.
An odd postscript: Coppélia’s choreographer, Arthur Saint-Leon, isn’t only famous for his ballets; he also invented an early form of notation to record these all-important steps. Ironically, he failed to record his work on Coppélia, and it only survived as its popularity kept it in almost constant circulation – even though it was initially interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war. What if it hadn’t been so lucky?
And another: in 2007, Japanese scientists offered a strange solution: a human-sized robot that could mimic the steps of a human dancer. In this way, the specific movements of folk dances could be perfectly captured and replayed, even after its original performers were long dead. “My impression is that there would still be a human element lacking,” one English folk dancer is quoted as saying. “The robot would still look, for the want of a better word, robotic.”
We keep telling ourselves that – but I can’t help feeling like it’s just modernity’s equivalent of whistling past a graveyard.
The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.
Inside the building at 372 5th Avenue Brooklyn, there’s a secret door. (I won’t say where because it’s a secret.) Behind it, there’s a large room where children sit and finish their homework, get help from tutors, or embark on ambitious extracurricular creative writing projects. When I visited, posters from their most recent batch of films were hanging around the walls. This is 826NYC.
Others have explained the make-you-all-warm-inside, bring-a-tear-to-your-eye, maybe-the-kids-will-be-alright-after-all charity work done at 826 National. There are seven locations around America, each fronted with its own theme. San Francisco has the Pirate Supply Store, Los Angeles has the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, and Chicago’s Boring Store does not sell spy equipment for secret agents. No sir.
But it’s the Brooklyn store that also houses the Superhero Supply Co., providing everything a young superhero needs to combat neighbourhood evil. As the sensibly-lettered sign outside says: “Costumes. Eyewear. Invisibility. Instruction Manuals. Dastardly plots will be foiled. Underground lairs will be found. ‘Ever vigilant, ever true.’”
There are X-ray goggles, wrist-communicators, industrial strength suction-caps, and secret identity kits – in case you need extra documentation to prove that you’re actually Ruben Fletcher, 46, an appliance salesman from Iowa City. There are other products that are a little more conceptual, too, just a jug of pure chaos from Bugayenko Laboratories.
There’s a selection of capes – and a cape-tester to see how it looks billowing dramatically behind you – and a Devillianizer machine in case you need to work on those occasional villainous tendencies.
I love the attention to detail, the utterly convincing graphic design, and the quips scattered around the store for those who are paying attention. (“Please ask a clerk for assistance with products on the higher shelves. Do not levitate, hover, or stretch.”) I love that you’re required to give your superhero name and recite the Vow of Heroism before leaving the store with your purchases. They frown on irony, too, so be prepared to say it with gusto.
Most of all, I love how democratic it all is. Too much fantasy seems to requires that its heroes are born special. Secret royalty; chosen one after chosen one; you know the drill. The division between who’s worthy and who’s not seems impossibly wide. Once you’re one, you can never be the other. Batman and Iron Man might be self-made heroes, but they’re the exceptions – and still chosen by tragedy. If you want superpowers just to help people, have fun, and save the world? You haven’t earned them. Look at anyone who takes Mutant Growth Hormone (in the Marvel Universe) or joins Lex Luthor’s Everyman Project (over at DC). It never seems to end well.
It’s also what made me wary of Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, even though I rank his earlier Iron Giant as one of my all-time favourite movies. It’s difficult to root for the stars when you know you’re just one of the mundane many who are holding them back from their heroic destinies.
I’m more of a sucker for the end of the good-hearted and much-maligned Mystery Men from 1999. The last thing these misfit heroes do in their film is assure everyone out there that they too have got what it takes:
“I think we would all like this victory to go out to all the other guys… and I’m talking about the people in this city who are super-good at their jobs, but never get any credit. Like the lady in the DMV. That’s a rough job.”
“For the people that remember jingles from tons of old commercials!”
“And for people who support local music and seek out independent film.”
Besides, at the Superhero Supply Co., they don’t look down on you just because you can’t fly. You don’t have to cross your fingers and hope that you were born special. Why wait for an origin story? Go and get one!
You might have to cough up some spare change for the gadgets and tights out the front, but it’s all to raise money for 826NYC’s free programs out back – and that means just by wanting to become a superhero, you’ve already made the world a better place.
The Thirsty Mayor
Halfway through watching the ballet Scuola di ballo, I was interrupted by the Thirsty Mayor.
Scuola di ballo (The School of Ballet) is the second of the three pieces that comprise the latest production by The Australian Ballet: the ambiguously-but-sleekly named Concord. Choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky, it’s the story of an egotistical buffoon in charge of a dance studio and the lengths he’ll go to in order to ditch his worst dancer, Felicita, onto an unsuspecting impresario. Eventually, though, the authorities dance in to put a stop to the schoolmaster’s schemes, and…
Hold on. The authorities dance in? Sure. I mean, it’s a ballet. That’s fine. Everyone dances.
But then… I mean…
If everyone dances, all the time, then why is there a need for a dance school? Is the dancing they do in the school somehow different than the dancing they do when they dance at home, or out of bed in the morning, or through the aisle of the local grocery store? Or is everyone forced to attend a dance school in order to learn some basic steps? If they don’t, they must be shunned the rest of society. Imagine if everyone was dancing around you at all times – friends, family, strangers – and you were just putting one foot in front of the next like a nobody. Imagine the name-calling. Imagine the self-loathing.
Furthermore: are they born with these steps already encoded deep inside their nervous systems? Perhaps they attend the school to learn a complicated selection of steps that they can use during various commonplace social events! A ‘happy’ dance, a ‘sad’ dance, a ‘my schoolmaster is trying to palm off his worst student and I wonder if he’ll succeed’ dance…
You accidentally ask one question; that question clatters into the next; before you know it, the entire premise of the fictional world has ceased to make sense.
Somehow, I’ve taken to naming these moments of complete logic meltdown after the Thirsty Mayor. It’s a reference to a quick joke from The Onion: “Thirsty Mayor Drinks Town’s Entire Water Supply“. This story was used as an example in a behind-the-scenes piece by beloved radio show This American Life on the hellish pressures of The Onion’s writer’s room. They describe how most writers thought the Thirsty mayor headline was ridiculous enough to be instantly funny – but one writer needed more. Some kind of reason. Why was the Mayor so thirsty? What does the joke actually mean?
(The answer that placated him was that the Mayor had “…deeply mismanaged city resources”.)
You can find the Thirsty Mayor everywhere. He’s particularly at home in superhero comics. The interconnected universes of Marvel and DC lead to exactly the kinds of logical fissures that the Mayor finds irresistible. Every kid has asked themselves why Batman doesn’t just call his indestructible pal Superman to solve 99% of Gotham crime without breaking a sweat, right?
These disjunctions are not only between different characters. They’re often contained within just one. For example, Batman (the all-to-human street-level vigilante who beats up punks on the streets of Gotham) must coexist somehow with Batman (the teleporting, dimension-hopping, alien-fighting member of the Justice League of America). Or take his relationship with fellow Justice Leaguer Zauriel. Zauriel was an angel. An actual, literal, from-heaven-above angel. Would you expect this undeniable proof of the existence of the Almighty would make Batman wonder about, say, his beloved dead parents and their eternal afterlife? You’d be wrong.
You can see the Mayor’s footprints all over commercials, too, especially those for food or alcohol. I remember one beer ad where animated bottles walked up to a bar, and the bartender (who was also a beer bottle) popped off all their bottle caps, and then, uh, I guess they happily drank themselves. Did they metaphorically drink the beer that was already inside their own glass bodies? Or slosh their internal fluids into each others’ mouths? And does that make the bartender-bottle some kind of sadist, or murderer, or…
The Mayor is very, very thirsty. Try not to think about it.