Der Ring Gott Farblunjet

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

One evening in May 1987, we passed the Ridiculous Theatrical Company on Barrow St. in Greenwich Village and saw flowers piled up on the sidewalk. What was going on?

We found out at the Sheridan Square newsstand. The Times reported—on its front page—that Charles Ludlam, the gentle wit who ran the company, author and star of Bluebeard and Camille, had died of AIDS at age 44.

We gasped. How could it be? So many people died of AIDS in that vile year. And now Ludlam. Greenwich Village would never be the same.

Our only consolation was that Ludam had done a lot in the time he had.

A Long Island kid, Ludlam moved to the city in his 20s and joined John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous. He co-authored two plays with Vaccaro, then left and formed the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.

Blessed with a gift for friendship, Ludlam gathered several talented players around him, including Everett Quinton (who kept the theater going after Ludlam’s death), Black-Eyed Susan, John Brockmeyer, Bill Vehr and Lola Pashilinski. Moving from one theater to another, they did plays like Turds in Hell, Hot Ice, Corn, Caprice and many more.

In Bluebeard, a mad scientist named Bluebeard tries to create a third sex: His failed experiments wander the island. I can still hear the one played by John Brockmeyer pleading, “Mercy, master!”

In Camille, Ludlam played the Greta Garbo role, dressed in a gown with his hairy chest visible, and he went over the top as Camille died of consumption. First he spit up blood (how was a trade secret). Then there was this Villagey double entendre:

Camille (weakly): I’m cold. Throw another faggot on the fire.

Servant: Madame, there are no more faggots.

Camille (with sudden strength): What! Not even on the street?!

What spectacles they were. And when Ludlam wasn’t doing them, he was entertaining kids with Punch and Judy shows and science fiction pieces. Still to come were The Mystery of IrmaVep and Gallas (in which he played Maria Callas in drag).

But let’s turn the clock back—to 1978. That’s when a magazine sent me down to interview Ludlam. At first, I was intimidated by the balding and goateed legend, but he quickly put me at ease with his enthusiasm and charm.

It was a good time for Ludlam. He was rehearsing a new play, Utopia Incorporated, and he had found a theatrical home in the basement theater on Barrow (the former Café Society Downtown nightclub).

“The lobby looks just fantastic,” he said as we sat down. “Did you see the mural? I’m in ecstasy. I’ve never in my life seen anything so fabulous.”

Someone handed around a bottle of corn liquor, and we all had a slug. Apropos of nothing, Ludlam mentioned the Pink Teacup, a soul food restaurant on Bleecker St.

“The waitresses are really outrageous right now,” he said. “They’re all in pink uniforms, and all the teacups are pink.”

I responded that they were vandalized when they tried to open on another block.

“Not every part of the country is as advanced as the West Village,” Ludlam said. “And of the whole West Village, Bleecker Street has to be the fever pitch of civilization.”

Here at the height of his powers is Charles Ludlam.

RS: There’s one thing I don’t get about Utopia Incorporated. If they’ve been cut off in Utopia for thousands of years, how could the hero have been swindled by the outsider’s father?

Ludlam: Right. It’ll all make sense in the end, though. The theory behind it is that there is a matrix of plot types. I no longer tell a story, I tell a type of story. And all things that accrue to that type of story can coexist in it. For instance, there is a type of story that might be roughly called the Enchanted Arcadia or Lost Horizon. The Tempest is that kind of story, The Wizard of Oz, the Time Machine, any going to Mars or any other planet, like Forbidden Planet. Usually, through some kind of natural holocaust or phenomenon, they get stranded in a strange world where time has stopped, or where they’re more advanced than we are, or behind us, or better than us, or worse than us. And they have a series of adventures within that world. Then they have the problem of getting out of there. Often the thing is destroyed in the end, and usually it is ruled by some kind of Wizard who holds some kind of mad power. So I get a plot type, and rather than tell a convincing story, which ties me down to logic, I encrust the plot type with all the possibilities even though they contradict each other.

RS: Do you mean it as a comment on the genre?

Ludlam: In a way, but I want not so much to comment on it as use it to my own advantage as artist. You don’t have to be literal in modern art. The techniques are based on reduction, distortion, rearrangement and collision of aesthetic principles. But modernism has never really been successful in playwriting because people could never get over this hump of the story. If you regard the story the way Picasso regarded the human figure or a bowl of fruit, then you become free.

RS: And this all falls under the heading ridiculous?

Ludlam: The name is sort of a fluke. Someone at a John Vaccaro rehearsal said, ‘This is ridiculous,’ and we just called it that. But I was interested in comedy and getting people to laugh, creating a really rich, baroque experience, a grandiose kind of theater, and to provoke a sort of moldy glamour.

RS: The broad brush…

Ludlam: I don’t really like subtlety. If you do away with subtlety and replace it with complexity, you can get something unbelievably rich and interesting. But we’ve never codified what the Ridiculous is into a theory or a hard cold notion. Like an amoeba, it changes shape and becomes different things. We do grand opera, we do nightclubs, we do variety acts. We tap dance. In one show, we do high tragedy. In Ventriloquist, I saw Susan in half.

RS: What were you trying to do with Der Ring Gott Farblonjet?

Ludlam: I followed the plot of the Wagner ‘Ring’ cycle and distilled it into something you could do in one night. We did a modernist interpretation of it. We had a small orchestra of musicians who played five instruments each. All the Valkyries had horns. The highest moment was the Wedding March, with Black-Eyed Susan as Gertruna, Ethyl Eichelberger as Gunther and John Brockmeyer as Siegfried. They do this wedding procession, and Susan’s dress was all these sheer plastic veils that we painted—you could see through the plastic. She was like walking stark naked to her wedding. And she had this headdress on of twinkling lights and these Nibelungen, these potato people, were carrying her veil, and they were all carrying these swans. When they went off, the procession would run around backstage, and get on the end of the line, so it just kept going on and on. That was the highest ecstasy I’ve ever achieved in the theater.

RS: You’re also played several roles in drag.

Ludlam: I love getting in drag and love people in drag. I like it artistically, but I also like it when people get into drag and walk down the street for the fun of it. I like when they do it on Halloween, and in Mardi Gras. It’s wonderfully festive and liberating. Gender is the one thing you’re born with against your will. You can change your social class, your nationality or your language, but you can’t change your sex. Uh, wait a minute…(laughter). Drag is a way of overcoming that limitation without undergoing surgery.

 

 

Art and Commerce

RS: How are you doing financially?

Ludlam: I’ve risen up financially from the pits. I can’t believe that we’re able to make a living for even part of the year. Sometimes people in the company have jobs, and I sometimes teach in college.

RS: You must have had some rough times.

Ludlam: There have been millions of crises. For example, we were stranded in Vienna with no money or bookings.

RS: How you stay alive other than box office admissions?

Ludlam: We have private contributors, and we get Council on the Arts money, and the National Endowment for the Arts. And we save everything because money is so at a premium for us. We have a small studio on 14th St. where we store all our old sets and costumes for future use.

RS: Have you ever been evicted from a theater?

Ludlam: Well, we have had to leave. Sometimes they sell the theater. Sometimes your lease runs out. Sometimes you can’t pay the rent anymore. That happened at the Provincetown Playhouse. We were doing Caprice, and we planned to run it for two months, but the critics hated it so much that the houses were absolutely empty. So we had to stop performing it a month before we thought were going to.

RS: What did they hate about it?

Ludlam: Everything.

RS: What was the idea behind the play?

Ludlam: It was about a fashion designer who was getting beaten out. His competition would steal his ideas and mass produce them and make money. I think it shocked people because it was racy and gay. I never really had plays with homosexual characters in them before. These characters were all homosexuals. But it was no big pleading for sympathy for homosexuals, or to liberate or hate homosexuals. It’s just that they happened to be in the fashion world, and I thought it made it very appropriate.

RS: Don’t you have a large gay following?

Ludlam: I’m very grateful to the gay audience. They’ve been very supportive over the years. There’s a feeling of comradeship. But we’re far from being exclusively anything. It’s problematical but it’s also a saving grace because the audience isn’t ever one kind of audience. I don’t create by formula. Ultimately, the audience has to come to me on my terms.

RS: How would you respond to the charge that it’s pointless and decadent?

Ludlam: It’s not pointless and decadent. Anyway, who would make that charge of such a hardworking, good-natured group of well-meaning people? Only a terrible spoilsport. Decadence is a kind of a peace-loving aestheticism. Maybe people want (the company) to be decadent, but it’s not—it’s the opposite of decadent. It’s war-like and ascendant and utopian and aggressive. Minimal art is decadent because it doesn’t want to deal with conflicts or ideas.

Family and Friends

RS: What’s your background?

Ludlam: My father is of the Long Island Ludlams, the first settlers of Long Island. His father was a Puritan. My mother’s father was a German-Lutheran. Both grandfathers married Irish Catholic girls and converted to Catholicism, so I was raised Catholic by Puritans. There was absolutely no relief.

RS: Do you still consider yourself a Catholic?

Ludlam: I’m very emotionally involved in the Catholic Church. It has very powerful images. It creeps into everything I do. But it’s a love-hate relationship. I loathe it, but I occasionally have visions like St. John of the Cross or something. I’m probably a saint. That’s why I have to watch my step—you know what happens to saints. But that’s the Catholic thing. I put up plaster-of-Paris religious statutes. I have a Lazarus and a black Madonna.

RS: How did you pull your company together?

Ludlam: We’re all friends. We wanted a very creative life in the theater, without hacking, looking for work all the time or having to put up with compromises. We had this similar viewpoint, we stuck together.

RS: Do the others contribute to the script?

Ludlam: If they weren’t there, there would be no script because I wouldn’t write plays. Their incredible contribution is themselves.

RS: But you’re the final word.

Ludlam: I like to work with people who have lot of ideas: It’s stimulating. But ultimately, one must be a tyrant. I always know exactly how everything should be without thinking about it. I could be completely wrong. but I don’t demand reasons of myself for everything I do. As a result I can just express myself. The other day, I decided that the volcano should destroy Utopia at the end, and Kay-Kay said yes, columns should topple, bits of brick and things should fall on the set. And they figured out how to do it, and there’ll be this maneuvered trap that will drop all this debris on the actors at the end.

RS: It seems that the visual is as important as the dialogue .

Ludlam: I think the visual has equal weight

RS: You write all the jokes, too?

Ludlam: I go to my joke file.

RS: Your joke file?

Ludlam: Yeah. Like Milton Berle, I have a joke file. All comedy writers have one. There’s seven basic types of jokes, and all jokes fit into one of those types. The rest is adapting it to the subject matter, and giving it a new twist and context.

RS: Have you ever tried to make it in the commercial world?

Ludlam: It’s happened a number of times. They wanted me to work on some project, and I’ve always played along because I wanted it to work out. But there seem to be so many obstacles in the way of—I guess they’d call your big break. I’m not patient enough to go through that. I have to be creative right at hand. I need a theater so I can work the minute I get the idea. For ten years, we’ve experimented and tried dozens of theaters, and now we have our own place, and we really want to create a center of excitement here. We have a ten-year lease.

RS: Do you think the company will be around in ten years?

Ludlam: It’s like enough to make you stop smoking and start eating vegetables to last for those ten years.

The King of Pulp

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

It was a fact well known in the publishing business that when Myron Fass put out a magazine, a smart person read it. Fass, the founder of the legendary Countrywide Press, was like a human divining rod when it came to spotting popular obsessions and quickly cashing in on them. The headstone was no sooner in place on John F. Kennedy’s grave when Fass came out with the first Jackie Kennedy pulp in 1963. A few months later, he hit the stands with the first Beatles one-shot, which sold millions. How did he know the Beatles were going to become the greatest pop phenomenon of all time? “Instincts,” he was reported as saying. “Voices in my mind.”

All of us should hear such voices. Fass also capitalized on UFOs, psychic phenomena, Son of Sam, Elvis, the Osmonds, Richard Nixon and the swine flu. He took a chance on history repeating itself with a one-shot item called, The Beatles Come Back, which some said was a harbinger of things to come. It was his one miscue.

I met Fass in 1977, when I was assigned to do an article on him. He offered me a job on the spot, and invited me out for lunch. “Nothing fancy,” he said. “Just a beanery.” I turned down the job, but accepted the lunch, and enjoyed getting acquainted with the then-50 year-old publisher and his product line.

In addition to his one-shots, Fass published monthly magazines on durable topics such as dogs, horses, guns, motorcycles, crime, sex and entertainment. Most of his books stayed on the stands for no more than a week or two—they appeared and disappeared like rumors. “We sell about 75,000 on each one,” he said at lunch. “Together they add up.”

Most of Countrywide’s publications had a strange uniformity of style, based on pictures and witty copy. Yet each was uniquely designed for the audience for which it was intended. The gun magazines read like they were put together by firearms experts. The rock mags—Blast, Punk, Rock, Acid Rock—were more fun than Rolling Stone, in my view.

The biggest sellers, which Fass was especially proud of, were the smut books like Jaguar, Duke, He and She, Guys and Gals and Stud. Each contained misogynous articles like, “Why Women Crave Penetration,” illustrated by hard-core photographs. For the more esoteric-minded, Countrywide published a bi-monthly offering called True Sex Crimes, which ran a story on necrophilia, titled, “Shacking Up With a Corpse Turned Them On.”

All of these periodicals were published out of a big, rambling office on Park Avenue South in New York. It had all the charm of a defense plant. Editors sat in cubicles, putting together their respective rags, and art directors worked on six publications at a time. Fass sat in an office to the side, ready to entertain any idea for a magazine, no matter how silly it seemed at first.

Some very talented people went through that mill, including Al Goldstein, the legendary Screw publisher who has since fallen on hard times. “I used to work on a scandal sheet Myron put out called the National Mirror—an Enquirer ripoff,” he recalled in 1977. “I’d sit there and write these ridiculous stories, using names of people like Franz Kafka, who Myron knew nothing about. It was a great place to learn the business, but you have to leave within six months, or you’d just melt into the woodwork. There are people there who’ll never get out. Myron is a brilliant man, but he can be abrasive. He fired me when I asked for a $15 raise from $125 to $140. Actually, it was the best thing that ever happened to me—I started Screw eight months later. Today, it’s Myron’s crowning achievement that he fired me.”

Another was Michael Gross, author of Bob Dylan—an Illustrated Biography. Gross said, “I went to see Myron with an idea for a Led Zeppelin one-shot. He offered me the editorship of Rock, and I took it, after he gave me a contract allowing me a certain amount of autonomy. He’s eminently fair about things like that, and money, but once after I did a really bad issue, he made me sign a paper saying that if I ever put out as bad a magazine as that again, I’d resign immediately. He doesn’t know anything about rock, in fact, he can hardly read, but he has a sure instinct about what sells a magazine.”

Fass emerged from Brownsville, Brooklyn in the 1940s, doing art work for such long-forgotten comic books as Black Diamond and Captain Tootsie. After serving in the Army Air Corps during the war, he headed a public relations campaign for the Army, encouraging servicemen to use contraceptives. Its slogan, which he authored, was, “You may think she’s your gal, but she’s anyone’s, pal.”

After the war, Fass went to work editing an early-day sex magazine called Fotorama, which he said had “crotch shots, but no nudity, but which was arrested nevertheless.” In the mid-‘50s, he put out movie mags for an outfit called Globe Photos, which eventually backed him in starting Countrywide. In the beginning, the Countrywide catalog consisted mostly of movie books and parodies of more established magazines like Confidential, but it made money, and by the 1960s, Fass had come into his own.

Fass, who died at 80 in 2006, was a forceful man pictured by his associates as being very much an eccentric. For example, he carried on a dispute with his partner Stanley Harris over who was really boss. In court papers filed in 1976, Harris charged that Fass had a habit of opening his jacket and displaying a loaded gun during office arguments. “Even if the weapon is never upholstered, its presence has an unwarranted coercive and intimidating effect, on the employees, and other persons dealing with the company.” On at least one occasion, the dispute reportedly erupted into a fistfight.

Fass seemed to care less. “Harris is a quiff,” he said. And he went on amusing and titillating the public with his endless catalog of magazines. “Publishing isn’t a science, it’s an art,” he told me. “There are no rules. You can’t learn it.”

 

The Birth of Maus

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

It was a bizarre conversation even by the standards of 1969. Five underground comic artists—R. Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Kim Deitch, Gilbert Shelton and Art Spiegelman—met in New York to discuss their craft. Led by writer Dean Latimer, though, they spent more time talking about West Coast mating patterns.

One person held back from this raillery: 21 year-old Artie Spiegelman. And there’s no great mystery why. His mother, Holocaust survivor Anja Spiegelman, had committed suicide barely 18 months before this roundtable. Spiegelman had different concerns.

Just how different became clear when the collective comic book, Funny Aminals, appeared in 1972. The opener was an R. Crumb riff about two cats luring a bird into a pot. Then came Maus, a harrowing three-page strip about the Spiegelman family in Poland, in which the Nazis are portrayed as cats and the Jews as mice. “When I was a young mouse in Rego Park, New York, my poppa used to tell me bedtime stories about life in the old country during the war,” says the narrator named Mickey.

The patriarch describes life in the ghetto under “Die Katzen,” and recalls the moment when the family arrives at “Mauschwitz.” At this point, he says: “I can tell you no more…it’s time to go to sleep, Mickey!”

Hardly a typical underground comic, Maus was the first of two searingly personal strips Spiegelman did that year. In the other, Prisoner on the Hell Planet, he used human figures to document his mother’s suicide and his overwhelming guilt. “Now you cry!” a relative says: “Better you cried when your mother was still alive!”

He would do more than cry. In 1978, Spiegelman started a book-length version of Maus, based on interviews with his father Vladek.

A fellow underground press alumnus, I visited Spiegelman in his Soho loft that April. We caught up on things, and I met his new partner: a beautiful dark-haired French woman named Françoise Mouly. “We met in New York through a mutual friend,” Spiegelman explained. “Then Françoise went back to Paris, and I didn’t like the idea, so I went to Paris and Françoise came back. So it’s settled.”

The talk turned to what he was doing. Spiegelman had just published Breakdowns, a collection of his early work, including Maus and Prisoner on the Hell Planet. And he was a consultant for the Topps Bubble Gum Co., creating novelties like the Garbage Pail Kids and Wacky Packages. “I put on my company man disguise once a week,” he said. “I go out there with one part of my brain functioning and the other part completely asleep, and if it starts waking up, I have to club it back into submission.”

Then there was his new project: The expanded Maus. We went to his work table, and he showed me the opening pages. It was different from the first version—more dense with detail, less stylized, less focused on the mice as animals. In this work, the narrator is Artie instead of Mickey. If memory serves, Spiegelman had gotten as far as a scene in which Vladek and his in-laws are sitting at a dinner table in the days prior to World War II.

Why did he portray Jews as rodents, the very way the Nazis depicted them? He inferred that this was the point—the white gloves worn by cartoon mice and black-face minstrel characters were a symbol of oppression. Not everyone got it. One old-time cartoonist had said admiringly of Spiegelman, “He’s a good mouse man.”

I asked Spiegelman if he had seen the recent TV docudrama, The Holocaust. “I don’t watch too much television, but to me it just looked like more TV,” he said. “It was ‘One Life to Live—Auschwitz,’ or ‘As the Wermacht Turns.’ It’s just a soap opera.”

Riveted by the opening panels, I asked Spiegelman for an interview about the new Maus, and he agreed. We regrouped a few days later for the first of two sessions. An intense conversationalist, Spiegelman was generous with his time and patiently answered even dumb questions. Mouly, who was working on several projects, including a line of Soho street maps, joined us for part of it, and at one point we broke for coffee.

Little did they know that it would take eight more years for the first volume of Maus to be published, and another five for the second to appear. Nor could they have foreseen that Art Spiegelman would win the Pulitzer Prize and many other honors. It was enough on that spring day that he had started a monumental work, and that he had entered an enduring marriage, one in which there seemed to be little or no line between the creative and the personal.

“Do you two ever sleep? I asked.

“15 hours a day,” Spiegelman laughed. “All too much.”

RS: What are you trying to do with this longer version of Maus?

Spiegelman: I think it would be important not only to tell my father’s story, but also implicitly and explicitly to deal with my responses and my relationship to it. I can’t fully tell my father’s story, I can only tell my own. There’ll be a section where I’m specifically dealing with my responses in between sessions with my father. I’m using mice and cats—I didn’t have these experiences. I’m not going to do something removed like the Holocaust on TV.

RS: How does it differ from the first Maus?

Spiegelman: It takes place with more reality. Extending the metaphor would be too laborious, and would miss the point and create a false reality.

RS: I got the impression from the original version that your father would tell you these stories without your soliciting them.

Spiegelman: Well, I got some stories from my father and my mother when I was a kid. They would just crop up in conversation, like in the introduction, where my father says, ‘You think you have friends? Wait ‘till you’re locked in a room without food for several days.’ They would drop little time bombs on me like that, and they would tell me some stories. But if I pressed for too many details, they’d back away. The story I had in the first Maus was one I heard when I was a kid from my father. But he’d skirt certain things. He wouldn’t tell me too much about the death camps. He told me, ‘Well, they gassed people.’ But only recently did he tell me that when all these Hungarian Jews came into Auschwitz in 1944, there wasn’t even enough room in the gas chambers to deal with all these people—they were standing on line to go to the gas chamber. So they had them dig large trenches and get into them and gas was thrown in after them. Now this wasn’t very effective because the gas would escape into the air—as a result, a number of people were only half-suffocated, half-dead. What happened after that is that they tossed in hand grenades to kill more people who were in the trench. After that, there were still people alive, and they said, ‘The hell with them.’ They got more Hungarians to bury the first group of Hungarians, and they had those Hungarians dig their own trenches, and repeated the process. This was going on for days.

RS: How did your father survive all that?

Spiegelman: That’s essentially what this 200-page book is going to be about: the story of a survivor. In essence, he survived through a combination of good luck and exceptional present-mindedness. If somebody needed a carpenter, my father was a carpenter. If they needed a tin man, my father was a tin man.

RS: And he had all these skills?

Spiegelman: Only partially. (Laughter). He’d take an incredible crash course. To some extent, they all did this. He was able to pick up these skills pretty quickly. He was always very manually dexterous, and he was able to fake it as a shoe maker, as a carpenter, as a tinsmith. And that also kept him alive. As long as you could work, there was more of a chance at surviving than not.

RS: What did his family do in Poland?

Spiegelman: My father’s father had been involved in several businesses. The most long-term one was a seltzer-bottling business, and he actually got involved in bootlegging for awhile, since he had all the bottling equipment. You couldn’t sell booze without a government license and print it on the bottle. And my father’s father ended up getting involved in some kind of chicanery like this. And then my father was involved in textiles before the war. My mother’s family had been quite wealthy—they were textile manufacturers also.

RS: They lived in Warsaw?

Spiegelman: They lived in a place called Sosnowiec, which is in the part of Poland that was in question whether it was Germany or Poland. His father-in-law had a big textile factory, and he ended up working at that when he married my mother. And he had his own factory right before the war in another town.

RS: He was drafted into the Polish army when the war started?

Spiegelman: Yeah, he was one of the first. They called Jews up first. The Polish army didn’t last too long, and he was put in a prisoner-of-war camp for awhile. They were kept in very, very bad conditions, the Jews. Then they were given this offer where they could work and in exchange get better conditions. So my father was put in very hard labor, and got through the prisoner-of-war camp period that way. A lot of people who didn’t actually didn’t survive—they died of exposure to the cold and hunger. Then when he got back, this whole other period began—ghettoization and separating Jews from the rest of the population. The reason he was let out of the prisoner-of-war camp was that he was protected by International Red Cross sanctions relating to the military. As a civilian, they could treat him any way they wanted. As a soldier, they had to afford him some protection.

RS: Where was he when the war ended?

Spiegelman: He was in Dachau. When the Russians began approaching Auschwitz, they had all the people from Auschwitz evacuate the camp and march back to Germany. The Germans didn’t want to lose their Jews—they wanted to kill them. So what they did was they took all of the people in Eastern European concentration camps and were marching them back into Germany to retrench.

RS: To kill them there.

Spiegelman: Incredible but true. So my father was on this long march, and he ended up for a brief period in a camp called Gross-Rosen, and then he ended up in Dachau. And in Dachau I think he caught scarlet fever or typhus, I don’t remember which one. When he was liberated, he was dying of typhus.

RS: This will be portrayed.

Spiegelman: Yeah, the march will be portrayed. I think the book will take it all the way to his immigration to America. After the war, there was a reuniting with my mother. She started out in the same camp, Auschwitz-Birkinau. When they started retrenching to Germany, they were separated, but by that time my father had arranged a better position for my mother and she was safer. This is also in the book. These were fairly complicated maneuvers, but my father was able to bribe her way out of Birkinau, which was a death camp, and into Auschwitz, which was a work part of the camp. And she ended up finding a protector in this Czechoslovakian woman, who looked out for her, and was mistress of an SS man.

RS: Did you ever show Prisoner on the Hell Planet to your father?

Spiegelman: I never showed it to him, but he came across it. I was storing my originals at his house, never dreaming he would look at them—they were just sort of in a box. And one day, he went through the box and ended up reading that strip. When I did it, I really didn’t intend to show it to him, and I didn’t think that he would come across it. But I felt that if he did, that was his problem. My problem was to do it and not go out of my way to cause him any grief. My stepmother had seen it because a friend of hers had a son who read underground comics and showed it to him. My stepmother never showed it to my father.

RS: Was he hurt by it?

Spiegelman: No. He said it did make him cry because it made him relive everything, and it was very hard for him to take that way. But he wasn’t upset that I had done it. And I was very glad, because when I was working on Breakdowns, I was wondering whether to include Prisoner on the Hell Planet, or bind several copies—maybe a dozen—and just take the pages out and give him those copies. I thought that he’d be very hurt, first of all, to have it reenacted and relived, and I also thought it might be a problem for him that this was being made public because to him it’s a great shame. In the Jewish religion, committing suicide is a sin. In fact, at the funeral services, they specifically never mentioned that she killed herself.

Mouly: In society in general, it’s not considered a crime.

Spiegelman: If you succeed, they say that you committed a crime. If you don’t succeed, they say you’re mentally ill.

Mouly: But your father feels ashamed that your mother committed suicide?

Spiegelman: Among many other things. I don’t think I would be able to simplify what his reactions to her death were.

RS: Did you show him your other work?

Spiegelman: In the period I was rebelling, I showed him some of the pornographic stuff I had done, and I didn’t know what his reaction was going to be. I wanted to make him uncomfortable. But his only reaction was: ‘Huh! So from this you make a living?’

PART 2: SPIEGELMAN ON NARRATIVE

Art Spiegelman had just published Breakdowns, a collection of his early work, when this interview took place in 1978. Breakdowns Maus and Prisoner on the Hell Planet. Then there were pieces like Ace Hole Midget Detective, a purported detective comic.

In the latter, Ace Hole is hired by the art dealer Laurence Potato-Head to find Al Floogleman, “a bird who’d passed him some bum Picassos!” It seems to be a comment on the genre, but Picasso makes an appearance to say: “We artists are indestructible. Even in a prison or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art…even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.”

What did it all mean? Here is what Spiegelman said about narrative and perception on that warm spring day:

RS: Except for Maus and Prisoner on the Hell Planet, most of the strips in Breakdowns seem to veer from straight narrative. What were you trying to do in Ace Hole Midget Detective?

Spiegelman: Here I was interested in narrative and the function that it performs in society. When people go to the movies and watch television, which is what most people do with their free time, what they’re really getting is a dream. You’re just going into this state where you’re passively pulling in this story, which is only a mild permutation of things you’ve heard or seen before. When you watch a TV series, one week’s episode is not very different from another week’s episode. You’re just going into this comfortable warm bath each time, essentially lulling yourself—it’s sort of a way of putting a thumb in your mouth and suckling. That’s the appeal of detective stories and all other popular fiction. What happens in a detective story is the detective ends up being like a father figure in the story—he’s the one who knows all the answers. He gets beaten up, but he’s tough. On one level, you think you’re reading this to see if you can outguess the detective and solve the murder. And you never can if it’s a well-written story because it’s this crazy roller coaster ride you’re going on. You’re trusting that the detective will solve it for you. Since these books are written in the first person, you end up getting right into the main character’s head—you feel like you’re the detective.

RS: And you experience all the great scenes and backdrops.

Spiegelman: All that’s really being changed is the character’s specific situations—the essential situation is always the same, story to story. I was more interested in dealing with the things that relate to detective stories rather than telling another detective story. On the other hand, I wanted it to work on a level of a detective story—if you read it, it would be a little haywire in a few places. At the same time, I ended up getting involved with the nature of the first-person narrative, what that does to you, and the nature of comic-strip panels and what that does to you. There are several things happening. On the first page, each character is drawn with a different tool. I never want people to forget that these are drawings, that these are lines on paper. So on the first page, you usually have the characters’ faces in these boxes. This would be Ace Hole, this would be Gretta, this would be Mr. Potato Head. Instead, I’m showing you the brush stroke. This is the brush I use to draw Ace Hole with, this is the curvical pen I use to draw the Picasso lady with, this is the rapidiograph that I use to draw Mr. Potato Head with. You’re being forced, I would hope, into looking at the fact that these are drawings rather than creatures that you can live with.

RS: What do these techniques have to with something more socially relevant like Maus?

Spiegelman: They’re not techniques. I’m dealing with something really fundamental, which is perception. And perception is fundamental to understanding Maus, to understanding Hell Planet, to understanding social change. It’s the way you take information in.

RS: You’re working this out for yourself?

Spiegelman: I’m not working it out for myself or anybody else any more than Hell Planet was for somebody else. I didn’t draw Hell Planet to amuse people or tell them an interesting anecdote from my life. Nor did I do it to warn people about suicide. Hell Planet was as much involved with my own interests and needs as these other strips are. It’s just that my needs are complex. I’m a complex person. Most people are, I would hope. And I don’t see them as that different or separate. I understand what makes some of my strips more difficult for people to understand than other strips, but for me these are all part of the same thing. The same needs of expression are at work in these strips as in Prisoner on the Hell Planet. Since one focuses more directly on content, it becomes easier to take in. That’s why I’m doing this Maus strip with the means of perception that are employed in reading Maus. I’m aware that what I have to do is very directly tell the story, and not get in the story’s way. Most of the time, I’m dealing with stories that are trivial. Most people are dealing with stories that are trivial. Therefore, I’m more interested in the way of telling the story, making people understand what they’re looking at when they’re looking at a story, rather than just telling them a story and lulling them to sleep one more time. I think it’s more important that people, myself included, be more aware (in a sensory way) of what they’re going through. When you’re looking at a movie, it’s important to know that it’s a movie. You can’t think you’re looking through a window at something that’s happening. You’re affected too greatly by what you see. Most people’s information comes to them from newspapers and from TV. That information is highly distorted by the medium that it’s coming across to them in. And unless you’re aware of those distortions, unless you’re aware of how they work, they have much greater effect on you. You’re much more capable of being controlled. You’re much more capable of being at the mercy of the people who have the power of the medium. And as a result, that may be the most important thing about the media is how they work. It’s important that when you’re watching the Holocaust, a Lysol ad comes on between segments.

RS: Lysol?

Spiegelman: Yeah, it really is, and it’s very significant, that you’re being shown something that broken up. Most of the people watching Holocaust on TV are not even aware of whether it’s a story or not. From what I understand, for television it was powerful. In terms of what actually happened in terms of life, it wasn’t powerful at all. And I’m told that for people who watch television, this was a significant event. That was close as they’ll come to understanding the Holocaust. I guess that’s good, but it’s also too bad that’s as far as it went.

How to Write Copy Like Damon Runyon

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

If ever a writer was good at engaging readers, it was Damon Runyon. He held them from the first sentence to the last, in any format, and he would do that online if he were alive today.

Who’re we talking about? Damon Runyon, born in 1880 in Manhattan, Kansas, died in 1946 on Manhattan Island. He was, to start with, a great reporter and columnist, as proven by his coverage—on deadline— from the Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray murder trial in 1927. (The pair murdered Snyder’s husband).

“Right back to old Father Adam, the original, and perhaps the loudest ‘squawker’ among mankind against women, went Henry Judd Gray in telling how and why he lent his hand to the butchery of Albert Snyder.

“She-she-she-she-she-she-she-she. That was the burden of the bloody song of the little corset salesman as read out in the packed court room in Long Island City yesterday.

“She-she-she-she-she-she. ‘Twas an echo from across the ages and old familiar echo, at that. It was the same ‘squawk’ of Brother Man whenever and wherever he is in a jam, that was first framed in the words:

“’She gave me of the tree, and I did eat.’”

Then there was his sportswriting. Many sportswriters wrote poems in those days, but it’s hard to top Runyon’s paean to the jockey Earl Sande:

Say, have they turned the pages
Back to the past once more?
Back to the racin’ ages
An’ a Derby out of the yore?
Say, don’t tell me I’m daffy
Ain’t that the same ol’ grin?
Why, it’s that handy
Guy named Sande,
Bootin’ a winner in!”

But it’s his fiction that has earned Runyon a small but real place in American literature. He wrote maybe 200 short stories, all in the present tense, creating memorable (if not admirable) characters like Big Jule, Nicely Nicely Jones, Harry the Horse and Sam the Gonoph.

The Snatching of Bookie Bob

Take his story, “The Snatching of Bookie Bob.” Bookie Bob is kidnapped by three thugs named  Harry the Horse, Little Isadore and Spanish John. He agrees to book their horse racing bets to pass time, and they end up owing him double the amount of the ransom.

Yes, I know—it’s the same basic plot as O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief.” But “Bookie Bob” is darker—and funnier—in its tale of Depression-era betrayal.

Consider the way Runyon starts the story, and at the same time explains why snatching is in vogue:

“Now it comes on the spring of 1931, after a long hard winter, and times are very tough indeed, what with the stock market going all to pieces, and banks busting right and left, and the law getting very nasty about this and that, and one thing and another, and many citizens of this town are compelled to do the best they can.

“There is very little scratch anywhere and along Broadway many citizens are wearing their last year’s clothes and have practically nothing to bet on the races or anything else, and it is a condition that will touch anybody’s heart.”

So the three wiseguys start nabbing people for ransom, and “much fresh scratch comes into circulation, which is very good for the merchants,” the narrator writes. He notes, however, that “you cannot snatch just anybody”—you need a reliable finger.

“The finger guy must know the guy he fingers has plenty of ready scratch to begin with, and he must also know that this party is such a party as it not apt to make much disturbance about being snatched, such as telling the gendarmes.”

It also pays to know if the victim “does not care to have matches run up and down the bottom of his feet, which often happens to parties who are snatched and who do not seem to wish to settle their bill promptly, because many parties are very ticklish on the bottom of their feet, especially if the matches are lit.”

Now what is Runyon really doing here but describing a process? He could just as well be explaining a best practice in B2B.

Butch Minds the Baby

Then there’s “Butch Minds the Baby,” an even more perfect blending of style and content. Butch, a reformed hoodlum, is offered big money to break open a safe, but his wife is at a wake, so he has no choice but to take his infant son on the job.

The narrator, “a little dopey” from needled beer, tags along, although he feels that cracking a safe with a baby present is “very dishonorable.” (Who’s this narrator? As he says in another story, “Nobody pays any attention to me, because I am known to one and all as a guy who is just around.” This is the story, by the way, that opens with the memorable line: “One evening along about seven o’clock I am sitting in Mindy’s restaurant putting on the gefilte fish, which is a dish I am very fond of, when in come three parties from Brooklyn wearing caps as follows: Harry the Horse, Little Isadore, and Spanish John”).

The scenes follow with impeccable timing. Butch heats up milk in a saucepan next to the safe, Little Isadore muzzles the baby to keep him quiet, Butch blows the safe open and the police arrive on the scene.

By this time, young John Ignatius is “beating his own best record for squalling,” the narrator writes, “and as we go walking along Big Butch says to me like this:

“‘I dast not run,’ he says, ‘because if any coppers see me running they will start popping at me and maybe hit John Ignatius Junior, and besides running will joggle the milk up in him and make him sick. My old lady always warns me never to joggle John Ignatius Junior when he is full of milk.’

“‘Well, Butch,’ I say, ‘there is no milk in me, and I do not care if I am joggled up, so if you do not mind, I will start doing a piece of running at the next corner.’”

The story is based less on a plot than a premise. But the tone is pitch-perfect. And Runyon sustains it to the very end.

Mastery of His Language

I could go on. I could tell you about Blond Maurice, who in 1936 is placed in quicklime by “certain parties who do not wish him well.” (He shows up later eating cheese blintzes in Mindy’s). I could mention Rusty Charley, who is known to carry a gun “and sometimes to shoot people down as dead as door-nails with it if he does not like the way they wear their hats—and Rusty Charley is very critical of hats.”

But why bother? You can read about these characters—and many more—in a fairly recent Runyon collection from Penguin.

Runyon has been criticized for making hoodlums loveable. But he was the first to admit that he was a “hired Hessian on the typewriter.” He wrote to entertain people, and he succeeded, for at least a dozen of his stories were made into movies, and another couple used for the musical “Guys and Dolls.”

Were there better, more profound writers around? Sure. But as novelist William Kennedy wrote, “Far more serious writers than Runyon have fallen on their faces and other parts because they lacked what he had: a love and mastery of his language, a playful use of its idiosyncrasies.”

How to Write Copy Like R. Crumb

Posted on by The TellAllmarketing Blog

By Ray Schultz

R. Crumb opens his comic, “The Fight,” with this line: “Uh oh, this oughta’ be good.”

Don’t ask what happens next, or the name of the comic book it was in—Crumb had not yet taken to illustrating the Bible. But what a setup: It’s a classic use of what I call the anonymous editorial voice.

It’s the voice you find in decks, captions and other unsigned copy in magazines. It’s the voice you see in old-time mail order ads, the kind Crumb read in comic books as a kid.

It’s Crumb’s voice, but he’s not using it as Crumb. Rather, he’s acting as an omnipresent narrator or huckster.

In one memorable piece, the cartoonist starts by saying, “You people better get hip to the fact that we’re livin’ in the—LAP O’ LUXURY.”

In another, he mimics a public service ad to make a satiric point:

“Cliffy the Clown says:

“‘You can help solve the OVERPOPULATION PROBLEM this quick, easy way! This year, why not COMMIT SUICIDE?”

Note that Crumb  is speaking right to the reader. He may dislike advertising, but he has learned from the great copywriters of old.

Now we’ve come full circle. The anonymous voice of which Crumb is a master is uniquely suited to content marketing.

Let’s say you’re doing a B2B white paper. Even without a byline, it has to sound like it came from a human being, preferably one you know: Think of Dick Cavett doing anonymous ad voiceovers

‘The Line, the Line’

An R. Crumb white paper wouldn’t be boring: He would take complex material and make it so vivid that anyone could understand it. And he would display two of his other great qualities: Pacing, and what one Crumb admirer has called “the line, the line.”

These are on full view in the 1975 rant, “Let’s Talk Sense About This Here Modern America!” by “that cranky old fuddy duddy R. Crumb.” As it opens, an agonized America says, “Love me or leave me,” and Crumb adds: “This is not a happy comic strip.” He then runs through some rapid-fire visual bullet points:

  • America the Cruel Bully
  • America the Glutton
  • America the Greedy
  • America the UGLY!

Moving on, Crumb denounces motorcycles, calls for the return of trolley cars, depicts jet setters working in the fields (“Tsk! I just hate this ensemble I have to wear for this work!”), insults several ethnic groups and concludes by deploring aerosol sprays. Then, as easily as he gets you into it, you’re out. It’s a breathtaking performance even for someone who disagrees with the sentiments (and it would be hard to pinpoint Crumb’s politics).

“With comics, you’ve got to develop some kind of shorthand,” Crumb told the Paris Review when discussing his illustrated Book of Genesis last year. “You can’t make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn’t want all that detail, it interferes with the flow of the reading process.”

Here’s another lesson from Crumb. He told the Comics Journal that he’s an “entertaining cartoonist,” and not much else (“Bruegel, I ain’t,” he once said). His authority lies “almost in a satiric reflection of cartooning in some way. And maybe in telling a story.” That last phrase says it all.

Finally, Crumb makes every word count. “When you write slowly you have more time to think about how to word things,” he told the Paris Review. “I don’t type, I just handwrite everything in block letters. I take the time to think out how to articulate things.”

Not bad for a guy who admits he had trouble reading as a child.