‘Schoolhouse Rock Live’: Sing-along for the sentient

The ensemble of "Schoolhouse Rock Live" at the Arvada Center. [Photo credit: P. Switzer]

There are two kinds of parents in the world – those who have never heard the songs of “Schoolhouse Rock,” and those who can’t get them out of their heads.

Thanks to the excellent current production of “Schoolhouse Rock Live” at the Arvada Center for the Performing Arts, we can all get on the same page.

Under the inventive direction of Kitty Skillman Hilsabeck, the sextet of performers give literal life and bounce to the material developed by TV producer Tom Yohe beginning in 1973.

Thanks to great writing and performances by people such as Bob Dorough, Blossom Dearie, Jack Sheldon and Lynn Ahrens, the bite-sized series of animated songs that covered topics such as math, science, grammar, American history, economics and more are indelible. My wife can sing the Preamble to the Constitution thanks to the show, and I believe that if you turn a figure 8 on its side it’s a symbol meaning infinity. And one of my offspring thinks that there is some Kabbalistic profundity about the song “Three is a Magic Number.”

The stage adaptation finds a clever framework within which to place the action. A young, nervous teacher, Tom (Seth Caikowski) finds himself surrounded by an ensemble of alter egos that lead him through the material he plans to address to his class – Schoolhouse Rock style, of course.

The five avatars of Tom (Amanda Earls as Sparky, Ashlie-Amber Harris as Whynona, Matt LaFontaine as Coolroy, Daniel Langhoff as Mathu and Julia Perrotta as Hap) exhibit great singing voices, bold physicalization, and cheery stamina. This is a fast-moving, high-energy show, and no one drops a beat throughout.

The result is fun for the kids, who will love the loopy set, costume and makeup designs as well – and nostalgic for we who drove them there and know each one by heart. I almost held up my lighter at the end. I was trying to get them out for an encore of “Interplanet Janet.”

“Schoolhouse Rock Live” is presented by the Arvada Center for the Arts, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd., Arvada, through May 15. Tickets are available by calling 720-506-4130 or by visiting http://arvadacenter.reachlocal.net.

Your mom goes to the opera: the ever-threatened fine-arts audience

Ever notice how the arts are always dying? They’ve been in a perpetual swoon since I can remember. Periodically, a U.S. study is released stating that arts attendance and participation are lower than ever, and that “something must be done.”

There have been forays into topics of the moment, such as “Jerry Springer: The Opera” and a newly proposed piece about the life of Anna Nicole Smith. 

Orchestras, museums, theater companies, and other entities are constantly trying to reach the coveted 18-35 demographic by feigning hipness, good cheer and snarky humor in their promotional materials – and showing some skin doesn’t hurt either.

Fine-art appreciation is stereotyped as a rich man’s pastime. In fact, many times high-art tendencies are supported and perpetuated by people with disposable income and a desire for prestige. And, many times, they drag themselves to high-falutin’ cultural events for reasons of social distinction, not on the basis of enthusiasm or deep appreciation. Yep, those dudes in the tuxes are just as bored as you.

There’s a lot to be said for maintaining and expanding arts education and participation for school-age kids. A recent proposal by Colorado’s Boulder Valley School Board to reduce or eliminate 5^th-grade music programs has raised parental uproar, but is a typical move for a financially distressed school district.

But is there much you can do to lure audiences of young adults to the concert hall? I doubt it. Should you try? I say get Grandma and Grandpa gussied up and send them down to the cultural events only they are capable of appreciating!

Japanese philosopher Shunsuke Tsurumi split art, for the sake of analysis, into three categories: pure, popular and marginal. Pure art requires a certain level of expertise and knowledge from both its creators and its consumers. In popular art, the creator is still a professional but the audience is undiscriminating. Marginal art is everything else – from decoration to gesture – the raw material of aesthetic creation and response in everyday life.

So pure art is smart art. It needs the audience’s critical tools to complete the communication circuit. It requires contextualization, intelligence, education, and indoctrination; it has connoisseurs, cognoscenti, specialists and interpreters. Smart art aims high, features demonstrations of technical expertise, and to be sure errs on the side of seriousness and significance and pretentiousness. Accordingly, it has a much higher failure rate. It’s despised, made fun of and marginalized by a populist reverse snobbery that discourages explorations that can’t be easily packaged or sold.

The very things that are unique about these niche arts are what marketers and publicists are trying to overcome. Instead of trying to make them palatable, perhaps their best move would be to emphasize these points of difficulty.

Smart art doesn’t require money – it requires passion. Occasionally, art bridges the categories of pure and popular for a time – opera in the 19^th century, jazz up to the bebop era. Its popularity phases out, or never develops, but the art form stubbornly persists and continues to speak to its audience, however small.

Smart art also requires maturity – that dreaded word! Hopefully, the longer life goes on the greater the stock of life experiences and learned lessons grow within each person. Those who age successfully develop a tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, develop longer attention spans and more nuanced receptivity. And I think that those closer to the end of life have a more keen appreciation of artistic work that asks hard questions.

Smart art has a research and development arm – it’s called life. Life grows the gray-headed, always-dying-off audiences that mysteriously maintain the arts in America, replacing the fans that pass away with others who have aged out of the commercially bombarded demographics into the more deserted areas where, at last, they can sit down and look and hear and feel and think.

Now, get cracking!

ESSENTIAL TEXTS:

 A Night at the Opera: An Irreverent Guide to the Plots, the Singers, the Composers, the Recordings; Sir Denis Forman, Random House, 1994.

The New Penguin Opera Guide; ed. Amanda Holden, Penguin, 2001.

The Grove Book of Operas; Stanley Sadie and Laura Macy, Oxford University Press, 2009.

The Metropolitan Opera Stories of the Great Operas; ed. John Freeman, W.W. Norton, 1997.

The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, ed. Roger Parker, 1994.

JUST FOR FUN

"P.D.Q. Bach: The Abduction of Figaro," dir. Kaye S. Levine -- 1984.

"Anna Russell Sings! Again?," Anna Russell, CBS Masterworks, 1953.

"Das Ring Gott Farblonjet," by Charles Ludlam, 1977.

Ice fishing: as painful as it looks?

PART 1: GO WITH THE FLOE

Howdy, thrill-seekers! How would you like to combine the slam-bang titillations of fishing with the palpable danger of freezing to death?

Well, look no further! Ice fishing is here. This year, I’ve heard dozens of folks in the Colorado area talk about it – this distinctly Northern pastime has really caught on out West recently.

For those of us without the syrupy blood of native-born Michiganers, Minnesotans or Wisconsonians, this perilous enterprise has got some explaining to do.

Evidently this sport began as a desperate survival tactic. The breathtaking nonchalance of the ice fisherman, or person, suspended above the abyss by an unknown thickness of cracking, groaning temporary solidified from of water, while making a play for dinner is inspiring.

No wonder they drink.

My friend Joe started me out by cluing me in that the last people you want to ask “How well are they biting?” are the people who run the bait shops next to the lake. “Of course, they’re biting! Here, let me ring up that beef jerky for you.”

Joe spoke movingly of the quiet simplicity of the experience. He lovingly described augering a special second hole in the ice for the beers, watching them float – “sort of like watching a campfire burn on the beach during a summer night.” Damn!

Then he compared ice fishing to women – “you never know what you’re going to get.” Well, we were deep into Hemingway territory now. My manhood was at stake -- I had to try it.

I recruited two very close friends to accompany me, who I thought frankly would hold up a lot better under the strain. Now that we’re out of urgent care, I have time to sit back, relax and reflect.

 PART 2: THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

Needless to say, always check on ice conditions. ALWAYS CHECK ON ICE CONDITIONS. Don’t make me say it again. A great resource in Colorado is the state Division of Wildlife – their ice fishing Web page is at http://wildlife.state.co.us/Fishing/Reports/IceFishing. Trust them. Budgets are tight, and no one has the money to send a diving crew to collect your remains.

Good rules of thumb are: 4-6 inches of ice thickness to walk on, 7 inches to drive a car or snowmobile out on and 10 inches to drive a truck out on. “Inches?” I enquired. “How about feet?” Nope – too tough to cut through, and no room for the fish below.

You are fishing for, depending on your location and time of year, panfish such as bluegill, crappie, yellow perch, sunfish, and pumpkinseeds; also, northern pike, walleye, lake trout, burbot and bass. Please note: feeding times in the winter largely adhere to the dawn/dusk patterns of fish during the summer, so you still have to get up when it’s dark and cold and stay out until same if you want results.

To make it, you need to dress in layers. Polypropylene first, then wool, then Gore-Tex. Get the order straight. I did this backwards, contracted hypothermia . . . and parts of me shriveled up as well.

You should have a shelter to crouch within while fishing, hopefully with a gas heater by your side. These “ice houses” come from the most simple to the fanciest, complete with bunks and satellite TV. What they all have in common, though, is the capacity to asphyxiate you via carbon monoxide poisoning – the same way Emile Zola died, although he was not ice fishing at the time. Zut alors!

A hole between 6 and 8 inches in diameter will be cut in the ice – hopefully, not by you. Tools for this task include an ice saw, ice chisel and auger. Whew! Let the drinking begin. Most ice fisherfolk use the ubiquitous “tip-up” pole, which is positioned on a frame over the ice and signals a nibble by the raising of a small flag, after which the prey can be hooked, gaffed and stacked over in a corner until the haul is complete or the game warden is gone.

Alternatively, you can use a short jigging rod, with which the wielder is compelled to shimmy and bounce around incessantly in an effort to attract the attention of some sluggish, recalcitrant future filets. This second approach is more for nervous types who are out for results, not simply hiding out from their spouses, work or the law.

Bait: some swear by live minnows, chubs, shiners, wax worms, fly larvae. Others count on chunks of raw meat, cake and uncooked oatmeal. Still more rely on lures with cool names such as spoons, jigs, teardrops, glows and fry. What they all have in common is that NONE OF THEM WORK. This is fishing, remember!

Oh, here are a few more recommended items: an ice skimmer, chairs, compass, map, flashlight, GPS, depth gauge . . . and the stuff with weird monikers! I love those the most, as they constitute the terms you will sling about widely and inaccurately after your adventure. Flasher – gaff hook – spud bar --- creepers – awesome.

Here’s my favorite pair of must-have items – the ones that pushed the big, hooting alarm in my head. Ice pick, 50 feet of rope and personal flotation device! 

 

I should have known the other pescadores del hielo would laugh at me as I shuffled out onto the frozen surface of Dead Bastard Lake clad in a life jacket. Too bad, suckers! While you will be swept away under the ice, I will bob to the surface, unscathed and praising my creator.

The ice pick clutched in my hand? What’s that used for? Well, when the ice breaks, you stab frantically at the edges of the frozen mass with it in an attempt to keep yourself from full immersion.

And the 50 feet of rope wound about my middle? That’s in case the ice pick doesn’t work. Evidently you can calmly pass one end to your companions as you rapidly subside into that sleepy-bye Jack London “To Build a Fire” hypothermic coma, so they can drag your carcass out at leisure.

  

And beer. And whiskey. And schnapps. And some food, if there’s room.

 PART 3: ICE FISHING – THE MOVIE

(Three men wander in a forlorn skirmish line across the surface of a high-altitude frozen Colorado lake. Blizzard conditions make their exact coordinates doubtful. Each carries an absurdly heavy and large bundle of equipment. MUSIC: Symphonia Antarctica, Movement 3 by Vaughan Williams.)

CASEY: Hey, guys, this looks like a great place!

OAKLAND: Whe-whe-whe-

ME: This is the worst idea you ever had.

CASEY: This was your idea!

ME: Shut up.

OAKLAND: I’m cold.

ME: Shut up.

CASEY: I brought a spear!

OAKLAND: Why?

CASEY: You can spear them through the hole.

OAKLAND: How?

CASEY: I guess they come up to check it out.

OAKLAND: My parts are cold.

(CASEY grinds hole in ice, stands watchfully crouched over hole, spear in hand. The others try and fail to construct a shelter around him, using broken-off car aerials and Saran wrap.)

CASEY: This is fun! I’m having fun.

OAKLAND: (Lays down ceremoniously, preparing for death) This is the last of earth; I am content.

ME: Move over, I want to try this flip-up contraption.

CASEY: I can’t. I can’t move, really. I’m frozen.

(I pour whiskey on Casey’s lips until he can form his mouth into a spout. He thaws.)

OAKLAND: (Mumbling) Thomas Jefferson still lives.

ME: (Addressing sky in grand fit of hysteria) Nothing works. My hands can’t flex to put the lure on. I can’t see the car. We’re all going to die.

CASEY: We’re not licked yet!

(CASEY fires flare gun into sky. It strikes a hovering rescue helicopter, the sudden presence of which requires a serious continuity revision. The helicopter explodes, crashing in flames upon our three protagonists, and burning through to the icy waters below. Finis.)

ME: Ow.

CASEY: COOL!

OAKLAND: Pretty . . . fishie . . .

Obit Patrol

I can't help it -- I read the obits. Do you? Now I've started keeping track. The Obit Patrol's a way to note the passing of interesting and significant people from the world. Check it out.

Buntport’s ‘The World is Mine’: Memory, confession and O’Neill’s warty brilliance

Erin Rollman and Erik Edborg in Buntport's "The World is Mine." (Photo courtesy Buntport Theater)

We are all doomed. Isn’t that hilarious?

The six-pack of geniuses that collaborate to create Denver’s Buntport Theater have done it again with “The World is Mine,” a riveting examination of Eugene O’Neill from the inside out.

O’Neill was the most honored American playwright of the 20th century. He was also the most significant. And he’s yet another icon of the tortured-artist tradition, and by now the accumulated armchair psychoanalysis surrounding his late, “confessional” plays has permanently skewed our understanding of him and his body of work.

Buntport plays with these conceptions with adroit abandon. They set the play inside O’Neill’s mind during the germination period before his late great spate of creativity – including “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” a work so obviously patterned on O’Neill’s own family that he forbade its publication until 25 years after his death (his widow subverted his wishes, releasing it only three years after his death in 1953.)



Ostensibly, the time and place are Merritt Hospital in Oakland, California on February 17, 1937, where O’Neill received the Nobel Prize in Literature while recovering from an appendectomy (his wife took a room, too, just to keep an eye on him).

The premise is simple and freeing. We are afloat in the playwright’s consciousness, tossing chronology and logic out the same window O’Neill’s sacrificial plant falls from (you have to see it). Oh, and everyone sports O’Neill’s authoritative moustache.

Erik Edborg plays O’Neill as a paradigm of self-absorption -- equal parts self-pity and self-contempt. waiting to become unstuck, paging through mystery novels, drinking steadily, and bantering with his wife Carlotta (Erin Rollman). (O’Neill’s strongest feeling of compassion is extended to the aforementioned plant.)

For once, Buntport presents us with a “traditional” set – almost. The room the characters inhabit looks suspiciously like the kind your average theater company would nail together to present a work of realism. The dark woody tones of the set are congruent with those found inside a writer’s mind, and the roomscape is littered with stacks of books, empty glasses, lamps and mirrors.

But there are traps, trompe l’oiel, and sight gags. Two O’Neill’s in self-portrait face each other on the back wall. As in technical rehearsals, there are tape-down marks for the furniture. The stage-right doorway is out of scale – O’Neill must duck through it. And in every object onstage lurks a hidden reservoir of “medicine” – the booze that all and sundry lap at throughout the evening, casually scooping it out of a side table, or milking a chandelier.

The “real” world is outside, and when O’Neill chooses to address that world he hits his taped X downstage center and yells into the void – at us, actually, gazing over our heads. Meanwhile, a pretty fair and funny rendition of the constant reinvention of the creative process plays out in front of us.

Trapped inside his head with him and his wife are Cathleen, a nurse (Hannah Duggan), who reminds O’Neill of his daughter Oona, whom he cut out of his life after her marriage to Charlie Chaplin in 1943 (a loop of screen test featuring Oona plays over and over on a number of screens hidden in a cupboard). Brian Colonna as Erland the Swedish emissary stomps in over and over, always at the wrong time, to present O’Neill with his Nobel.



Hannah Duggan as Cathleen the Nurse in Buntport's "The World is Mine." (Photo courtesy Buntport Theater)

Cathleen is also a shadow of her namesake, the maid from “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” and a female temptation, a potential nemesis for Carlotta. Colonna snaps with stupefying ease into and out of the character of O’Neill’s brother James – or is he spouting lines as Jamie from “Long Day’s”? As one point, during a tirade, O’Neill scrambles for paper and pen to transcribe the invective.

The overlying mood is that of suffocation and torment. (No wonder O’Neill loved Strindberg.) Buntport’s O’Neill can’t stop memories from intruding, replaying with variations in his head. In a closet sits his famous father’s costume from “The Count of Monte Cristo,” the hit play in which he found himself trapped, playing it over 6,000 times. When Carlotta throws it out, a replica appears in its place. “It never goes away,” Edborg intones mournfully.

Rollman’s daffy gloom seems a quite plausible way to characterize the last Mrs. O’Neill. Born Hazel Tharsig, she fled into the persona of Carlotta Monterey. She parlayed an affair with a wealthy Wall Street banker into an annuity that later helped support Eugene while he wrote his way to fame. She, chock-full of suspicion and paranoia, was determined to be the wife of a genius, and she effectively alienated him from everyone else, effectively imprisoning him so that he could work.


Brian Colonna as Erland in Buntport's "The World is Mine." (Photo courtesy Buntport Theater)


Her dithering with the cheesy details of the faux-Chinese mansion she intends to build with his Nobel Prize money did indeed get built as Tao House, where he scribbled out his last “confessional” masterpieces before the tremors of late-onset celebellar cortical atrophy destroyed his ability to write, and finally, move and speak. She sheltered him and herself – a haunting touch not mentioned in “The World is Mine” is that she, like O’Neill’s mother, was an addict. (She took, of all things, potassium bromide, an anticonvulsant and sedative.)

As usual, Buntport doesn’t really explicate anything. They produce a spray of ideas, associations, and fantasies and let them roam free, bouncing and colliding on stage. This removes the impulse to spoon-feed meaning to the audience, forcing it to collaborate and complete the puzzle presented.

When “Jamie” from “Long Day’s Journey into Night” is speaking, he’s not spewing a transcription of conversation brother James O’Neill, Jr. spoke decades before. In “The World is Mine,” O’Neill is doing what every creative person, haunted or not, does: rewriting, editing the past on the spot and ever after, and forcing it into position.



For better or worse, O’Neill’s family will now always be confused with the characters he created out of them. We are obsessed with the “truth,” how “real” the characters are, as if their value and validity can only stem from how closely they reveal the personal. If you’re not spilling your guts, nobody cares.

But it’s important to remember that when O’Neill won the Nobel Prize, he hadn’t yet delved into his personal past. Instead, he had created a large body of poetic, experimental work – including such great plays such as “Mourning Becomes Electra,” “The Hairy Ape,” “The Great God Brown,” “All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” his Glencairn cycle, “Ah, Wilderness!” and “Strange Interlude” – the last of which permeated public consciousness to the degree that Groucho Marx makes extended fun of it in a scene in “Animal Crackers.”



In a 1924 New York Times piece about Walter Huston, who was busy originating the role of Ephraim Cabot in “Desire Under the Elms,” John Corbin wrote of the performer’s task in O’Neill: “The actor has so much actualistic matter on his hands that he must be convincing as realism, but at the same time he must evolve a creation that transcends realism or resemblance.”

This Buntport gets, and like any great theater group it doesn’t tell us, it shows us. Its slim anchor line to “truth” leads into a more fantastic and truer realm.

O’Neill’s brand of drunken, grueling dramatic self-examination has cast him in legendary terms. But expiation is not art – in that case, every tortured and overwrought diary would be a masterpiece. O’Neill could write his last works because of his skill, not because of his past. And if he did redeem himself by writing these final plays, ease his fevered conscience? Or did he revenge himself on the past?

Does it matter a damn?

At the last beat of “The World is Mine,” the back walls fly apart and a platform holding a pair of hospital beds is revealed. There are Eugene and Carlotta, lying side by side. He has broken through. He will write. They seem pleased. They seem happy.

“The World is Mine” is presented by Buntport Theater at 717.5 Lipan St., Denver, CO through March 6. Buntport is Brian Colonna, Hannah Duggan, Erik Edborg, Erin Rollman, SamAnTha Schmitz and Evan Weissman. Shows are 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, with some 3 p.m. Sunday matinees. For tickets and information, please visit ww.buntport.com or call 720-946-1388.

Crumb's Genesis: hardcore Bible

How do you draw God’s picture?

Famous underground illustrator R. Crumb took a marvelous, gutsy stab at the question on Oct. 19, when “The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb” hit the bookshelves. His antic style is channeled into a gruelingly faithful 224 pages. Murder, incest, power struggles, family fights, and betrayals – it’s all graphically rendered.

The results are subversive and affirming at the same time. Subversive because they dodge none of the text’s ugly incidents or confusing lurches of tone and doctrine.


Even the boring stretches, those long lists of begats, are transformed into strings of absorbing, carefully wrought portrait cameos. Affirming because it takes the document seriously. Of course, any depiction is a de facto interpretation of the text, but Crumb doesn’t go for laughs or satirical comments, nor does he posit an alternative interpretation of it.


After so many decades of being categorized as a countercultural artist, Crumb’s impulse to portray one of Western civilization’s founding sacred texts is understandable. Although he first found fame as a rebellious figure, Crumb’s work as a whole ranges far more widely. In tackling Adam and Eve and all that follows, he follows centuries of tradition, from the Book of Kells down to today.

The power of the graven image cuts both ways. Prohibitions against and mistrust of images is strong in monotheistic cultures. The word “iconoclast” means “image breaker”; it stems from a struggle over the use of images in Christian Byzantium in medieval times. During the Reformation, too, statues, images and altars were shattered, torn apart or burned.


Statues at the cathedral of St. Martin in Utrecht, the Netherlands, damaged by Reformation iconoclasts.

Islam has long frowned on images as well. During the three-day 1977 Hanafi Siege in Washington, D.C. 12 members of an Islamic extremist group took 149 people hostage, and killed two. One of the incident’s causes was its leader’s opposition to the pending release of Moustapha Akkad’s “Mohammad, Messenger of God,” aka “The Messenger,” a feature film about the founder of Islam.


(Ironically, in the film the prophet was never shown, and his speech never heard, in accordance with the strictures of the Hadith.) In 2005, the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon controversy led to the deaths of over 100 worldwide.

Yet the Bible, like most other religious texts, is a bottomless font of visual inspiration – and, particularly in Christian history, the use of visual storytelling aids, such as murals, paintings, panels, stained-glass windows . . . and illustrated Bibles.

The fundamental artist for me in this tradition is French illustrator Gustave Dore (1832-1883). The huge, impossibly heavy Bible in my grandparents’ home was tempting to pore through not because of the crabbed, unreadable Fraktur typeface verses but because of the staggering visions of the artist, whose engraving abilities are historically unmatched.


The tormented physicality of Dore’s figures and the fantastic landscapes in which they coil and stretch are endlessly fascinating, and they drew me into the words behind the pictures. As intended.


Another publication that still floats around my subconscious is “Picture Stories from the Bible,” a 1943 work by the enterprising Education Comics.


It was created under the direction of Maxwell Gaines, nee Maxwell Ginsburg, who created the size and look of the comic book itself in 1933.

Gaines’ All-American Comics launched the careers of the Flash, Wonder Woman, Hawkman and the Green Lantern characters. He broke away and started EC with only the “Bible” material, and began diversifying before his sudden death in 1947. (Son Bill is best known for his creation of such sci fi/horror/war/humor comics classics as Tales from the Crypt, Frontline Combat and Mad magazine.)

For all of Gaines’ faith (no pun intended) in the material, “Picture Stories” is a severely neutered and distorted version of the goings-on in the Good Book. The six-panel page standard is rarely swerved from, and all the drawings by Don Cameron are functional, the strip equivalent of a movie made entirely out of medium shots. A brilliant visual analysis of the still-in-print work can be found here, penned by Kristy Valenti at Comixology.

God manifests himself as a sunburst or cloud of speech, delineated with all capitals, with squiggly text, as though the Deity was equipped with a mighty sub-woofer to go with his Mister Microphone.


All the women characters are dressed in standard-issue Hollywood B-movie Arabic gowns, all with eyeshadow and perfect perms, even immediately after giving birth.


The men are interchangeable, the action is non-stop, with many of the stories streamlined and condensed under the heading of the main character involved – the editor’s revenge at last on the unwieldy original! (The back cover, studded with cameos of Bible heroes, is paraphrased entertainingly in Crumb’s version.)




No one gets it on in “Picture Stories.” We don’t get to read about Noah’s drunkenness, Lot’s incest with his daughters. Ruth busts in on Boaz when he’s in bed – and, well, she tucks him in. “Rest well, Boaz, I shall lie at your feet all the night!” she chirps. No wonder we needed sex education in schools.

After Dore’s elegant lines and Gaines’s brash, brightly colored freemaking, everything else seems tame. Mass-produced evangelical publications tend to toe the aesthetic and doctrinal line. A mantle of propriety puts the kibosh on close, hard visual depictions, leading to lots and lots of sanitized kitsch. Much is forgiven in the name of faith.


Only exceptions such as the harsh, crude figurations found in the Chick Publications gospel cartoon tracts – those nifty little pamphlets you find in the men’s room in bus stations, tucked in random books in the library, gracing some fried chicken joint in the middle of nowhere.


The past 50 years have seen secular culture knock Biblical conceits from their pedestals. If we absorbed any spiritual information from the Judeo-Christian tradition, it was probably in the form of a comedy routine like Bill Cosby’s “Noah” trilogy from his first album:


Flip Wilson’s “David and Goliath” routine, and film comedies such as “The Life of Brian” and the much less funny comedy “Wholly Moses!”.


Going to the other end of the spectrum, the grotesque is emphasized in films such as “A Clockwork Orange,” in which the sociopathic protagonist Alex turns to the Old Testament in prison to trigger and feed his sexual and violent fantasies. Others were dazzled or enraged by the hallucinatory epic of “The Last Temptation of Christ” or torture porn of “The Passion of the Christ.”


A standout independent film from 2003, “The Real Old Testament,” goes for the vernacular with a rendition of most of Genesis in the style of a TV reality show, complete with pull-out interviews, a strong dose of improvisation, and a reliance on the overturning of strongly branded, stock conceptions of the Bible as literature.


And now, we even have the Bible illustrated with Legos! The Brick Testament boasts that it is "the world's largest, most comprehensive illustrated Bible." It's pretty nifty.


Crumb’s innovation comes in facing his material head-on, engaging in extensive research and thought. Unyoked from organized religion’s concerns, or the compulsion to mock, he finds what is powerful and sacred by showing us real people and real feeling, warts and all.

Most importantly, he makes those confounding passages clear. Some might argue that forbidding, bumpy roads such as Crumb’s Genesis can also lead us to God.

Pop culture Christmas: into the Rankin/Bass ‘Animagic’ vortex

Singing elves. Dancing snowmen. The awkward beauties of stop-motion animation. Yuletides threatened by mad professors, insane dictators, giant buzzards, and Arab stereotypes. Welcome to the world of Rankin/Bass, a company that took the pop-culture Christmas ball and ran with it, creating a demented body of video work that will live forever . . . for better or worse.

We can sometimes measure our faithfulness to the sentiments of the season through our dedication to the ritual of watching holiday TV specials.

The best are just can’t-miss, hands-down good: “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” Then there are eerie moments, like that kooky nutty 1977 Bing Crosby/David Bowie Christmas duet:



And the depthless horror that is “The Star Wars Holiday Special”:



But no one could crank out the Xmas kitsch quite like the minions of Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass. For more than two decades, their studio produced over a dozen animated Christmas specials, most of them filmed with puppets in painstaking stop-motion technique. Only Sid and Marty Krofft of “H.R. Pufnstuf” fame can claim a similar dominance over the injection of absolute weirdness into children’s minds.

The real heroes were the Japanese animators, under Tadahito Mochinaga and later at Topcraft, who developed into a powerful generation of anime artists, directors and producers.

Here are some highlights:

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)

The first and the best. I distinctly remember the first broadcast, and it blew me away. The attention to detail, the anything-goes leaps of logic, the weird mix of cultural references: it sets the pattern, both in form and tone, for all Rankin/Bass holiday specials to come.

Celebrity narrator: Sam the Snowman (Burl Ives). So memorable, he made it into “Elf”!



Song You Can’t Get out of Your Head: “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas”



Villain: The Abominable Snowman, and the worst blizzard in a century.

High points: a) Hermey the elf confesses his obsessive desire to become a dentist. B) Rudolph calling out, “Ready, Santa!” Gulp. Sob.

Huh?: Still wondering about strong yet sensitive Yukon Cornelius, and King Moonracer, the flying lion that rules over the Island of Misfit Toys. I’m still trying to work that last one out.



Lesson: Diversity. We must love and accept all our differently-abled reindeer.

Quote: “Nobody wants a Charlie-in-the-Box!”

After the relatively turgid and uncomfortably Christ-centered “The Little Drummer Boy” (1968), we move on to

Frosty the Snowman (1969)

Celebrity narrator: Jimmy Durante

Song You Can’t Get out of Your Head: The title song, silly!

Villain: Professor Hinkle, memorably portrayed by the inimitable and now forgotten Billy De Wolfe, a professional sissy of the type played by Charles Nelson Reilly and Franklin Pangborn.



High points: Frosty saves his friend Karen at the cost of his own conversion from a solid to a liquid state.

Huh?: Santa threatening to cut Professor Hinkle off from the present list if he doesn’t give Frosty his life-producing magic hat. Then makes him write 100 zillion apologies. This does not follow the precepts of “Love and Logic.”

Lesson: Don’t be a hater.

Quote: “Happy birthday!”

Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town (1970)

Celebrity narrator: Fred Astaire

Song You Can’t Get out of Your Head: “Put One Foot in Front of the Other” (later recycled into the “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” special a year later)

Villain: Burgomeister Meisterburger! Ooo, he hatez dose toyzzz!



High points: Kris Kringle is a defiant elf-raised orphan who brings toys to children despite being ground down by The Man. He works under cover of darkness, an outlaw advocate of materialism, and winds up a political prisoner, Yuletide’s own Vaclav Havel. Plus, Jessica Claus is hot.

Huh?: The insane lengths the story goes to in order to explain every aspect of the Santa mythos are beyond compare. Red suit, beard, flying reindeer, magic feed corn – the scrotal fortitude of the writers is impressive.

Lesson: Nobody can mess with the inalienable right of children to have toys, especially with omnipotent omniscient Santa on their side. Dammit.

Quote: “Behave yourselves, because Santa can still look into his magic snowball and see just what you're up to.”

The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974)

Celebrity narrator: Shirley Booth

Songs You Can’t Get out of Your Head: “The Snow Miser Song” and “The Heat Miser Song”



Villain: Isn’t it Santa this time? He catches a cold, decides to take a break, and basically bails.

High points: Snow Miser and Heat Miser, of course

Huh?: It’s kind of like “Measure for Measure” – a leader leaves, creating a power vacuum that’s filled with bad bargains. Elves are making deals with Southern mayors, element-controlling spirits, and the like.

Lesson: Santa is too big to fail.

Quote: “Nobody cares a hoot and a holler for you or Christmas.”

And . . .it just starts to go steeply downhill from there. The Little Drummer Boy, Book II (1976) still has a rap that it contains anti-Arab stereotyping. Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey (1977), Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July (1979), Pinocchio’s Christmas (1980), The Leprechaun’s Christmas Gold (1981). All dredging up scraps of the old Animagic.

A few years later, it ground to a halt. Only the renaissance sparked by Will Vinton (the California Raisins), Henry Selick (“The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “James and the Giant Peach,” “Coraline”), and Nick Park (Wallace and Grommit) has restored the technique to mainstream use. No Rudolph, no “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”