Uncrustable

The lunch of the future. Fear it. (For full horrible effect, read the FAQ.)

Invisible In the Magic Kingdom, part VI

At last, and as ever, damn everything but the circus—Cirque du Soleil, in this case. The style is emblematically European: there’s always more going on than can be comfortably perceived at once, and much of it is cheerfully, pointlessly surreal. There’s some intellectual riffing on the traditional motifs of clowning, much arrogant posturing, and pretension you could cut with a knife. It’s art for art’s sake, undeniably beautiful to look at but hermetic—dramatic imagery that seemed fraught with meaning but whose symbolism is too obscure to be properly representational.

When it’s not about animals or vaudeville, the circus is about the glorification of the human body and its abilities (which many people find in sports, though I never have). And when the troupe started pulling of Matrix-style running-up-walls tricks in real time, with no more high-tech effects than a trampoline, I started thinking: This is what it must be like to see superheroes. And when a ropy, bare-chested man in white jeans wrapped himself in Kieslowski-red silk and hurtled through the air above us, draperies billowing behind him like a cape, the connection was explicit: this was what it’d be like to see Superman for real. (Requires QuickTime)

Invisible In the Magic Kingdom, part V

If the development of Downtown Disney dismays me, at least it does not baffle me. If I were from Podunk, Disneyworld might be my only chance to experience a Wolfgang Puck meal, or the House of Blues, or Planet Hollywood. But I’m fortunate enough to live near major cities, and goddammit, I did not haul my ass through the snow to Florida just to eat smoked duck & goat-cheese pizza.

And I despise the recent, swift shift of focus on Walt Disney World from a place to do stuff to a place to buy stuff. What was a Magic Kingdom becomes instead Magnifico, City of Malls.

Invisible In the Magic Kingdom, part IV

p>Disney-MGM Studios was hugely enjoyable for the film geek in me. The highlight was surely standing outside a mock-up of the famous Mann’s Chinese Theatre, trying to find a pair of footprints into which I could fit my own enormous shoes—and discovering that I matched The Rocketeer’s bootprints perfectly.
I LIKE it!

From a kiosk in Disney’s Animal Kingdom I bought a small bronze figurine of Ganesh that now occupies a place of pride on my computer.



The figurine, by the way, looks nothing like this image.

Also at Animal Kingdom: “Tarzan Rocks!” Billed as “a concert event,” it was an attempt to co-opt the power and energy of rock ‘n’ roll that utterly failed to do so, for all its weird over-the-topness. It didn’t feel like a rock concert at all, despite a competent and highly visible band.

The show failed, I think because rock ‘n’ roll is ultimately at least in part about the cult of personality. And Disney’s performers, though highly skilled and enthusiastic, are studiedly anonymous—by design, in fact: there are no program guides, no credit books— you literally don’t know who these people are. The guitarist, for instance, did all the classic rock-star preening and posturing: but his poses, unlike, say Jimmy Page’s, rang hollow—because they didn’t reflect any personality: at least, not one that we knew...

(That guitarist bore a chance resemblance to David Knopfler, ex of Dire Straits—I joked with D that the Disney gig was probably the best he could get now: but a quick Google search reveals that in fact David Knopfler is now, God help us all, a web designer.)

Our hotel TV had dozens of channels, but it may has well have gotten only two, for all we watched. Meteorologist was speaking of “a highly organized weather system out West.” Oh, God—look out! It’s the West Coast Weather Mafia!

Invisible In the Magic Kingdom, part III

Don’t know if you’d call this a meme exactly, or a 23-style perceptual trick, but during our trip the stylized S-in-a-pentagon symbol of Superman seemed ubiquitous—on ball-caps, T-shirts, jackets, and tattoos both temporary and permanent. In both the classic yellow-and-red and the more abstract Kingdom Come version, there were dozens of sighting over eight days. What can it mean?

Post-Pocahontas whitewash aside, I still found the Magic Kingdom’s Adventureland and Frontierland disturbing. They’re built around unreconstructably racist colonial notions of “taming the land,” which translates readily into White Man killing Red Man and Black Man. Surely these notions were ethically problematic even in 1971?

The Disney organization itself seems to have given up on these two areas. Surely a tie-in with the rootin’ tootin’ cowboy Woody of the phenomenally popular Toy Story movies would be a boost for Frontierland, but he is nowhere to be seen there (though he’s a fixture at the Disney-MGM Studios park). Surely attractions themed to Tarzan and The Lion King would draw visitors to the jungle setting of Adventureland, but there are none there (though both are represented in lavish shows at Disney’s Animal Kingdom park).

Fine. If you’re going to let these areas die, good luck and it's about time: but do it, already. Get the bulldozers in there. Letting them hang on, while tacking on a few messages about “cultural sensitivity,” only compounds the damage. All the official back-pedaling just makes the ugliness of the original conceits that much more glaring.

Invisible In the Magic Kingdom, part II

What place for the futurist at Disneyworld? Nostalgia is WDW’s lifeblood--from Main Street USA (hearkening back to the “good old days” that never were) all the way down the line. I think it was completely intentional: in 1971 (the year WDW opened) nobody, but nobody thought the Future was seriously going to be all Art Deco stainless steel parabolas and skinny typefaces: that was already a retro vision of the future, the future predicted by the 1939 World's Fair. It's a a retro-future that shows up often in comics, from ZOT! to Terminal City

And it was a savvy move on Disney's part—because that retro style is a goddam sight more appealing than the functional, dull architecture and design that we've got in the “real” 2001. We still recognize the Deco flourishes of Tomorrowland as quote-unquote "futuristic" simply because they don't look anything like that which we see around us in Todayland.

The most horrendously dated (and ugly!) design at Disneyworld can be found at the so-called “Contemporary” Resort. Make of that what you will.

If anything, Tomorrowland made me impatient and discontent with the utilitarian ugliness that is to be our lot for years to come. Warren Ellis is right: if this is the Future, it’s fucking boring. It’s the Twenty-First Century! Our lives should be bright and shiny! All our music should be charming bloopy-bleepy Moog synthesizers! Our every waking moment should be a Main Street Electrical Parade!

Despite its reputation as a kitschy horrorshow, I liked “It’s A Small World”— the riot of details, the icon-making, the sheer blown weirdness of it. And (although the execution is admittedly not great) the attraction’s sound design touched on some ideas about melding music with radio-drama production techniques—using the studio itself as an arranbging tool, creating the sense of travel through sound design: the forground, the tune, remains constant, but the background keeps shifting—here a Latin beat, here African drums, here a dijiridu, here a balalaika—such that the melody is continually recontextualized: song as tracking shot.

In fact, we rode it twice.

Resurrecting a dead Internet meme, pointless and silly and dated as it is, because it still makes me laugh and because it reminds me of the bus driver who enlivened a tedious ride: Carlos, this one’s for you. (Requires QuickTime)

Invisible In the Magic Kingdom, part I

Couple weeks ago I finally got around to buying Miles Davis’ Birth Of The Cool disc. Listened to it nonstop for about three days; in its complex, bop-inflected melodies and thick textures (nine-piece band!), it’s far denser and more structured than Kind Of Blue, but just as immediately alluring and just as relistenable—it’s beautiful at first glance, and grows moreso the longer you look.

We listened to it in the car on the way to the airport... and so began our journey to the House of the Mouse...

Impressions from a journey south
First off: apologies to Carla Speed McNeil, whom I love dearly and whose work I adore—but for my own good, I probably shouldn’t have seen this before we left...

The good folks at New England Comics supplied us with reading material for the trip. For me it was a Transmet trade and Bendis’ Torso—which, despite some overstriving dialogue, pisses on Sin City from a great height, not least because it’s (mostly) true. For Claire, volume one of the magnificent Akiko.

The resort was a crackhead cartoon version of the old French Quarter.
The thing about Disneyworld is that there’s always music, everywhere: drifting from hidden speakers in the parks, the restaurants, the resorts. Even on the trains. Even on the wildlife pathways.

At Port Orleans, the motif was jazz, but modern jazz: there was a sprinkling of Dixieland, but overwhelmingly—and I mean at least every other song I heard—it was Birth Of The Cool. We spent the better part of eight days soaking up that album along with the Orlando sunshine.

(It’s funny, of course, because Miles had nothing to do with New Orleans: he was born and raised in Illinois and cut his musical teeth in New York city, bebop’s Ground Zero.)

Poetry Clinic: We Who Love The Sun

Hey. Long time no blog. Lots of ruminations on our recent DisneyWorld sojourn coming up: but let’s ease back in with this month’s Poetry Clinic patient—more’n a day late and more’n a dollar short, I know.

Another song lyric this time: ramshackle rapid-stammer garage-rock with a pseudo-uplifting chorus. In like a lion, don’cha know... this one’s called

We Who Love The Sun

I’ve been up all night but I lie here still
counting the crows that feed upon the roadkill
and I count one for sorrow I count two for joy
and I count three for a girl and I count four for a boy
and I count five for poverty and six for wealth
and I’m laid out on the grass still lying where I fell

the moon is falling
the clouds are breaking
and we who love the sun will see her face again

for fifteen days and nights it has been gray wherever I looked
the sky was like Antarctica hung upside down on hooks
in its continental contours it would crush us if it fell
we’ve been looking at that blankness like we’re chickens in the shell
but yesterday the rain hung strings of pearls across the trees
and at nightfall I could catch a hint of ocean on the breeze

the sky is cracking
the chill is fading
and we who love the sun will see her face again

I’m lying in the wet grass about a quarter-mile from dead
the sky along the eastern edge grows pink above my head
and somewhere there is singing and I’m crawling to my feet
my bones hold up my body like a clothesline holds a sheet
and the crows out on the roadside are still divvying up their meat
and the wind is in the pines and it is sweet sweet sweet sweet

the dawn is breaking
the wind is rising
and we who love the sun will see her face again

Loved it? Hated it? Suggestions for improvement? Talking points? Let me know...