Author: Michael H. Price

Mel Brooks and Woody Allen and Drew Friedman, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • April 6, 2008

more-old-jewish-comedians-6769250I met Drew Friedman in 1990 through a long-standing friendship with his brother and then-frequent collaborator, the songwriter and social critic Josh Alan Friedman, while we were attending a cartoonists’ convention in Dallas as working artists and comic-book developers. Drew had built a reputation within the industry as a meticulously lifelike portraitist, capable of arraying tiny dots of ink into images of dreamlike accuracy that captured the soul – unflatteringly so, as a rule – as unerringly as it suggested a physical reality.

Poised for a leap into mass-market commercial illustration, Drew had brought to the Dallas Fantasy Fair a work-in-progress assignment for a video-box edition of a pioneering television series, The Honeymooners. The portrait of star player Jackie Gleason shone forth from the over-sized Strathmore page – Drew was working on a scale larger by far than the size of an actual videocassette sleeve – like some impossible photograph. The piece was too richly caricatured to be a photo, but it captured an essence of Gleason in a way one seldom sees in ink-on-paper.

“Needs some cleaning up,” Drew said, surveying the results. He set aside his Rapidograph, a fountain-pen drawing tool capable of dispensing near-microscopic quantities of ink, and went to work with an X-Acto knife, chiseling at one ink-speck after another with unerring near-photographic accuracy. Gleason’s face, already as convincing as if reproduced by a half-tone engraving camera, seemed to engage the observer in direct eye-contact animation under Friedman’s masterful touch.

The intervening years have found Drew Friedman moving ever deeper into pop-mainstream acclaim via such publications as MAD and Los Angeles Magazine and Entertainment Weekly – a far cry from the compassionately acerbic show-business satires that he and Josh Alan once produced for various under-the-counterculture and arts-revue publications.

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“Prowling” – Juggling the Blues with the Comics, by Michael H. Price

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  • March 30, 2008

axe-man-8645473

“Ya gotta be a juggler to woik in dis racket,” a senior-staff powerhouse named Frosty Sloane informed me after I had landed my first job in a competitive marketplace, back around 1965.

“I thought we were selling shoes,” I answered him. Which of course we were. I had a fleeting mental picture of some Ed Sullivan Show juggling act involving wingtip clodhoppers and stiletto heels. Took a while for Frosty’s metaphor to sink in – but once I had experienced my first stampede of customers and watched Sloane accommodate ten or fifteen prospective buyers while I attempted to deal with one or two of ’em, I caught his drift, all right.

Frosty Sloane was so effective at the craft, with consistently high sales tallies to show for it, that he could afford to be overconfident. He would juggle products while juggling customers: If a shopper should ask to see one style of shoe, Sloane would bring out half-a-dozen selections and wind up selling two or three of those. And he was such a wisenheimer that I wondered how he could get away with some of his sales-floor stunts.

“Y’see, half o’ th’ customers who come in here durin’ a slower stretch – they don’t even know they’re customers, yet,” Frosty counseled me, as if dispensing the Wisdom of the Ages. “They’re jus’ sleepwalkin’, browsin’ away like as if they knew what they were doin’. An’ ya gotta figger out how t’ get their attention.” No sooner had he spoken, than a woman wandered into the department, browsin’ away – just like the man said.

“Watch dis,” Frosty said, “an’ I’ll show ya what I mean by ‘sleepwalkin.’” He strolled toward the browser, nodded in her direction, and then spoke: “Tickle your ass with a feather, ma’am?” He paced the question just rapidly enough to blur its words.

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‘Superhero Movie’ Review by Michael H. Price

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  • March 23, 2008

superhero-movie-1s-4938097

The superhero, and I don’t mean sandwich, has been a staple of the popular culture since well before the Depression-into-wartime beginnings of Superman and Batman. Those characters’ nascent comic-book adventures of 1938-1939 served primarily to focus a popular fascination with superhuman struggles against extravagant menaces – but similarly conceived protagonists had existed all along in ancient mythology and mass-market popular fiction. And how better to explain the superior heroic intellect of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Seabury Quinn’s phantom-fighting Jules de Grandin, or the beyond-normal escapades of Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel?

People need heroes, he said – if I may adapt a thought from Mike Gold’s recent Hope Versus Fear commentary at ComicMix. Such characters spur the imagination to assume hope in the face of fearful real-world circumstances, even if their activities and abilities (and allegorical antagonists) seem patently outside the realm of possibility. And the spiritual generosity of superheroism is such that people are willing to fork over either hard-earned cash or Daddy’s Money to experience the fantasy: Hence the proliferation of super-hero comic books in the immediate backdraft and long-term vapor-trails of Superman and Batman, and hence those characters’ fairly prompt leap into motion pictures during the 1940s.

Many people regard the superhero movie phenomenon as a fairly recent development, traceable as “far back” as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man breakthrough of 2002, or maybe to the perceived “antiquity” of Richard Donner’s Superman pictures of 1978-1980. Not by a long shot.

Nor are the inevitable superhero parodies – as seen in David Zucker’s collaborative production of Superhero Movie, due March 28 – any particular innovation. Just as there is something awe-inspiring about some guy in long-john tights, hurdling buildings or piercing the veil with a blast of X-ray vision, there also is something innately ridiculous about such a spectacle. Even some of the earlier superhero films, such as Columbia Pictures’ Batman serials of the 1940s, emerged as unwitting parodies despite (or because of) their more earnest aims.

The formal parodies are a rarer breed. Zucker had proved himself a capable spoofer with 1980’s Airplane! – a well-received lampoon of the large-ensemble disaster-movie genre – much as Mel Brooks had parodied such genres as the Western epic and the Gothic horror film (1974’s Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein) to pleasing effect. Both artists were springing from the influence of Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad magazine of the mid-century, with its recurring demonstration that a parody must harbor an affectionate understanding of the story it intends to spoof.

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Blues Poetry: Rough-And-Raw, by Michael H. Price

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  • March 16, 2008

<span style=”mso-bookmark:

OLE_LINK1″>race-wes-cd-cover-9303079Fort Worth, Texas’ Wesley Race is a businessman in much the same way that the Chicago blues singer Little Walter Jacobs once proclaimed himself a businessman: “I’m a business<span style=”mso-bookmark:

OLE_LINK2″> man,” Jacobs growls on a 1964 recording called (what else?) “I’m a Business Man,” allowing songwriter Willie Dixon’s lyric to leave the nature of the business open to suggestion but permitting no doubt of a businesslike attitude.

<span style=”mso-bookmark:

OLE_LINK1″>Walter Jacobs had died, a casualty of a busy sideline in street-fighting, a year before Wes Race’s arrival in 1969 on Chicago’s blues-club scene in search of raw emotive authenticity. Jacobs, among such others as the singer-guitarists Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, had embodied the urbanized and electrified Deep Blues style that had drawn Race to Chicago – perhaps less for the raucous nightlife, than for the poetic ferocity that Race had long perceived in the blues.

<span style=”mso-bookmark:

OLE_LINK1″>Race’s path, winding but decisive, has led to the release this month of a début CD-album of his original poetry, recited with real-time spontaneity against a blues-rooted musical backdrop. The recording, Cryptic Whalin’ (Cool Groove Records), is a production of the guitarist and engineer Jim Colegrove, with instrumental contributions from such additional mainstays of Fort Worth’s roots-music scene as saxophonists Johnny Reno and René Ozuna, guitarists Sumter Bruton and James Hinkle, drummers Steve Springer and Larry Reynolds, steel guitarist David McMillan and keyboard artists Jeff Gutcheon and Ruf Rufner.

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Allan Turner’s Folklife Treasures, by Michael H. Price

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  • March 9, 2008
 
roun1866_cover-1074035The measurable results of bare-knuckled research, like gold and luck, will turn up where you find ’em. Folks often think of cultural research in academic terms – the ivory-tower stereotype, alone in the realm of uninterrupted thought and empirical fact-sifting, or the aloof egghead at large amongst the tribes – but a truer basis must rest with the very folks whose thoughts and dreams and deeds form the foundations of any popular culture.
 
Or should the term be populist, as opposed to popular, culture? No matter – the root word means “of the people,” in any event. And some of the most lasting such research has come from the efforts of working-civilian folks whose interest in the down-to-earth lives of other folks drives them to venture among the masses with a companionable attitude, laden with note-pads and recording devices, to take down impressions for the long term. (Pete Seeger has a good term for such excursions, research-driven or not: “a political vacation.”)
 
The Allan Turner Collection at the University of Texas provides a memorable example of this people-to-people imperative. The namesake of the archive is a news-biz colleague of long standing, and several of these conversational interviews date from a collaborative push that Turner and I accomplished during the 1970s and ’80s. 
 
Deep-rooted sources of this influence include Thomas Edison (1847–1931). Eager to popularize and perfect his version of the 19th-century phonograph, Edison reconciled note-taking anthropological research with sound-recording technology by sending crews far afield, into the streets, to capture the crowd noises and pushcart-vendor cries of the turning of a century.
 
Then, in a more focused campaign of the early-middle 20th century, the father-and-son team of John and Alan Lomax concentrated upon the preservation of American folk music – starting with the songs of prison inmates and field-hands in the Deep, Deeper and Deepest South. Alan Lomax (1915–2002) helped in particular to forge new commercial possibilities for traditional folk-singing during the 1950s and ’60s – advancing a Voice of the People urgency during the reactionary post-WWII years, on the one hand, and arguing the case for a purer folkloric expressiveness during the 1960s’ craze for a more commercialized dilution of folk-singing.
 

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Still More Modern Art, by Michael H. Price

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  • March 2, 2008

lever-3If any one outcropping of the cultural skyline of Fort Worth, Texas, can be said to state a case for a Bold New Millennium, it is the 2002 landmark address of the Modern Art Museum, designed by the architect Tadao Ando as a sculptural statement in itself. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is at once the oldest such museum in Texas – chartered in 1892 – and handily the newest in aspect. I spend a great deal of time there for both workaday and leisurely purposes: The Modern’s art-film theatre is descended from an imports-and-independents movie program that I developed during 1996–2002 at one of the downtown movie houses, and my jazz trio performs at the Modern as a matter of routine. Full disclosure, and all that.

 
As befits a monumental sculpture of architectural pedigree, the building that houses the Modern of Fort Worth has fared particularly well as a showcase for internal exhibitions of sculpture. The exhibit of the moment is called Martin Puryear, newly opened for a run through May 18.
 
The retrospective survey of works by a celebrated American artist features nearly 50 sculptures in an arc reaching from Martin Puryear’s first solo museum show in 1977 to the present day. 
 
Working primarily in wood, Puryear, 67, has maintained a commitment to manual skills and traditional building methods. His forms derive from everyday objects, both natural and man-made, including tools, vessels and furniture. His sculptures are rich with psychological and intellectual references, examining issues of identity, culture and history. Key influences can be traced to his studies, his work and his travels through Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States. 
 
Chief curator Michael Auping explains: “Puryear’s work has a way of sneaking up on us perceptually, and it is partially through his surfaces that we are drawn in, invited to inspect his wooden objects more closely, as one would a more intimate construction, through the subtlety of inflection that he … imparts to the surface.”
 
Puryear’s most striking forced-perspective work, Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996), is part of the permanent collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth – and as such, an ideal element of familiar leverage into the greater range of the exhibition. This towering object was inspired by homemade ladders that Puryear had noticed in the French countryside while working at Alexander Calder’s studio on an invitational grant.
 

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Mo’ Dern’ Modern Art from Texas, by Michael H. Price

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  • February 24, 2008
 
l2007-58-4-6094273The Fort Worth Circle – a fabled and enduringly relevant colony of artists who transcended their provincial Texas bearings to help redefine art as a class during the 1940s and ’50s – comes full-circle in a massive exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The styles of painting and etching – often veering toward cartooning, like their European counterparts in the somewhat earlier dawning Age of Picasso – are too wildly diversified to allow any simple description: One might say the members shared an impulse to describe how it felt to be alive at a time of unbridled creative enthusiasm and reciprocal encouragement.
 
The display of nearly 100 striking examples is called Intimate Modernism: Fort Worth Circle Artists in the 1940s, the first such industrial-strength retrospective in more than 20 years. (More than 50 years is more like it, in the case of many of the featured works. Some privately held pieces have gone that long without a public-viewing showcase, as curator Jane Myers points out.)
 
If some of the works suggest music to those discovering the Circle for the first time, it might be helpful to mention that Stravinsky and Ravel, as modernists in their own right, were among the members’ preferred composers; at the time of the Circle’s launching, the larger movements toward modern jazz, progressive jazz, and free-form jazz had yet to take a decisive form.
 

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On the Wavelength of ‘The Signal’, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • February 17, 2008
 
signal-the-4815394The dramatis personae roster for a soon-to-open, three-author film called The Signal lists a multitude of roles identified only as “random bodies,” “struggling people,” “deranged people” and so forth. If the casting, as such, suggests chaos, then such must be precisely the intent. From a premise of frenzied malevolence, writer-directors David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush have crafted a smart and orderly, if cryptic, chiller that owes many debts of influence but also brings some welcome new twists to an old and over-familiar formula.
 
The menace appears to stem from the electronic gizmos that have dominated civilization since the middle of the last century – television as a murderous influence, compounded by telephones and computers and anything else capable of transmitting a disruptive signal. The Bruckner/Gentry/Bush screenplay might trace its ancestry as far back as a 1935 movie called Murder by Television (back when TV, still a dozen years away from commercial acceptance, was popularly regarded as a science-fictional concept), in which a high-tech breakthrough yields “the interstellar frequency that is the death ray.”
 
The Signal is, of course, creepier and hipper by far than the bland and stodgy Murder by Television. The new film imagines a force that transforms ordinary working-class souls into maniacs – borrowing extensively from hither and yon, although co-director Gentry will hasten to point out that “our killers are not mindless zombies.”

 

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George A. Romero’s ‘Diary of the Dead’ in Review, by Michael H. Price

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  • February 10, 2008
 
The film-trade press tends increasingly to hail Pittsburgh’s George A. Romero as “the godfather of gore,” in a smirking nod to his new picture, Diary of the Dead, and to the persistent influence of Romero’s breakout film of 1968, Night of the Living Dead. The facile assumption, here, is that Romero’s films must rely more upon visceral shock value than upon narrative ferocity or scathing social criticism – qualities that constitute his larger impact as a filmmaking artist.
 
The medium is outright and unapologetic horror, of course – a perennially hardy escapism-or-allegory genre that had embraced gratuitous “gore” as a ticket-selling commodity several years before Romero had seasoned Night of the Living Dead with such incidental excesses. If any human agency counts as a “godfather of gore,” it must be the short-lived partnership of Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman, whose first-of-a-kind collaborative films Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs and Color Me Blood Red (1963–1965) had championed the pageantry of bloodletting spectacle to the near-exclusion of storytelling values. (Interesting to see a homage-to-Lewis sequence turn up in the Jason Reitman’s indie-film Oscar-bait hit Juno. Enough with the digressions, already.)
 
Romero’s investment in the genre, however, involves a steadfast commitment to bigger and more troubling ideas about the fragile state of civilization. Imitations, remakes and homages abound, but Romero stands apart as the Genuine Article. (Among the more sharply attuned nods to Romero: Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, from 2002; Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Shaun of the Dead, from 2004; and Robert Kirkman’s comics-chapbook novel The Walking Dead, from 2003 et seq.)
 
Romero’s previous such picture, Land of the Dead, goes so far as to channel the humane, defiant desperation of John Steinbeck, suggesting a Grapes of Wrath-like prophecy of America as a Third World country – harshly divided amongst a small monied class, an impoverished mass population, and a gathering horde of once-human predators, with no remedies in sight and no perceptible middle-class buffer zone. Romero, like Francis Ford Coppola with his Godfather suite or Ingmar Bergman in his film-by-film search for a Meaning of Life, has accomplished more with one recurring concern, so outlandish that it becomes plausible, than many another writer–director from either the maverick or studio-establishment ranks could perform with any succession of self-contained ideas.
 

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Capt. Marvel and Serial Retro-Mania, by Michael H. Price

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  • February 3, 2008

 

515n0admfrl-_aa240_-6397917Apart from some chronic bouts of concentrated cliffhanger enthusiasm in visits with the pioneering Texas cartoonist-turned-fine artist Frank Stack, I haven’t paid a great deal of attention in recent years to the extinct form of Hollywood filmmaking known as serials, or chapter-plays.
 
I’ve overcome that neglectful tendency lately with an assignment to deliver a foreword for IDW Publishing’s The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, Vol. 4 (due in print by March 25), which covers a stretch of 1936–1937 and thus coincides with the early-1937 release of the first Dick Tracy serial by Republic Pictures Corp. George E. Turner and I had covered the Republic Tracy in our initial volume of the Forgotten Horrors books – but a great deal of information has come to light during the nine years since that book’s last expanded edition.
 
The transplanting of Tracy from the newspapers’ comics pages to the big screen figures in an earlier installment of this ComicMix column. So no point in re-hashing all that here, or in spilling any fresher insights that will appear in the IDW Tracy edition.
 
Anyhow, I had expected that these strictly-research refresher screenings of Republic’s Dick Tracy and Dick Tracy Returns and so forth would bring on an attack of Serial Burnout Syndrome – but no such. If anything, the resurrected Tracy cliffhangers have stoked a level of interest that I hadn’t experienced since I had been granted my first looks at the Republic serials via teevee in 1966. (Those attractions were feature-lengther condensations, roughly half or less the running time of a theatrical serial, prepared expressly for broadcast syndication, and re-titled to compound the confusion: 1936’s The Undersea Kingdom, for example, hit the tube as Sharad of Atlantis.)
 
I had wondered aloud while comparing notes recently with Frank Stack, whose lifelong fondness for the serials influences his own approach to storytelling, as to how Dick Tracy in particular could have adapted so brightly to movie-serial form – given that Republic’s adaptation had altered many key elements of Chester Gould’s comic strip. Frank’s lucid reply:
 

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