Welcome, happy campers! Warm and fuzzy memories of the Arts & Crafts tent mix with Brooklyn’s art scene at this year’s Renegade Craft Fair, June 22-23rd in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. After a long hike through forests of crafty goodness, you’ve earned a seat at the campfire. Bask in its warmth under the shadows of totem poles representing Brooklyn’s vibrant local artists, or keep cool with your troop in the tents.

This very weekend you can join me at the Renegade Craft Fair where, in addition to the possibility of getting all your holiday shopping done before Labor Day, you can stop by my installation, Camp Renegade! With the immense help of my friends, we’ve created a walk-through mini-camp where you can park your butt, hang out in the tipi (teepee? tepee? So many variants), or see ridiculously tall totem poles in their natural glory (instead of crammed in my living room as seen above)!

I volunteered to set up an installation at Renegade because I’ve genuinely enjoyed visiting the fair in the past. A lot of craft fairs…how can I say this delicately…have a high tchochke-to-object d’art-ratio. Renegade features the creme-de-la-creme of crafters, including brevity,  Susanne Layton, Chez Sucre Chez, and Dea Dia Jewelry  who I believe just joined this year. So come on down for a weekend full of fun, crafts and potential sunstroke (stay hydrated people)!

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This one reminds me of that Hemingway 6-word baby shoes story, but much, much sadder. ‘Cathy shirt, 2X, NEVER WORN.

It’s the background that really takes this to Spencer’s Gift-level depressing. Remember when Spencer’s Gift was more a dad-joke/gag/cheap magic trick store? Now it’s like walking into Tommy Lee’s head, or a bachelorette party underway at Egypt on the Waterfront in Jersey.

Why announce it as a title then?

What does this all mean? Warning signs of things to come at the Renegade Craft Fair, June 22-23rd.

Several friends were slated to play back-to-back all-cover shows, first at Glasslands, then around the corner at Death By Audio. For the unfamiliar, all-cover Halloween shows are a delightful recent tradition, whereby all bands playing are strictly covering another well-known band’s songs, usually dressed up as & behaving like that band. The Misfits are a wildly popular choice here, though most can’t get the Lodi accent right. My friends were playing as…I’m not actually sure what name they went under that night, but they were a Go-Gos cover band and batted around The Go-Guys, Go-Guhs and We Got The Meat(ewwww). Other Glassland bands covered The Cramps, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, and oddly, Witchfinder General (didn’t think they were popular enough to warrant a cover band, but then life can be full of pleasant surprises). It was a crammed roster full of bands. Death By Audio had a showcase of just 4 bands doing full sets of songs, including a gender-switched Joy Division that worked despite initial doubts about female vocals hitting the low range (and unfortunately she couldn’t resist wearing a noose tie, which was expected but still tacky), and a MOST excellent Ramones who got EVERYTHING right, including a) announcing ‘Thanks, we’re The Ramones’ between every song, b) Dee-Dee in a half-shirt, c) no one making eye contact with any other member but glaring straight ahead. Genius. Both shows became insanely packed once word got out they were happening, and to Brooklyn’s credit, 95% of attendees had decent costumes (and no, a lone mask or glitter bowler hat does not a costume make. Fake cat ears + tail with a sexy dress is also debatable as to whether it’s a costume or a cry for help).

The shows went well, everyone had a damn fine Halloween with plenty of treats to make up for Nature’s vicious trick, and that seemed to be that. But having practiced all those songs for so long it seemed a shame not to do anything with it. So my friends went ahead and released a full cassette, available here. And then they had a bunch of footage left over from the photo shoot for the cassette, and it seemed a shame not to do anything with it, which is how I ended up editing a music video out of it for them.

1959′s ‘Beat Girl’ has enough high hair and dated teenage slang to enjoy purely for camp, but underneath all the eye makeup is a somber reflection on post-WWII malaise. ‘Beat Girl’ opens with an already-tenuous home situation completely breaking down when distant, wealthy dad brings home hot new Parisian wife Nicole to meet his daughter, Jennifer. Jennifer’s already estranged from her father, rebelling and hanging with the beatnik scene down at her art school’s local coffee house instead of swizzling drinks with dad’s upper-crust clients. Young wife Nicole tries her best to bridge the gap – she impresses Jennifer’s friends with her knowledge of jazz and responds to Jennifer’s cruel comments with kindness, but Jennifer only resents her intrusion. When a woman from the strip club across the street comes into the coffee house and greets Nicole like an old friend, Jennifer investigates further and gets tangled up with the club’s classy sleazeball owner, played with perfect oiliness by a young Christopher Lee. Nicole and Jennifer circle each other, drawn more tightly into a tangled web of blackmail. Through a last-act burst of violence, Jennifer’s tough-girl act falls apart and her family finally comes together. In between there’s plenty of teenage kicks – games of chicken, hot rods, and lots of spazztastic dancing:

The unique charm of ‘Beat Girl’ is seeing America’s Beat Generation layered over English culture. The film was released in 1959 in England, 1960 in America, and shows English youth embracing the Beats’ detachedness, their rejection of ‘proper’ social markers like money, a steady job, and all signs of traditional Englishness. There’s a panicked edge to showing the teen’s beatnik ways, as if warning viewers hanging out at coffee shops could lead to NOT DRINKING (as when a musician tosses his friend’s bottle away declaring ‘drinking’s for squares’) and NOT FIGHTING (when a group of toughs destroys the friends’ jalopy, the owner says ‘If you wanna fight, JOIN THE ARMY’ before walking away). Horror! What could be less English than NOT DRINKING (NOT EVEN TEA! Just coffee)! That would’ve been a great tag line for the movie’s poster: They WON’T DRINK! They WON’T FIGHT! THEY’LL DANCE! (The actual posters were far more misleading and lurid, but more on that in a bit).

There’s a reason for the teens’ embracing of Beat culture beyond getting to use ridiculous slang at every opportunity – these were the children who survived the Blitz. The film’s most telling scene takes place at a ‘cave stomp’, held in a club’s sub-basement. Bored with the music, Jennifer’s friends move away from the action and talk about where they are, not a cave but a fallout shelter. The space reminds one lanky musician of his childhood ‘playground’: “When [the bombing] was over I played on the bomb sites. Down in the cellars amongst the rats. This here’s a home away from home for me.” Another describes seeing his mother killed right next to him; his father, abroad with the army as General, only came home after, decorated in medals. These teens’ entire childhoods were running for shelters, nightly bombings, houses suddenly destroyed in the middle of quiet neighborhoods. After the war, the older generation coped by immediately settling back into pre-war ways, keeping a ‘stiff upper lip’, almost pretending nothing happened to avoid facing the war’s horrors. Now, on the brink of becoming adults themselves, the teens want a severe break. It’s no wonder Jennifer declares with venom she hates everything about adults’ lives, that she rejects it utterly and that she and her friends are ‘free’. Breaking from society may ostracize them, but they’re ‘free’ from what they see as the root cause of the war.

Of course, that’s not how the film was marketed.

The movie was released in the U.S. as ‘WILD FOR KICKS!’, and while, yes, the hedonistic/nihilistic attitude of the youths was certainly kicks-centric, that’s not really what the movie’s about.

NOR IS IT AT ALL ABOUT BECOMING A STRIPPER. You’d walk into this film thinking you were about to watch ‘Striptease’ and you’d get a war of wills between two young women…wait, that’s also what ‘Striptease’ was about…you get what I mean.

And who could resist the lurid fearmongering of ‘THIS COULD BE YOUR TEENAGE DAUGHTER!’. Why the emphasis is on ‘TEENAGE’ and not ‘YOUR’ I’m unsure – perhaps this is all socially acceptable behavior for 20-somethings and 10-year-olds. Also, the lady on all three posters appears in the movie for a grand total of 5 minutes.

You can watch the entire movie on YouTube here. In the words of the youths, it’s ”great, dad, great! Straight from the fridge!” “I’m WAYYYY out!”

The novel is a strange work- a tale of thwarted revenge and unhappiness stretching across generations told two steps removed from most characters involved. ‘Strange’ and ‘power’ are the two words used most frequently in early critical reviews; in contrast to the era’s florid novels of innocent women threatened, Wuthering Heights’ stark brutality, the ambiguous morals of its characters and their sad fates made for difficult reading. Of course, the same holds true for the modern age- adaptations of the novel tend to lop off the second half’s complex interweaving of families and relationships in favor of focusing on the first half’s tragic romance. That the novel’s been adapted so many times is bizarre in itself – why take the trouble to squish an unusual story into a more conventional format, not once but over and over again?

It could be the story’s raw power, attested to even by its major critics, but my theory as to why there’s over 12 film versions of Wuthering Heights, not to mention several adaptations to stage, is that the roles of Heathcliff and Cathy are actor catnip. Compare them to the juiciest stage roles for gents and ladies – Hamlet and Lady Macbeth. For the gents, you have free leave to be a melancholy jerk under the guise of SERIOUS SADNESS (dead dad on one side, thwarted love/dead lover on the other), and for the ladies you get to be absolutely un-ladylike (grab for power/raw nature), then play at being a lady but with lots of guilt and anguish,  then SUPERNATURAL STUFF (specifically: ghooooooosts)! Scene-chewy goodness all around- plenty of spots to soliloquize about GRAND EMOTIONS and DEEPLY FELT PASSIONS and how those lesser losers just don’t understand ANY OF IT, GOD. Again, Wuthering Heights adaptations focus not on the fallout of actions upon the next generation, but on the doomed romance of Heathcliff and Cathy who doom their own romance instead of an outside force ripping them apart. Or maybe Culture ripped them apart; this isn’t English 102 and that’s not the point.

The point is much like Doctor Who or James Bond, Heathcliff is the rare character whose facets shine through the variety of actors taking on the role. A special award for Hat Trick goes to Timothy Dalton, who played James Bond, Heathcliff and not technically The Doctor but Lord President of all Time Lords so, close enough. The role’s also been played by Laurence Olivier, Ian McShane, Ralph Finnes and….Cliff Richard. Yes, the English Elvis, the Young One himself, wrote and starred in Heathcliff, a musical retelling of Wuthering Heights presented as ‘evidence’ to the audience for YOU to decide what kind of man Heathcliff really is.

Either I’m grossly misremembering video capability from 1997 (the year ‘Titanic’ and ‘The 5th Element’ came out) or the choice to have this staging look like a Lifetime movie from 1986 was intentional.

Did I say Lifetime movie? I mean Sunday morning public access worship hour.

The music is….let’s just put it this way, there’s a lot of synth keyboard. And not the good German kind, I mean the kind backing Christian-themed R&B from the early 90s. Cliff is certainly earnest as Heathcliff, but I kept getting distracted by his facial hair and sartorial choices.

(so many lapels…)

The same goes for the entire production – much like the Broadway staging of ‘Phantom of the Opera’, a lot of the story’s horror and power are lost through the very medium chosen to deliver it- bombastic stage musical. It’s paradoxical that music, which has the ability to reach emotion more readily and directly than other mediums, combined with live theater’s visceral presence and the depth of  written word results in a maudlin, campy mess nearly every time. Could it be compromise made between the three mediums cancels out the strengths of each, leaving only weak middle ground to tread? Possibly the ‘language’ of staged musicals could be cheesy, with music demanding high energy to correlate with high emotion, making ridiculous what the theater/written word would get across with quiet strength. The parts could be inherently at odds. Then again I love Judas’ death scene in ‘J.C. Superstar’, so the synthesis can be done well.

This really looks like a fade-in from a Christian music video.

The entire production is available to watch on YouTube, but all you really need to see are the first 20 seconds of this:

I don’t believe the intent was to sound like Don Cornelius, but that is definitely the effect.

Brood on, devil incarnate/misunderstood man.

• Noble And Most Grandiloquent Assembly of Sweatpants

 

• Ancient and Accepted Masters Of Casual Fridays

 

• The Honorable And Benevolent Society of Thin Crust

 

• Women’s Benevolent Brunchers

 

• The International Brotherhood Of Fedoras

 

• Most Secret Order Of The Mysteries Of Jenga

 

• Sisterhood Of The Downward Facing Dog

 

• Native Sons Of Sudbury, MA

 

• The Charitable Patrons of Unsolicited Advice

 

• Knights of the Squat Rep

 

• The Reverent and Independent Assemblage of MSTies

 

• The Illuminati – Old Bridge, NJ Chapter

 

• The Grand Sacred Lodge Of Pancakes

So imagine my surprise when, reading an article about futuristic abandoned buildings, I see THIS:

(no, not the giant spacedong building.)

This is in WEST GERMANY! Up a crag whose name translates as ‘The Devil’s Mountain’! HOW DID THIS GET THERE? The obvious answer is, whoever YOU GO GIRL! is took a trip to Germany and brought their spraycan with them. Still, it’s so strange seeing something closely tied to my neighborhood and everyday commute in a different country, in such a random context.