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Charles Burns and OK Soda
Last year, I visited the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta. I’ve mentioned it briefly here before. It wasn’t nearly as terrifying as the M&M store in Times Square, but wandering through its displays definitely brought on its own particular jitters.
(All that caffeine probably didn’t help.)
Buried amongst the hundreds of products on the walls, however, was an item worthy of a double-take. It was a can of something called OK Soda, featuring the instantly recognisable art of Charles Burns. When I interviewed him for Bookslut last month, I finally got to ask him about it:
Yeah, that was a very odd project. Another American cartoonist, Dan Clowes, did some designs as well. I kind of know what they were after – but I don’t know what they were thinking. They were going for this kind of ironic humour, for the 20-something audience. Instead of having that iconic Coca-Cola logo, the can would be different every few months or so.
It was test-marketed in maybe five or six different US cities. It was produced; it was out there. I never sampled it, but everyone I talked to said that whatever the soda was it was truly disgusting. It was a combination of grape soda and tea, or something like that.
I said that I felt like he needed to taste it for himself, right? Just so he knew what his art was wrapped around? He wasn’t convinced.
I wasn’t in one of the cities where any of this stuff was available, but they sent me a few cans. I never felt compelled to crack one open and chug it down.
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.
