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The Burning Bush

Big Love, Smallville, and Messianic Fiction

The spring of 2011 marks the finale of two television series that have been keeping me company for several years, each of which I feel a little misty at the thought of letting go of. Beware, traveler: herein lie spoilers for Big Love and Smallville.

The protagonists of the two programs hardly seem similar, at a passing glance. Big Love's Bill Henrickson is a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist, a family man, and an entrepreneur. Smallville's favorite son, Clark Kent, is a monogamist of undetermined Protestant stock, single, and searching for the right career.

  

But scratch the surface a little (with Kryptonite, if you must), and it's easy to see how the two characters have more than a passing resemblance to one another. Even beyond generalities one could draw regarding each program's implicit statements about the American Dream, for example, each continuity's set of thematic elements mirrors the other so well, in fact, you'd think the writing teams were each cribbing from the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index. (And heck, if one subscribes to the Campbellian monomyth theory, as does your humble host, the popular wisdom is that we're all cribbing from it, all the time, simply by being part of our own culture.)

The Secret Identity

Both Bill Henrickson and Clark Kent protect double lives, secret identities. The lies and deception that these two men, each of whom purports to rely on values such as honesty and forthrightness, are born of their iconoclastic and idiosyncratic natures. Bill is forced to hide his family life away from the American and mainstream Mormon publics that will castigate him for his lifestyle choices, while Clark must obfuscate not only his abilities, but his very species, in order to lead a normal life and to facilitate helping others.

The Prophet

This month was Lane County's annual Project Homeless Connect, described on the program's website as "a one-day, 'one-stop shop' event serving people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless." Back in 2007 I interviewed a couple of the project's clients for articles for my graduate program. That work was never published, so below I am polishing off an oldie but (I think) a goodie. Enjoy.

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Though I offer to keep it under wraps, Paul Lehman wants his full name used for this article. Paul is a poet and author, and the extra publicity can’t hurt. Paul is also a guru. Consumer-driven culture holds no appeal for Paul, so he has elected to engage in a self-imposed exile from mainstream society, to shoulder a life of contemplation, and the lifestyle of a beggar.

At the moment, Paul’s immediate concerns are more earthly in nature. His bodily vessel is hungry, so Paul has made the trek from the mobile home park, his current base of operations, to nourish it. Yes, Paul is a guru, and he dresses the part. A maroon cap bears a Tibetan-looking pattern, crowning a gaunt visage of deep, watery gray eyes and a cascading white beard. At lunchtime Paul holds court, breathlessly reciting one of his own works to a couple of volunteers, a poem about personal growth, and the beauty of truth, and a higher power, surprisingly wrapped in an almost-iambic pentameter.

Neither a free meal nor the role of supplicant are new to Paul, but then he has played many roles in his six or seven decades on this plane… choirboy, soldier, high school teacher. Once he even helped build a boardwalk over a Florida mangrove swamp. Society is a curtain across truth, says Paul, a fog obscuring our knowledge of the power of the self. “That’s why I hang out outside the system,” he grins conspiratorially.

Paul’s self-appointed job is to free the masses from “the shadows of their own poor understanding.” He is Gandalf, Merlin, Teiresias, sprung from the storybook page to sound a word of warning in these dark times.

Historically, mankind feeds and clothes its prophets out of reverence, or awe, or fear. But eventually the wise men almost always combust, set afire by the glare of the social order they serve through its subversion. But Paul does not apologize, and has adopted his own credo, codified in the words of one of his poems:

'Twas then I set aside my reason, / In favor of the moment, / And began to live / in every season / Without need of atonement.

Say, you attended a conference, right?

Why yes, Johnny. Yes, I did. A few more words on the University of Oregon's recent "Understanding Superheroes" academic conference. I'll try to keep this post Teen Titans-sized, and not one of the Justice League-length diatribes of my last couple of superposts.

Perhaps my favorite of all the conference events I've attended to this point (yes, there are more upcoming; this conference and its schedule of attendant events are massive), was the panel "Being and Super-Beings: Existentialism, Temporality, and Eschatology." I knew I was among my own when I met a dapper Ph.D. student from UC Davis name Kane (or Caine?) who was dressed to the nines in a natty shirt, blazer, and Blue Lantern ring. I also met a wheelchair-bound comics expert from Tacoma who works for Twomorrows Publishing, who not only amused me with the tale of one Halloween when he won a costume contest dressed as a motorized Sherman tank, but recognized in me a kindred spirit when he realized he didn't have to explain the meaning of the phrase "Cei-U".

Both panel presenters were excellent. Professor Beth Davies-Stofka of Excelsior College spoke on the connection of superheroes and religion, arguing that comic book heroes are not the "modern day mythology" (yawn) fanboys make them out to be, but rather are representative of humanity, the religious themselves. Reading Comics and New York Times-published author Douglas Wolk also spoke about a connection of gods and men, helping this dubious nerd locate a logical through line in Grant Morrison's sprawling, metatextual Final Crisis storyline featuring DC Comics' so-called "Fourth World." (How could I never have noticed that the Omega Effect symbols on Darkseid's gauntlets on the cover of issue #4 form a "DC"? Jeez Louise.)

Both of the presenters were gracious and engaged in taking questions after their respective presentations, even when I pushed Wolk a bit to defend what I believe to be substandard work from Morrison. Davies-Stofka and her husband were also great fun to hang out with for the rest of the weekend.

The week prior, at one of the earliest conference talks, UO law professor Dominick Vetri, spoke about the complicated legal struggle of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, to regain control of their golden goose after a rash adolescent decision to sell the character to DC Comics for $130(!) in 1938. Vetri spoke at length about the legal ins and outs of the case, a superhero-style "neverending battle" that has risen, phoenix-like, from its own ashes countless times over seven decades...and which, believe it or not, is still taking place as I type this, long after the principle actors have all passed along to that great comics bullpen in the sky.

The UpStairs Lounge: Dead Men Do Tell Tales

This article originally appeared in the Winter issue of Etude: The Journal of Literary Nonfiction.  A much expanded version of this story was incorporated into my final project for my graduate program.

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The psychic is already on his second glass of cheap red wine, and he’s been in the bar only ten minutes.

Phillip is in his late thirties, slight of stature, intense in disposition and nearly bald. He sits stoically, cloaked in the gloom of murky bar air at the head of the table, regarding his fellow ghost-hunter Kalila, her dark, straight hair bobbing as she dances along to the routine of four muscular young men, a Village People tribute group.

The costumed performers, on break from a show at a competing club down the street, are in the throes of an impromptu performance of the disco hit “Y.M.C.A.” here in Jimani Lounge, an Italian bar at Chartres and Iberville, in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Kalila seems especially enchanted by the cop character, a friendly African-American man in an incredibly tight tee shirt.

Phillip is hitting the red hard.  He’d much rather be ogling the beefcake, but he’s already picking up strong psychic impressions from the floor above, and the wine, he explains, “smoothes out the edges.”  He’s more forthcoming when pressed: wine drowns out the telepathic barrage of voices and impressions constantly battering at his consciousness. His daily intake is in the neighborhood of fifteen glasses.  Phillip makes a point of never beginning a supernatural investigation without first bellying up.

Instead of watching the high kicks, Phillip has busied himself unscrewing the top of a plastic salt shaker.  He neatly dumps the contents into a small plastic baggie he has produced from somewhere on his person. Phillip twists the baggie tightly closed and pockets it, as if squirreling away an ounce of cocaine.

“Do you believe in coincidence?” Phillip drawls at me, in an accent that reveals his backwoods Oklahoma origins. “I don’t,” he states flatly. We’re here tonight to investigate the site of the gay bar that occupied the space one floor above us in the 1970s, and Village People look-alikes “randomly” showing up feels like fate.  Or prescience.   

Just a quarter-hour ago, Phillip left his night job at Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo, a French Quarter occult supply shop catering mostly to tourists. Phillip is one of the store’s in-house psychic readers, advising vacationing secretaries and sloshed frat boys how to get laid or get loved.

 The Jimani, pronounced like “Gemini” but misspelled to incorporate the given name of its founder, Jimmy Massacci, Sr., occupies the first floor of a building whose second story once housed the UpStairs Lounge, the gay club. The UpStairs had been a gathering place for the Quarter’s nascent gay scene, even hosting homosexual-inclusive church services, until a Sunday evening in June of 1973, when someone lit an incendiary device, lobbed it into the stairwell leading up to the club and locked the street-side door from the outside.

Twenty-nine people, mostly homosexual men, died in the flames that night, while another three victims succumbed in the following days.  The destruction of the UpStairs was the most deadly fire in the city’s history, and an event that quickly evolved into a rallying point for gay rights in the Crescent City. The arsonist-murderer was never caught.

Continue reading "The UpStairs Lounge" at Etude.

Ghosts of the Future

A couple nights ago I dreamed about my departed friend Paul Carlile, and perhaps those thoughts are fueling today’s writing. 

As anyone who reads this blog for any length of time can attest, I write and blog a good deal about ghosts.  Ghosts figured centrally in my graduate school final project work, and I’ve always liked ghost stories.  Ghosts are intrinsically tragic, sad figures.   Like all the monsters of folklore, ghosts stand for something specific in the human psyche and inn our popular culture.  Emissaries of the past thrust into the present, ghosts inform us of our sorrows, our disappointments, our regrets.  Our failures.

DC Comics, home of Superman and Batman, has known this for decades, resulting in one of my favorite comic book franchises.  One of the company’s earliest heroic characters, co-created in 1940 by Superman’s proud poppa Jerry Siegel, is the Spectre, a leering, chalk-white Reaper type sporting a green hooded cloak. 

The undead spirit of a murdered police detective tasked directly by God with exacting vengeance from killers (how’s that for a secret origin?), the Spectre isn’t a particularly nice guy.  He habitually slices and dices his way through the criminal set, wreaking divine punishment that almost always ends in the perpetrator’s grisly, and often darkly ironic, death.  Yeah, ol’ Spec probably shouldn’t keep hitting ‘Refresh,’ hoping for that eVite from the Superfriends Membership Committee.  The Spectre represents remorse, and sadness, and anger over past mistakes.  The Spectre represents human emotion in a much more visceral fashion than the usual capes-and-tights types.