Arts District: Scene's Arts Blog

There’s a category of books that get sent to all the alternative newspapers in the country because the publishers of said books believe that we’re all total suckers for whatever wacky outrageousness they can print. Books that have come across the Scene arts desk recently include a slew in this category, from The Book of Beer Pong (Ben Applebaum and Dan Disorbo, Chronicle Books, 2009) to a children’s board book style gag gift called Penis Pokey Activity Book (Christopher Behrens, Quirk Books, 2009) which featured a die cut hole in the middle of each page—big enough, the designer presumes, for Roger Thomas to poke through. The picture book provides the context; and the ‘reader’ provides what’s missing, be it a banana, a sea serpent, or a bratwurst.

Margaret McGuire’s The Quotable Douchebag—a compendium of “spectacularly stupid remarks,” with 144 pages of large print quotations—teeters on the edge of this literary genre. It’s great sport to marvel at the ludicrous things people sometimes say, and in many of the cases here the words spoken do represent very high level douchebaggery which earns the speaker the title.

For example, talk show host Bill O’Reilly: “I’ve been in combat. I’ve seen it, I’ve been close to it. And if I’m—my unit is in danger, and I got a captured guy, and the guy knows where the enemy is, and I’m looking him in the eye, the guy better tell me . . . If it’s life or death, he’s going first.”

But of course Bill O’Reilly never actually even served in the military, and certainly was no combat veteran. Liar. Douchebag.

Then you’ve got his colleague Sean Hannity, leading public discussion down the toilet in his own special way: “I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo: every filthy democrat in the U.S. Congress.”

Party hack. Douchebag.

There are also elected officials like Dan Quayle, who’s quoted as saying, “The holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.”

Huh? Douchebag.

Sprinkled among the quotations from people who earned the “douchebag” title by the relentless piling on of similar verbal garbage throughout their public careers are a few people who have said some stupid, egotistical things but who surely don’t deserve inclusion in a collection like this.

Sure, the novelist Milan Kundera said “I find myself fascinating,” and that betrays quite an ego. But hundreds of thousands of other people no doubt find him fascinating, too. He’s written 11 novels, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Douchebag? I think not. Certainly not to be placed alongside Don “That’s some nappy headed hos there” Imus, which The Quotable Douchebag does.

The Quotable Douchebag is at least funny, even if it’s not the ultimate authority on who qualifies. Whether we agree with all the choices or not, McGuire gets props both for documenting some of the well worn examples of douchebaggery (Leona Helmsley ‘s “Only the little people pay taxes”) to revealing fragments that slipped by without much notice, like Justin Timberlake’s response when Rolling Stone asked what was the best thing he’d read all year.

“What,” Timberlake responded, “you mean like a book?”

Zygote Press director Liz Maugans is getting ready to show some new work in Germany. She and Bellamy Prinz are the artists participating this year in Zygote press’s annual Dresden Exchange program, an artist swap with a commercial print making studio in Dresden, the Grafikwerkstaat. Later in the fall, the Dresden shop will send a couple of artists here.

Maugans’ new work is the printed evidence of her musings on the economy and the way words —manipulated, associated, and even cropped, can address it. She’s using a new letterpress technique to print words —in one case “Hedge Fund”— but arranging them to shift their meaning. She's doing similar work with engraved copper plates.

Maugans has always worked with the innuendo between pictures and associated words, lately—as in a recent show at Zygote dealing with middle age and marriage—emphasizing the words. In her “Hedge Fund” piece she was cropping off the first and last letter of the phrase to make a new one—edge fun—that calls attention to the risky gamble that investment has become.

Prinz and Maugans will be joined by three other Northeast Ohio print makers—Jen Craun, Shelly DiCello, and Lisa Schonberg—who will show their work in NEO5: Graphics from Zygote Press, which opens next Friday at Galerie Drei in Dresden. Prinz and Maugans leave Cleveland Sunday for the three-week residency.

The Bang and the Clatter Theater is not packing it in, as Scene theatre critic Christine Howey heard from co-director Sean McConaha earlier this month, but the company is proceeding on what he describes as “a show by show” basis.

McConaha had called Howey to tell her a production of John Kolvenback’s On An Average Day, scheduled to open August 7 at the Akron venue, was canceled, and that the theater was going to suspend operations. “The business issues are a tax credit we didn’t get, the foundations are dried up, and audiences are smaller,” McConaha said.

The tax credit he’s referring to, for adaptation of a historic building for their new Sometimes in the Silence theater on Euclid at East 4th Street, would have amounted to $130,000 to $140,000, McConaha said.

“When we opened last April, we expected to get that money. It wasn’t if but when,” he explained.
Bang and Clatter’s pace of eight Ohio premiere productions per year had earned critical acclaim and generated buzz enough to get their Cleveland space rent free from developer MRN LTD. The theater company had to pay construction costs, and the project’s $700,000 budget was bolstered by a $250,000 loan from the City of Cleveland. But Bang and Clatter was not incorporated in Cuyahoga County in time to qualify for an operating grant from Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Without the money they expected from the tax credit, they’re left living show-to-show: “We’re just going to try to just basically pay for the next show with money from this show,” McConaha said.

That next play, Adam Rapp’s Bingo with the Indians (which happens to be about a cash-strapped theater company) is scheduled to open Thursday at Sometimes in the Silence Theatre (224 Euclid Ave., 330.606.5317). — Michael Gill

BACK TO SCHOOL SPECIAL
Fahrenheit 451, re-born as a graphic novel.
By Michael Gill

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
authorized graphic novel by Tim Hamilton
Farrar, Straus, and Giraux, July, 2009
$16.95

Fifty-six years after it was first published, high school kids are still reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the novel named for the temperature at which paper spontaneously catches fire. The novel tells of a world in which “firemen” have been re-purposed, their jobs being no longer to put out fires, but to start them to eliminate books— which in the story’s dystopian world have been outlawed.

The novel has been repeatedly recast in different media: a film by Francois Truffaut, Bradbury’s own stage adaptation (last seen around here in a Beck Center production about a decade ago), even a computer game. The latest is Tim Hamilton’s graphic novel version, which Bradbury authorized, and for which he wrote an introduction. The story’s most chilling message—that in this dystopian world it wasn’t dictatorial authorities that mandated the burning of books, but instead a grass-roots mandate in the interest of equalizing the population—remains intact, as do the original book’s other key scenes and cautionary points.

The key attraction is the art: Hamilton’s drawings have a dramatic, well-detailed comic book style that realistically create’s the story’s world and uses the multi-panel format to shift perspectives on a scene. It’s luxuriously presented, too, in full color with full bleeds that make Montag’s fires, thoughts, and relationship with 17 year-old Clarisse spill off the page.

One of the key figures in the ’80s jazz resurgence that introduced the world to Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Donald Harrison and many others, New Orleans-born trumpeter Terence Blanchard fell in love with the instrument at an early age. He started his career as a sideman with Lionel Hampton and Art Blakley’s Messengers (replacing childhood friend Wynton Marsalis). He pursued a solo career in the ’90s. Not long after, he connected with movie director Spike Lee and has since written scores for every one of Lee’s films (starting with 1991’s Jungle Fever). Blanchard also appeared in Lee’s poignant 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, recalling a return to his hometown, where his mother’s house was completely destroyed. Blanchard has been busy writing movie scores (he now has more than 40 of them on his résumé), but he remains faithful to his jazz roots by regularly performing with his quintet. His current tour includes cuts from the Grammy-awarded Requiem, but he’s also throwing in some fan favorites. Blanchard performs tonight and tomorrow at 7 and 9 p.m. at Nighttown (12387 Cedar Rd., Cleveland Hts., 216.795.0550). Tickets: $25. — Ernest Barteldes

In the early ’90s, George Takei — Star Trek’s original Mr. Sulu — guest-starred on 3rd Rock from the Sun, playing himself at a sci-fi convention. But Takei has done more than just milk his most famous role. On I’m a Celebrity! Get Me Out of Here! last year, he lived in the Australian jungle for 21 days. His big baritone voice also landed him a stint on The Howard Stern Show. That voice and those Star Trek creds make him the perfect narrator for the Cleveland Orchestra’s Sci-Fi Spectacular program tonight. The show features music from Star Wars, ET, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Superman, 2001: A Space Odyssey and, of course, Star Trek. Jack Everly conducts. Showtime is 7 p.m. at Blossom Music Center (1145 W. Steels Corners Rd., Cuyahoga Falls, 216.231.1111). Tickets: $21-$87. — Michael Gill

The Cleveland Jazz Orchestra is currently between directors, since its former leader, trumpeter Jack Schantz, stepped down. Incoming director Sean Jones — a trumpeter from Warren who teaches jazz at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University when he’s not performing with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra — hasn’t taken over yet. So another trumpet player, David Banks, will take over at the group’s outdoor concert tonight. Banks made a career in Las Vegas for more than 20 years before returning to Ohio, where he now teaches at Walsh Jesuit High School. In addition to his gig with the CJO, he performs with the Jazz Unit and Ernie Krivda’s Fat Tuesday Big Band and leads the Dave Banks Big Band. The Cleveland Jazz Orchestra performs at 6 p.m. at the Gazebo in Hudson (routes 91 and 303 in Hudson, 216.521.2540). It’s free. — Michael Gill