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Collage Theatre, Copyright, and the Curious Case of Anne Frank Superstar

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Sara Villegas and Anthony Pyatt as Anne and Peter.

Anne Frank and Peter van Daan flirt playfully in the crowded attic space, alternately shy and forward. They move lightly and talk softly, all to the accompaniment of a delicate instrumental on piano, guitar, flute and glockenspiel. It’s the first few notes of “We’ve Only Just Begun,” the treakly ballad co-authored by Paul Williams and Roger Nichols for a bank commercial in 1970, and later popularized in a syrupy easy listening version by Richard and Karen Carpenter. But, beyond the intimacy of the stage and among the small watchful crowd, the audience doesn’t seem to recognize it—or if they do, it’s a slight titter of recognition, and then transformation, the overtly sentimental lyrics (“We’ve only just begun/ to live/ white lace and promises/ a kiss for luck and we’re on our way/”) replaced by a soft flute that sends out echos of memory of these sentiments, the words casting delicate shadows on the moon-lit moment.

It was one strange moment of many in a forty-five minute performance filled with strange moments– 2011’s Anne Frank Superstar, a play constructed by Orlando high school theater teacher James Brendlinger, and acted, crewed and even directed (senior Cody David Price) by current students and recent graduates of Lake Howell High School. (A non-recent graduate, myself, was brought in as musical director.)

The show is the definition of high concept: The Diary of Anne Frank, set to the music of the Carpenters. Described by reigning Orlando theatre reviewer Elizabeth Maupin as “telling a sacred story through songs that have often been called kitsch,” the show was wild– and wildly successful, at least critically. The concept is almost stupidly simple, and some of the audience each night seemed prepared to hate the show, or at least mock it. After all, do “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “Yesterday Once More,” and “Top of the World” really belong in a story of profound loss and human tragedy, with a backdrop of indescribable horror?

But the success of the show– and if one can gauge a show’s success by what percentage of your audience is unable to stand after it is over, this one was truly successful—was directly due to this juxtaposition, a combination that set both elements in a new light, one that seemed to change each aspect of the material. Coming out of the mouth of an adult woman, a line like “hanging around/nothing to do but frown/ rainy days and Mondays always get me down,” is at best maudlin, at worst painfully trite, especially when set on a backdrop of gooey sentimental strings and turgid playing. But out of the mouth of an expressive, and doomed, teenager, the words are transformed into something sad, and possibly true. The songs were also served by the intimate arrangements consisting of piano, guitar, glockenspiel, oboe and flute, supplied by myself, two high school students, and the cast member playing Margot.

Likewise, the story of Anne Frank herself was transformed, or at least recast—it’s become so buried in weight and solemn reverence now that its easy to forget that the girl herself was a teenager, a pop culture enthusiast who wrote, drew, danced, had crushes on boys, worried about her period and her parents, who could have done so many things with herself but was instead doomed to never move on from that adolescent state. She is in many ways the ultimate teenager, having had all of the fears of adolescence made literal in her circumstance. For Anne Frank was trapped–puberty really was the end of the world.

There are additional resonances that present themselves throughout the play, both direct and tangential, including Karen Carpenter’s own doomed life. And much of the power of the play comes from the hopeful use of those songs, so hopeful that, by the time the Nazis actually arrive, it seemed as though the audience had managed to forget that they already knew the ending to this story.

But if the jubilant “Top of the World” and the small thrills of the budding romance have caused them to forget, they’re soon reminded by the violent, silent violation of the attic, accomplished as the three teenagers enjoy strawberries in the annex. After the violation of the attic and the tearing apart of the family, the ending sequence presents Mr. Frank on the now-bare stage delivering a monologue regarding the  fate of his family, as footage of concentration camp victims inter-cut with an increasingly emaciated Karen Carpenter is projected onto a sheet held by two Nazis, to the mournful accompaniment of an instrumental of the Carpenters song “Superstar.” At the conclusion of this monologue his doomed daughter comes out one more time and touches his shoulder, to sing/whisper a few lines of the song. “Don’t you remember you told me you loved me baby/ you said you’d be coming back this way again baby/ baby baby baby baby baby/ I love you/ I really do.” He reaches back, trying to touch her hand, but she is a finger length beyond reach, led off stage by the waiting Nazis. Slow blackout on Mr. Frank, alone on the stage, and house lights up twenty seconds later. No curtain call.

It seems implausible on paper that anyone would attempt such a juxtaposition, or that any audience would stand for such a thing. But at every single performance the reaction was the same—the house lights coming up on a stunned and reeling audience, many of them still sobbing.

Here’s the thing I haven’t brought up yet, which doubtlessly many of you have already thought—the show was in every way illegal.

The Carpenters songs were not the biggest barrier—although it would be a convoluted argument, as long as we weren’t using the name or logo of the group in the promotion of the show, we would have a reasonable chance of making that portion work legally—you can, after all, perform covers of songs written by other people with simply a venue’s membership to ASCAP, and we could probably make the argument that having a repeating theater performance that happens to feature songs popularized by a certain group isn’t fundamentally different than an all-lesbian vegan Led Zeppelin cover band playing at the local ASCAP-member Mexican restaurant.

Anne Frank’s words, however, and the translation of her words on which we were relying for much of our text, were a different matter, as was the authorized play (Diary of Anne Frank), which provided much of the rest of the text. All of these elements are still under copyright, and will continue to be so for several years. (In fact, copyright in the theater is more restrictive than in almost any other field. You can, after all, read a book or listen to an album any way that you wish once you’ve purchased a copy–but to publicly perform a play one must conform to a dizzying array of limitations set out by the author or the author’s agents–usually, that every word of the play will be performed, i.e. no cuts or insertions without permission, and that the appearance, gender and even staging etc will honor the stated intentions of the author regarding the script and contract.)

It’s no secret that a certain entertainment megalith has spent the past fifty years waging a war on the public-domain, its army of lawyers doing its damnedest to insure that their prized Mouse never legally becomes the public figure that he is. But its been only very recently that the full consequences of this have really been examined in the public sphere. The kind of theater that we created is not an unknown phenomenon—it’s just rarely seen in theaters. Instead, you’re more likely to see works that collide concepts with abandon on the Internet, in streaming video—in short, in places where authorship is more unsure and its not always clear who’s neck is on the line.

And I have no doubt that a not-insignificant portion of the people reading this might think, at first blush, that this is fine—that there’s no compelling reason for such a perverse transformation, and that if there’s a law to prevent such a perversion, all the better.

But at this point, seventy years after her death, is there any person that should be able to claim the words of Anne Frank? Is there any one person that can speak for her as directly or truthfully as she spoke for herself? Who owns her words? Who owns her name?

Victoria Camera as Margot.

The show was the brainchild of high school theater teacher extraordinaire James Brendlinger, who, as a young boy in rural Pennsylvania filled scrapbooks with elaborate collages, depicting himself rubbing elbows with celebrities cut from the pages of the dozen odd magazines to which he subscribed, cut from the pages to mingle with each other, with himself—a glorious life of rubber cement living rooms and glossy paper courtship. Concurrently he filled binders with his other love, never-ending Gothic soap opera novels of his own creation, the concepts and characters lifted in the beginning from episodes of Dark Shadows and slowly over many years grown, like the show that spawned it, to monstrous proportions, labyrinthine and tawdry and tangled. (Dark Shadows itself, of course, lifted these concepts itself, whole cloth, from an array of Gothic horror novels)

But after graduating college with a teaching degree, James didn’t move to glamorous Hollywood, but to Hollywood’s hick second cousin to the south—Orlando, FL. He took a job at Lake Howell High School, which is where I met him in 1998, during his first year.

Since then he’s put almost fifteen years into well over a hundred plays and projects at the school, an incredible tally of productions. But somehow he makes it happen, with an incredible expansiveness and a desire to involve as many students as possible.

This ties in nicely with his tendencies for the grandiose, for making something as big and as bold as it can possibly be—always more songs, more choreography, more dancers and aerialists and elaborate props and staging. After graduation I occasionally contributed to this craziness, lending a hand with set design and visual conception, and eventually supplying music. Most of his plays have virtually none of the “restraint” of AFSuperstar. Most of the time they’re much larger, as grandiose and spectacular as possible.

 

One of the more recent of these provides an interesting point of comparison– a little play called SpaceMacbeth, written by (ahem) William Shakespeare.

Jordan Wilson and Cara Fullam as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth

The title and the concept were mockingly suggested to Brendlinger via an angry multiple-page letter from a theater professor from a local private college who was upset by one of Brendlinger’s earlier adaptations of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, which featured two “sisters” in the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Like its predecessor, SpaceMacbeth is the sort of play that, by virtue of its dense bricolage, defies easy description. (it largely defied logic or common sense as well, but that’s another matter.) Rather than attempt to summarize, I’ll hit you with a few highlights–

–a live band (consisting of piano, marimba, violin, flute, oboe, guitar and drums) to one side of the stage, a thicket of mannequins to the other side, both plastic and flesh. It appears that the three witches stir up so much malice and death not only for their own amusement, but also to expand their collection of mannequins, which continues to swell with the bodies of the dead as the show continues.

–dozens (a hundred?) references to various tawdry pop-culture science fiction films and television series, ranging from the obvious (teams of astronauts and “space ninja” in mass battle), to the bizarre (tremendous flesh-eating puppets at the front of the stage to which Lady Macbeth delivers her enemies as food) to the inexplicable (previously mentioned astronauts entering the stage in march to an a capella rendition of the “Star Blazers” theme song).

–a truly berserk, yet somehow still believable, Lady Macbeth, played (and sang) to perfection by senior Cara Fullam. When she’s not busy scheming and pining after her husband, Lady Macbeth spends the first act concocting various ominous experiments, including creating giant dancing spiders with the aid of her nuclear reactor and designing some kind of sonic weapon while singing Kate Bush’s “Experiment IV.”

–At the top of act two, Banquo and the other slain men are reanimated by the witches, as drag queens. The witches explain their process, if not their reasoning, in an elaborately choreographed performance of the Scissor Sister’s “How Do You Make A Lady.” In the subsequent dinner scene Banquo teases Macbeth coyly from various places atop his giant castle machinery, batting her eyes, waving her hands and blowing kisses at the increasingly distressed king.

–Lady MacBeth’s final scene is sandwiched by two dramatic vocal performances. The first is a funereal version of Lana Del Rio’s “Video Games,” delivered as she drags herself out of bed to dispose of the evidence of the murders by feeding them to her giant pet at the front of the stage, who eats the bloodied clothing and weapons whole. She then disposes of the rest of her possessions in a similar way before dangling her feet into the edge of the pit  as her android attendants dance around her.

 

After lying comatose for several scenes as people talk about her bedside, she rises for one final song—the huge and truly theatrical “Dreams,” written by KISS co-writer Sean Delaney and previously performed by Grace Slick. Flanked by two Death’s Head creatures that emerge from beneath her bed, she stalks the stage gathering together all of her creations and attendants, so that she can kill them all in the frenzied climax of the song. “I believe in magic,” she insists, throwing her attendants into the pit. “And I believe in dreams.” At the final hit of the song she stands poised with the knife above her for a moment, before plunging it into her chest as her attendants pop up and slap the stage.

Here’s my question to you, gentle reader– does an event like this diminish Macbeth the play? Or is the play itself so strong, so elastic as to survive being bent even in such an extreme way? Is it a simple matter of repetition, that when a play has been staged ten thousand times something is broken, that it becomes untethered from some platonic concept of faithfulness and can instead be bent and chopped and rearranged at will? Or is it that certain stories or certain works of art are themselves impervious to adaptation, that the more spins one puts on a text like Macbeth, the more possibilities appear? Is it possible that so many adaptations, so many different stagings and interpretations and resuscitations have helped make the play what it is today, have in fact created that feeling of timelessness and “bottomless”ness that so many feel when they approach the material?

To my mind, a play like Macbeth has proved its durability, has proved that familiarity and exposure don’t have to distance, but can instead comfort in the face of the unfamiliar. I can’t pretend to know what audiences experienced when they saw the play, but I can remember for myself how those bits of familiar things interacted with each other, rubbed against each other, even changed each other by their proximity. And in my mind it’s in the best interest of all of our respective art forms to allow works to pass into this state, that there will be a time when these kinds of transformations will be legal after the death of an author, when the art that is capable of being made through juxtaposition isn’t outlawed, or kept from larger audiences by the will of lobbyists working for a company that was itself founded on the adaptation of public domain works.

I want to live in a world where Lady Macbeth and Lana Del Rio are neighbors, attend the same cocktail parties, sing the same sad songs, a world where a thunderous performance of Kraftwerk’s “Metropolis” is the perfect accompaniment for a blood-soaked space duel.

I want to live in a world where Anne Frank is free to sing “Rainy Days and Mondays” whenever she damn well pleases.

 

Adrift/ Cut the Cord

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This is part of a roundtable on The Drifting Classroom, and also part of the October 2011 Horror Manga Movable Feast.
________________

 

Adrift/ Cut the Cord

 

Hunger. Butchery. Transformation. An impossible situation.

A world without sense, without purpose or direction. Children adrift with no home, separated permanently from that bit of comfort and warmth that protects, that shields from the unknown. Slaughter, thirst, dirt and maggots and refuse and decay and no order, not at all.

The Drifting Classroom was originally serialized from 1972 through 1974 in the pages of Weekly Shonen Sunday magazine. Ostensibly aimed at an audience the same age as the story’s chief protagonists, the Drifting Classroom finds an entire elementary school mysteriously transported to a horrific landscape of death and waste where they must try their best to survive. The few adults that have been transported are, at best, helplessly arrogant and stupid, unprepared for the unrestrained, unordered world to which they have all been delivered; at their worst, the adults are crazed thieves and murderers who must be dispatched to prevent even more carnage.

The most resourceful of these children is Sho, a sixth grader of extraordinary leadership who struggles to create a small bit of social order in the complete disorder in which the children find themselves. Initially these are very small victories—coordinating the children to fend off an attacker, or equitably distributing a small amount of food. But even as the obstacles mount, Drifting Classroom begins to suggest that more may be possible with Sho, that there may be some reason for these refugees to hope for some resolution, for some bit of survival.

 

Bath Time/Lots of Fun/Helpless

Having all been children once, you would think that no adult needs the reminder—but to be a child is to be completely helpless in the face of a casually cruel world. A parent’s primary responsibility is to protect, and his second, to nurture—to help her child take those first tentative steps towards navigating the world. The first social structures that most children encounter in their lives are the ones created by their parents—their one-on-one relationship with their parent, the close circle of the immediate family. And a child can grow more confident and skilled in this limited environment, assuming a certain amount of stability and safety.

But for most children the world of the family is not the whole world forever, and the child will eventually encounter social situations and structures that are new to him, that may seem completely bizarre and arbitrary. At the age of two I was baby-sat daily by a woman down the street who had a large family. It seemed like a very natural thing for me to be taken into this family every afternoon, like some extended version of my own with different faces and different voices and different toys. But soon after my fourth birthday I began attending a Methodist daycare full-time while both my parents were at work, dozens of children and staff in an old, poorly-lit building in an unfamiliar part of the city. The adults were strange and distant and unknowable, the other children too numerous to be distinguishable from each other. I ate lunch by myself, sat in the corner during play times, was terrified of getting something wrong and of the inevitable retribution. One lunch time I bent a spoon until it broke, and, terrified of discovery, hid it beneath my chair before dumping my tray into the dish washing receptacle. Another lunch time I felt nauseated, and tried to get out of my assigned task of passing out napkins to the whole group. I was told to do my part, and so I continued, until I vomited on the napkins and myself, at which point I was taken to a nurse and sat in a corner alone with a glass of water and a fresh paper towel. All this anxiety, it seems, was justified. My parents told me years later that they had given me a bath one night only to find that I was trying to hide my back, which was covered with long bloody scratches, the apparently accidental work of one of the day care teachers, who had instructed me not to tell my parents about the mishap.

I don’t think that any of these events are unique. Their ubiquity is the point—that, to a child, the world is a confusing, dangerous, and at first, unknowable place, and that an adult is a capricious monster capable of any manner of harmful, arbitrary action.

 

No Francis Bacon/Vegetarian

The imagery of Drifting Classroom is itself so primal, and the staging so visceral, that it is often in conflict in a very real way with the very controlled, assistant-heavy surface sheen. Although the textures of Sho’s world are admirably dirty and gritty, all textures that would be put to similar effect by Junko Ito decades later, the surface is so consistent, the characters so on model in all their doe-eyed splendor, that the violence sometimes becomes distanced and almost comical. The effect is similar to that of photographs of dolls torturing each other, or documentation of a war between porcelain figurines. How would the same story read with a surface style as visceral and loaded as the imagery?

I tell myself it would be better, more attuned to the emotional content, the terror of the events. And then I think more about the later turns of the plot, and look again at one of the hundreds (thousands?) of almost identical drawings of Sho in profile, looking on in horror as another grotesque assaults his friends and his world, and I know that this duplication is part of the effect, that pressed between the pages these doll-like bodies will rip and tear and destroy each other for eternity.

 

The Process-oriented Apocalypse

The later stages of Drifting Classroom present a process-oriented apocalypse in which no problem is too horrific or complex to overcome, even if the solution happens to involve psychic time travel, the unbreakable power of mother/son love, or remotely-controlled severed limbs and partial faces that hide out in the backpacks of toddlers. Putting aside the wildly-inventive details to these problems, the solutions, and the need for solutions and explanation in the first place, keeps the Drifting Classroom from ever truly lifting off into the unknown, for better or for worse. Once the proceedings become so focused on process the series becomes almost procedural, not unlike the console adventure role playing games that would infect the youth of Japan a little more than a decade later. Sho leads his party of adventurers through the hostile land, gathering experience points and new skills and objects and information about their world that furthers their chances of surviving each new conflict. Along the way members of their party are picked off by foes they encounter, alternately sentient and environmental.

Although the early portions of Drifting Classroom are truly adrift, the later portions seem to very specifically reflect a worldview of purpose and direction and structure. God, or parent, may be absent from their lives, but He has not forsaken these children—he has gifted them with the intelligence and training to be able to collectively decode the clues around them. Many of them will die, and yes, they have been placed in a truly hellish place, a world devoid of life and growth and promise. But not devoid of hope. The confident, assured, and ultimately perfect Sho shepherds his flock of students through the dangers, knowing that although many of them will pass, their class, their tribe, will live on. Sho is the intermediary between the absent and the present, the bridge between the missing world of comfort and the current world of absence and abscess.

It is not insignificant that he does this while being the protagonist of the story. Although he may represent one Jesus Christ in relation to the children in his charge, he doesn’t resemble him in his role to the text- Jesus, despite being the central character of the gospels, is hardly our viewpoint character. Because we’re intended to identify with Sho, and because he happens to be the target age of the initial publication of the manga, it’s easy to read into Sho a kind of purpose to this entire enterprise that, on its surface, seems like so much mayhem and carnage. Through the blood and the murder and what on the surface seems like a hot, horrible bloody world of randomness, the students, and the readers, are slowly being encouraged to step into that truly adult space of individual agency, of realizing that they alone are responsible for their survival, but that survival is possible, and is in fact within their grasp, guaranteed by the inevitability of invention. There are problems, the Drifting Classroom insists, and where there are problems there must be solutions.

It’s a surprisingly conventional message for a narrative with so many unconventional details, and such uncommon violence.

Troll On- God, Natural Disasters, and the Powers of the Internets

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A version of this article appeared on Splice Today in March.

She recorded and posted the video quickly and impulsively—from concept to upload, the process took less than 20 minutes. Her eyes are gleaming and her face beams happiness and smug satisfaction. “God is such an amazing God,” she tells us, peering through the screen and into our eyes, so close to the lens that her face distorts. “On Wednesday, at the start of Lent, believers all over the world came together, and we have been praying specifically for God to open the eyes of atheists all over the world.” And, she tells us with excitement and pride, “Just a few days later, God shook the country of Japan. He literally grabbed the country by the shoulders and said, ‘Look! I’m here!’” TamTamPamela is overjoyed by the quick and emphatic response of her deity to her prayers, and encourages her audience to redouble their efforts. “Just imagine what will happen at the end of the 40 days!” she says with a beatific smile.

The video went live the morning of March 14, and began spreading almost immediately, thanks initially to a link on Ignorant and Online, a Tumblr account dedicated to “exposing the worst […] online comments, Facebook posts and internet posts. What was once anonymous is now revealed.” Started only two days before, Ignorant and Online had so far almost exclusively displayed screen caps of status updates of Facebook users linking the Japanese disaster to Pearl Harbor, or other off-color remarks related to the crisis. Perhaps it was her invocation of God, or the nature of video itself, but for whatever reason, this clip carried more weight. Within hours it was everywhere, and atheists and Christians alike seemed none too happy with the contents of the video.

That night I watched her YouTube channel with amusement, and then alarm, as thousands of comments flowed in, ranging from cries of “troll,” to threats of death, rape and pizza delivery. The alarm came when addresses, full names and phone numbers began appearing as well, first for a woman in Florida and then for another name in California. A sample of the comments:

b17ches like you makes me literally wanna start a crusade. mark my words that you’ll die a horrible horrible death.. — buyungwidhi

how about I fuck-start your face you stupid cunt.— heavysweater

Lady, if I held your head under the water for 17 minutes, I would quickly show that he either: A – Hates you B – Doesn’t exist— Notjustbonez

can anybody tell me who this girl is? name or location can help cause i can just look her up. Ill give her a religious wake up call myself and shoot this bitch.. private messg me any info on her. first person to do it ill give 1K. thanks— vietnameseJKT

you need to get raped — abaebae1

Yout such a dumbshit. fuck you get a fuckming life. i pray u fucking die u dumb bitch. i beleive that oh my god i cant begin how to think how much pain people will cause for u. your so fucking dumb. do understand anything? go die u fucking cunt. id llove to see u die. go to hell. do you not understand people are dieing. LETS ALL PRAY THAT YOU DIE! be encourage that god will crush you. Ill be overjoyed when you die — djmattzz1

Japan will come get u for this. — nova123

And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. TamTamPamela posted one last brief video, “Coming Clean,” in which she stated that she’s been “making troll videos for a while,” but that at this point she’s “kind of tired of pizza,” and so she’s calling it quits. Her account, along with all of her videos, disappeared shortly after.

Although deleting the account put out most of the fires, death threats and links to both somewhat correct and completely incorrect personal information continued to promulgate for days after the video. Surveying the wreckage, at the virulence of the reaction to her video, I tracked down the real person behind the character of TamTamPamela to find out, in her own words, what it’s like to be hated by a million people. What are the consequences of having your address and phone number, the names of your family members, even photos of your house linked to on dozens of web sites containing death threats on your life?

“Nothing,” she said over the phone, five days after having posted the most disliked video in YouTube history.

Really? Nothing?

“Nothing in real life,” she said, except that, “Tuesday morning a pizza was delivered to my house.”

Has anyone recognized her?

“If they did, they didn’t come up to me and say anything.”

A college student named Tam is the real-life person behind TamTamPamela, her self-described “character” that she played for more than a year on YouTube and on various religious message boards, both real and satirical. She was surprised by the reaction to her video, given that up until that point her videos had hovered around 10,000 views only. She ultimately outed herself, she says, because of the inaccurate private information being spread about the woman in Florida. “It wasn’t until late Monday night that my boyfriend told me that people were posting another woman’s information all over the Internet, saying the other woman was me,” she said. “And that was when I got worried. I started thinking that people were going to take this way too far.” Once she had outed herself, she said, there would be no point to maintaining the videos—the satire would be ineffective—and so she closed the channel.

I watched the year’s worth of videos before their deletion, and seeing them chronologically, one can see the rapid development of the craft of satire. The early videos are rambling, meandering, rarely getting to their central topics right from the start but instead approaching the arguments as part of a larger fabric of personal history. As they progress Tam warms to her character, and the videos have a lot more direction, arriving at the theme early and spending the bulk of the time developing the concept. One video discusses the season of Lent, and how it is the will of the Holy Spirit for TamTamPamela and her dog, Rambo, to fast together for the entirety of the 40-day period. In another video TamTamPamela has been visited by an angel who told her that she “must pass on this message to the sinful people of Massachusetts. If you don’t vote for Scott Brown today, God will be very angry. The wrath he poured out on Haiti, the wrath he has poured out over the world in small doses—let those be an example to you. Don’t give God a reason to be angry. Vote for Scott Brown.” In a more vulnerable moment, TamTamPamela reaches out to her YouTube audience and asks them for advice about how to resolve her impasse—the Bible instructs her to obey her husband in all things, but her fiancé doesn’t want her posting any more videos. She knows the Holy Spirit has instructed her to continue her evangelization. What’s a good Christian girl to do?

But something was different about the Japan video. Part of the reaction was undoubtedly due to its proximity to the crisis itself, but some of the extremity could come from the craft and the delivery of the satire. Almost all of the previous videos have slight tells to clue their audience into the intent. “I always had the same people watching and the same people commenting,” Tam said. “There were two groups—the one group that would watch it and argue amongst themselves whether I was being serious, and there was the other group who knew my intention was to bring attention to the subject of the video.” The difficulty of determining the authenticity of statements of a religious fundamentalist nature is a well-observed phenomenon—called Poe’s Law, named after and coined by Nathan Poe: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.”

In fact, if there is a “tell” in TamTamPamela’s penultimate video, it’s that most fundamentalists aren’t as direct in general conversation about these kind of feelings, and certainly not on video. That doesn’t mean that those thoughts still aren’t there or expressed. The earthquake connection readily brings to mind Pat Robertson. In 2010, shortly after the devastating earthquake in Port Au Prince, Haiti, Robertson had this to say on his show, 700 Club:

… something happened a long time ago in Haiti—people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon III or whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you free us from the Prince.’ True story! And the Devil said, ‘Okay, It’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out, the Haitians. But ever since that they’ve been cursed by one thing after another. They’ve been desperately poor…. They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God, and out of this tragedy I’m optimistic that something good may come.

It’s a spectacular bit of reasoning, tying the woes of a stricken nation to the perceived Godliness of its people. And, for a Bible literalist, it’s a perfectly reasonable position as well. If one believes that God has agency in the world, that He in fact has opinions about the conduct of the human beings he has created and rewards them and punishes them in turn, it’s natural to assume that such a devastating event is in fact the will of that deity. This assumption is made explicit throughout the Bible, as God selectively destroys individuals, cities, kingdoms, and at least once, the entire world. In fact, the Bible instructs those faithful to God to carry out the work of eliminating unbelievers for him:

If you shall hear say in one of your cities, which the LORD your God has given you to dwell there, saying, Certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which you have not known; Then shall you inquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is worked among you; You shall surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword. And you shall gather all the spoil of it into the middle of the street thereof, and shall burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit, for the LORD your God: and it shall be an heap for ever; it shall not be built again.

— Deuteronomy 13:12-16, American King James version

Did Tam approach her videos from an atheistic perspective? Like much good satire, it’s hard to pin the perspective down completely, but Tam sees herself as religious. Yet, “I really don’t like calling myself a Christian, because these people who are the face of Christianity have painted Christianity in such a terrible light.” From her perspective, the satire is directed at “the Christians who really don’t care what’s going on around them, and the kind of people who are representing them. Most Christians would never blame these natural disasters on God. But these same Christians let these crazy wackos lead them and let them be the face of Christianity. I kept posting the videos because I wanted to bring to light that if we actually followed these leaders, this is what we would be saying.”

Her faith did not seem to change the digital wrath directed at her, wrath similar in tone to the wrath God has instructed his people to visit upon the unbelievers. Reading the words directed at her, it’s hard not to see the reaction as the wrath of the righteous. And yet, in this world of screens and distance, of pulsing light and little physical proximity, what does the righteous indignation of a million people mean? Thousands of threats of death and rape. Your name and address and phone number. A single pizza, turned away at the door.

Tam is guilty of poor taste—she is guilty of indiscretion, and of tremendously bad timing. But mostly, she’s guilty of not winking at the camera often enough, and not couching her character’s speech in the language of diplomacy.

Professional provocateurs, meanwhile, have the line down perfectly, and know how to use indignation and outrage to gain audience and advantage. The same day that TamTamPamela’s love letter to God spread across the Internet, Glenn Beck shared his thoughts about the crisis with his radio audience of millions.

I’m not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes … Well, I’m not not saying that either. [Laughing.] What God does is God’s business. I have no idea. But I’ll tell you this—whether you call it Gaia or you call it Jesus, there’s a? message being sent. And that is, ‘Hey you know that stuff we’re doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it. [More laughing.]

Negative reaction to Beck’s calculated raving was mostly of the “what type of God would kill thousands of innocent people to punish them?” variety of indignation. Well, if you are a Christian or Jew who believes in the literal truth of even a fraction of your religion’s holy scriptures, then the answer is simple—your God kills people innocent of all but not loving him. He instructs his followers to do the same. Much worse than that, he’s set up a system of eternal torment to punish the slain unbelievers and sinners of all other stripes. That kind of petulance makes Beck, or even TamTamPamela, look like the very model of grace and understanding.

Not actually existing has advantages: TamTamPamela will suffer no eternal torment. But though she’s passed, her creator lives on. “I’m still definitely going to keep doing what I’m doing. I’m not going to stop,” Tam said. “It’s in my nature to troll people, to get a reaction out of people, to say, ‘Look, you see what’s going on, why don’t you do something about it?’ ”

Isn’t she worried about reprisal? What about applying for jobs in the future—isn’t she worried that searches using her full name might turn up all of this material? She reminds me that her state of residence has a law forbidding hiring discrimination based on religious affiliation. So she might be in the position of defending her character’s viewpoints in order to get a job? She laughs. Seriously, I tell her, the stuff I’ve written has been seen by such a small fraction of the people that have seen your videos, and yet I have constant anxiety about someone out there calling me out for the asshole I am, hating me for what I’ve written. Do you just get used to the hate? Are you and I just built differently?

“Everyone always says that it’s part of my natural personality to have that ‘I really don’t care about anything’ [attitude],” she said, her normally fast cadence of speech slowing down slightly. “But I know what people are like in real life versus the way they are on the Internet.” She paused, and then spoke again, a smile in her voice. “And I think I’m the perfect example of that.”

Here and There and Gone Again

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What follows is self-reflective, self-indulgent, and only tangentially related to comics. Topics covered—paralysis, instant gratification, illustration, the nature of desire. Not covered—ranking, freelancing, the problems of failure versus the problems of success. Consider yourself informed!

Regular readers to this website may know that this March, an article co-authored by Joy DeLyria and myself had a round of unexpected exposure, linked to and written about on dozens of sites, and seen by an unfathomable (to me) number of people. The experience and its aftermath was surprising, gratifying, but also paralyzing, and I was left for a long time afterward with a great difficulty in drawing at all. Leading up to the article’s publication I had been drawing upwards of ten hours a day, so this was a dramatic change, to say the least.

I had only been writing at all for only a few months at that point, having been asked to contribute to the Hooded Utilitarian after arguing with editor Noah Berlatsky on various topics both educational and aesthetic. A handful of my initial articles attracted some attention, at least at the scale of the modestly-scaled comics scene. Most, however, disappeared after a few days, as quickly as they came, the reaction to them in proportion to the moment that made them.

But this one seemed different.

It’s difficult now, some months after the fact, to describe the elation, giddiness, and eventual panic that set in as our Wire article went from casual blog post to high traffic blog post to server-breaking feature article. The excitement is perhaps most understandable. The panic, however, might require some additional explanation.

The article itself was written and illustrated so quickly, so impulsively, that the reaction to it seemed impossibly outsized, exaggerated. In particular, my confidence in my own illustration skills was tenuous enough that I felt a certain pain at their exposure, despite the delight I had taken in the few brief hours of their creation.

The speed at which everything moved was its own kind of hazard. In a few strange, bewildering weeks I went from a mostly unpaid comics blog contributor and unpublished cartoonist, to a writer/illustrator with a smart, sympathetic agent, a publisher, and a book deal. The transition and all of the ensuing attention was a heady experience, but the comedown, when it finally arrived, was harsh.

In short, I found it very difficult to draw anymore.

Because of the amount and nature of the links to the article, the exact numbers are hard to arrive at, but let me just skip over the particulars and say that it is very likely that more people have seen my drawing of Omar walking down a narrow Bodymore street than will see or hear anything else that I will ever create in my life. A set of drawings I created in the span of a few hours, drawings that reflect both my strengths as an illustrator (pastiche, virtuoso ink technique) and my weaknesses (virtually everything else), will most likely be, measured in numbers, the most significant thing I’ll ever be part of. This was a slow realization for me, made over a painful few weeks that also happened to contain the break up of my marriage of five years. It was during these weeks of weakness and personal turmoil that I would be required to create about two dozen new illustrations in a similar vein, this time for print, a medium that for me feels as permanent as any ever created. We are, after all, still reading the two-thousand year old garbage of the ancient Egyptians, them having successfully captured their thoughts and feelings and business transactions on papyrus in ink. (“Don’t worry about it,” my friend Shanna told me. “I mean, what percentage of people that read the initial article will even see the book? It’s no biggie, right?”)

It’s interesting to compare today’s fractured, specialized media environment to the vast undivided audiences of the previous century’s newspaper cartoonists. The early newspaper cartoonists had tremendous audiences for their work, audiences that would be unheard of today for any similar form of entertainment. They also had the illusion, though, of impermanence, a kind of impermanence that can nurture a certain kind of risk taking and impulsivity that can be invaluable to someone’s creative development. These early cartoonists worked knowing that, no matter how flat a single installment fell, no matter how many copies made it into print, a week later a hundred thousand copies of a strip would be a few thousand folded on a few thousand night stands and bureau tops. Two weeks after initial publication, how many copies would remain? A month later and anything could be forgotten. Newsprint was the most transitory of mediums, powerful but temporary, a bright flare turning in a flash to chalk message scrawled on the sidewalk.

Up until March I’d actually felt this way about virtually everything I’d written for public consumption, which amounted to an article a month at HU and a handful of articles and interviews for the Comics Journal. All of these brief works could be changed, edited if the need arose, always the possibility of elimination or correction. But even if I had wanted to do so, there was no way possible to put Victorian Omar back in the bottle. He now wandered this Wired world on his own power, untethered from the tongue in cheek piece of criticism that spawned him.

As for the actual problem of drawing all those illustrations through my own insecurity, I was greatly helped in this task by that old friend of the newspaper strip cartoonists—the regular deadline. Having five weeks to complete thirty illustrations and my portion of the text, I was forced to set concrete, daily completion goals, and these goals enabled me to power through my restlessness and difficulty and actually complete the drawings required. If I hadn’t had such a hard (and, now, seemingly arbitrary) deadline, I have no doubt that I would still be fussing with the details of the illustrations, re-imagining and re-evaluating, redrawing, planning…anything to avoid that dreaded sense of disappointed completion.

Finishing the book, however, didn’t make my desire to draw come back, nor did my eventual satisfaction with the illustrations. Something inside me seemed to have been switched off, some key part of me that was capable of self-satisfaction and confidence. I wondered if I would ever draw again on my own impetus.


Months went by. I drew, always through necessity or obligation. Illustrations for friends’ wedding invitations, contributions to round tables or one-off art shows, fulfilling promises made before my great freeze. But about a month ago, something changed again, something that seemed unrelated to drawing at the time. I met an extremely skilled fiddle player at a party of a mutual acquaintance, and after briefly getting to know each other, she invited me to busk with her at the local market. We had our first rehearsal on a Sunday afternoon in her backyard, putting together ten songs in about an hour and a half. We were performing the next day.

Busking, it seems, was the cure for my debilitation. When you’re playing in public, train wreck or triumph are equally fleeting, both erased minutes after the moment is over. No safety net, but no lasting impression, no pressure to be worth it; to be worth the lives of the trees that died to bring your drawings to life, to be worth the twenty dollars someone impulsively plunked down for your strange piece of cultural critical pastiche. In short, no pressure at all.

It’s not just the transitory nature of the performance that’s so appealing—it’s also the immediacy, and literal representation of the audience’s reaction. Joy and I worked all of May to write and illustrate a book that won’t be read by its intended audience for several months still. Even this informal blog post was composed over the course of a few days, and any reaction to it will necessarily follow that period of composition. How can this compare to the instant feedback, and judgment, of a crowd? When Rachel and I play at the market, we know when someone’s not interested, or actively dislikes what we’re playing–they pass right by. Someone that’s enjoying themselves stays, listens, puts money in our case or buys a CD. There’s a kind of cleanliness to it, art or entertainment made transactional again, unabashedly so, no confusion of role or purpose. We place Rachel’s fiddle case in front of us, open, as we play, a little bit of seed money at the bottom to function as change, grey-green on faded red velvet. In some ways, it’s the promise of those utopian Internet prognosticators of last decade made flesh–a perfect meritocracy where the best survive and thrive and the rest go home with empty cases. I grasp, stab at a comics comparison, desperate for justification for this article’s existence– witness the meteoric rise of Kate Beaton, which seems to be due solely to her making some really, really funny comics.

But of course, it’s not as simple as that–it’s not necessarily the best players that succeed, but the flashiest, the loudest, those most suited to the noise and bustle of the environment. One of the best buskers in the market, a man famous in Seattle while remaining virtually unknown by name, isn’t known for his unarguably charming songs, but because he has the unusual ability to hula hoop while playing the guitar, singing, playing percussion with his feet and balancing a second guitar on his chin. The parallel holds–the main breakout successes in web comics have primarily been gag strips, short punchy and easily digestible, able with sheer volume and verve to cut through the noise of the crowded environment.

When we are actually playing, though, the mechanics of the act itself, the social analogies and all the other possibilities, are the last thing on my mind. Virtually all of my attention is occupied by the moment, in sharing music and time with a person I am delighted by, and sharing that happiness with the people around us. And maybe this is ultimately what had been missing for me from drawing–creation without obligation, a sensual engagement with the world, the glorious moment of sticking your face in the dirt and remembering that you’re alive and doing the things that you want to be doing solely because it is what you desire. I might get tired of busking in a month or two–I might keep doing it for years. But either way, I know for sure that when it feels like an obligation, it will be time to change things again.

I’ve been sketching again, in brush, bolder and quicker than I’ve worked in the past. I don’t know if anything will come of it, and I don’t seem to care if it does.

from the forthcoming Down in the Hole

Addendum-

I filled Rachel in on the general premise of this article a few days ago, and she had a good laugh. “You can think about it being that way if you want,” she told me, “but it isn’t temporary like you’re describing. You just think that because you haven’t being doing it very long.” Video cameras and phones are everywhere, she explained. People are filming us all of the time. People take our picture hundreds of times a day. We don’t have any way of knowing where or when any of those things will show up.

She continued. “If you Google my full name one of the first things that shows up is this stupid article about the Seattle busking program that appeared in a million different places.” She can’t escape it, she says, nor the photo depicting her and another busker in an awkward high-five.

Me? I’m still choosing ignorance, and the gratification of the moment. It seems like the only sound strategy available.

Gerhard- Craft, Credit, Cross-hatching and Completion

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On Boxing Day of 2010 I had the opportunity to speak to Gerhard, the long-time background artist and environmental designer on Cerebus, one of the most sprawling pieces of visual fiction ever created. While reading back over the completed interview, I kept coming back to points that we touched on but didn’t really explore. I’d like to share some of these tangents with you now. Rather than trying to make this into a seamless whole, I hope you’ll accept these few bullet-pointed thoughts. In no particular order-

  • There is a strange allure to the incomplete

Towards the end of our conversation Gerhard told me about an exhibition of Cerebus art that had taken place a few years ago in which some of his pencil preliminary drawings had been on display alongside finished pages. He said that the tracing paper pencil drawings had gone over really well, and that, in some cases, he preferred his pencils to his finished artwork.

Gerhard preliminary tracing paper image, courtesy of Margaret Liss

This isn’t an uncommon reaction. There’s an undeniable appeal to an image that is in process, and I think that appeal remains no matter how accomplished the destination drawing.

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Manga! Manga! And then more Manga!

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More than thirty years ago, Frederik Schodt began laying the ground work for a book that would become the first real information in English on the phenomenon of Japanese comics- Manga! Manga! the World of Japanese Comics. It’s rare that a seminal work should be the most comprehensive as well—and yet, twenty-eight years after its initial publication, it remains the best historical survey of manga available in English. I first encountered the book almost eighteen years ago, on a crammed shelf at the downtown Orlando library. At the time it seemed like a portal to an alien world, full of glimpses into exotic styles and genres and storytelling techniques. Two decades since that first encounter, I thought I’d take a look back at the book and interview its creator, with an eye on what’s changed since its initial publication.

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