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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.
The Obsessional Horror of M&M’s World
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the following in 1934’s Tender Is The Night:
“After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of the Empire they felt that life was not continuing there.”
To experience the absolute reverse of this, however, you need to abandon all hope and travel to M&M’s World in Times Square.
I’m no stranger to blaring corporate overdrive. I survived the Coke Museum in Atlanta, even though the staff’s ID badges bear not just their name, but their favourite flavour. Even though when the Polar Bear mascot was on break I was told he’d be back after “grabbing a Coke”. Even though their 4D propaganda film featured a hoverboarding scientist who discovered the secret to Coke’s success is – yes, yes, of course – “you”.
M&M’s World is a different beast. It’s not an exercise in legend-building and carefully constructed flag-waving like the Coke Museum. It doesn’t seem to care much about chocolate, or taste, or any other aspect of the actual candy. Here’s the best way to describe it:
Imagine a man having the worst day of his life. Death, divorce, or some combination of the two. He maybe eats an M&M that he finds rattling around the margins of the kitchen table, and he notices that the bright colour is the one spot of optimism on this awful, godforsaken day. The next afternoon, he eats a whole packet of M&M’s, ignoring the reheatable food provided by well-meaning friends. They’re worried his grief will cause him to waste away to nothing. They don’t know about the M&M’s. After a few more days, just seeing the chocolate’s logo lifts his spirits. Everything else in his house makes him miserable with reminders of what he’s lost. Not the M&M’s, though. They’re delicious.
This man lies awake at night and wonders: why can’t everything be an M&M? Wouldn’t that be a better world?
Come to New York, fight your way through Times Square, and you can buy yourself M&M’s Monopoly. M&M’s stuffed monkeys. M&M’s t-shirts, mugs, and magnets. M&M’s chessboards. M&M’s action figures, stickers, and stamps. M&M’s hand-embroidered designer jackets, selling for four figures, that you’d save for with your M&M’s moneybox.
See the yellow M&M loom over Times Square on a billboard like some ancient, Lovecraftian god. Witness the green M&M cast as some kind of misshapen, gamma-irradiated sex-symbol, pouting like Marilyn on jigsaw boxes and beach towels. Have the red M&M imprinted on a penny by one of those old-fashioned souvenir machines – because why buy something when you can cut out the middle man and have his image stamped directly onto your money?
I guess there might have been some chocolate for sale, too.