#also like. i feel as though this would apply to 1980s mike as well. he likes ugly little creatures like fuckin. he definitely had

[lighthouseas]

full disclosure. in the world of tsad, josephine elizabeth mouse wheeler (a.k.a. mike's porch cat) is NOT cute by any means. mike thinks she is, but she's actually like. yk those raggedy ass dishcloths? yeah imagine that as her fur and then she also only has one eye. see also: this cat has been living under a muddy porch for the better part of a year. this girl REEKS. mike loves her though. she is his little creachur.

[will80sbyers]

I've gone through the entire ST4 score about 5 times, and im not sure this is the right track for when mike and el talk before argyle comes in with the pineapple pizza, but the track name really stands out so I though I'd share my theory and ask about your opinion. imo its probably the closest sounding track but I'm also running on 30 hours of no sleep and I'll admit, it feels like a bit of a stretch.

anyways, i'll get into it. there is a few parts but I think its a good one or at least thought provoking.

-so, the closest track imo, and also the only one with a name that references the pizza place is "Surf that Tasty Pie". if you're familiar with "The First I love You" and others, you'll know capitalisation is ~interesting~. there's a few track names that only capitalise the first word, so the choice of capitalising "Tasty Pie" means it must be significant. - also, if you apply grammar rules, its means "Tasty Pie" is a place, person or acronym. doesn't seem like a place, and its certainly not an acronym, so it must be a person.

-after this track plays, argyle comes in and breaks up the moment mike and el are having (conversation about their fight and neither look happy to be talking about this) the track is stopped by argyle throwing a pineapple pizza onto the table. mike is offended immediately. he is also very adamant that fruit on a pizza is *blasphemous*.. interesting choice of words. fruit, and being called fruity, has been a common slang term for gay people, and blasphemy has connections to doing things that are disrespectful to God.. you know what would have been considered very *blasphemous* in the 1980's? being gay. argyle's phrase of "try before you deny" on the phone call following the mention of the pineapple they have in store earlier in the season and el's repetition of argyle's statement and determination to make mike see that fruit on pizza is okay, not blasphemous, may not be as pointless as we once first though.

now the part that seems the easiest to explain

-pizza = pie. the "Pie" or pizza that arrives in shot when the track is stopped is a fruity pizza. two out of three of the people at this table agree that this pizza is tasty. what else do we know is fruity? will ! (also his coded conversation with Jonathan happens less than 3 minutes of the pizza coming out)

probably the most convoluted was of showing that mike is being encouraged to "Surf that Tasty Pie", or in not so cryptic messaging - go for will. essentially, its okay to be fruity and go for fruity things. this works oddly well with the idea that mike has internalised homophobia, as it's his friends helping him realise that being queer is okay, unlike his parents where, presumably, he gets the blasphemy sentiments - I know anyone can be homophobic but the wheelers did canonically (iirc) have a Reagan sign for the 1984 election sooo..

some of this feels like a joke, but there's some that is really interesting how it falls into place - also !! im not claiming the pizza = fruity theory, I've seen it floating around but not sure where the credit is due, unfortunately. the fact that theres a track with this name did add to my belief that maybe this scene had more to it than face value. anyways, thank you for reading, and if you made it this far, I'm so sorry for what I put you through haha

I'm running to listen to this and see if it fits! I think the song that plays is a mix of some of the scores but this theory is very interesting!! If it's true that they really pay this much attention to details this could be an inside joke between them!! Thank you!!! 👏👏

edit: after listening again I'm convinced it's a mix of surf that tasty pie and unambiguous true love for the base maybe

second edit: bullshit, I don't know I'm listening again and it doesn't fit enough with unambiguous true love.... it could fit some parts of Letter to Willy!!! someone who studied music needs to help us with this

[mikewheely]

i just HATE the fact that people discredit mike’s feelings and often manipulate them into not even loving el but ACTUALLY having been in love with will the entire time… i hate twitter—it’s all i see there :c i have been muting and blocking accs.. and even if, and only IF, that were true (but i mean let’s be serious…), why do you want by*er together so incredibly bad that it would destroy el in the process? the guy she fell for was ACTUALLY in love with her brother the whole time. like…..why do people want that to be true? also, people can respond to that with “El’s existence or feelings shouldn’t surround mike…..blah blah blah” ok,, so how is that different than forcing mike and will into this corner that their characters are solely revolved around each other 🤨 i swear most of these people NEVER make any sense by regurgitating this shit. i’m sorry if i made absolutely no sense and i was just rambling. i felt like ranting because i think y’all would get what i’m trying to say

No, you made complete sense and I get it! They condradict themselves all the time. And also, I think most of those fans just watch ST because of their ship and for finding gay subtext. They would say they really care about Mike, and about Will, but they want El to die even though they know how much Mike loves her (they don't accept it though) and how much Will cares for his sister (like we saw in ST4).

I am sorry but if you want innocent people to die so that your ship can happen, that is really sad and messed up. You will hear a lot of terminologies from them like "representation", "queerbaiting" and all, and just see how all of those have been twisted by them to fit their narrative. Idk but is a person (who happens to be gay) being in love with another person who is already in a relationship, and him being unable to say it to that person is queerbaiting?! If you consider a straight relationship, even Steve's love is also unrequited. What about the fact that Will is scared, is just 14-15, IN THE 1980s, worried that it might ruin his friendship with Mike, his relationship with his sister El, and reveal is identity to everyone that he is not very comfortable with? So worried that he couldn't even say it to his brother? How about we give him some time? How about we consider the basic human emotions and see how heartbreaking it is before we jump to conclusions like it was 'queerbaiting', and that they are implying gay people don't deserve to be happy? They ignore Robin's storyline in the process, because, well, she is not a part of this ship. It's so sad when people reduce the emotions and struggles of a character to just a marketing tactic to attract LGBTQ audience. They won't see that he is struggling to accept it himself, they won't see the time period we are in, they won't see what scares him, that he cares about the feelings of people around him, and that he feels like he is a 'mistake'. All of these struggles and people are here like "oh god that was queerbaiting, let me write a Google doc on that." All they want is Mike and Will to be together. And many of them are just simply disgusting where they would reduce this to seeing them make out and wouldn't even mind sexualizing the whole thing. I'm so done. It's almost like pseudo supporters. Like they learnt some new things and they would apply it everywhere. Like the pseudofeminists who believe women should do ANYTHING to gain power, like 'using' others for their own benefit. It's the same for many of these people. Like no matter what, no matter how, what they want needs to happen, because THAT is true gay representation.

[famous-aces]

Morrissey

Who: Steven Patrick Morrissey

What: Musician

Where: English (Active, internationally)

When: May 22, 1959 - Present

(Image Description: a black and white photo of Morrissey from 1992.  He is a young white man in his early thirties with dark hair and eyes. His hair is short and messy.  He has thick eyebrows and a strong jawline. He is smiling very slightly. He is wearing a pale knit sweater. End ID)

Morrisey is one of those world-famous single named singers: Cher, Sting, Prince, Madonna, Morrissey. Perhaps a little Bono as, while he is more ironic and droll than the U2 frontman, he also has a reputation for douche-baggery.  Morrissey is famous for his music's bleak drama blended with bleak humor, sexually ambiguousness, themes of the past and self-reflection, and being an all around "anti-pop idol".

Morrissey made a name for himself as the frontman for The Smiths in the 1980s (1982-87), but has a successful solo career since 1988 with only a brief hiatus from '98-'03.  His most beloved albums include The Queen is Dead (1986), Strangeways, Here We Come (1987), Viva Hate (1988), Your Arsenal (1992), Vauxhall and I (1994), You are the Quarry (2004), Years of Refusal (2009). His most recey album (California Son) came out in February of this year (2019).

He is outspoken politically on, for example, vegetarianism and animal rights and against the monarchy and Americanization. In 2006 a BBC poll voted him the second greatest living British cultural icon.

I admit that while I like the Smiths well enough I had never liked them enough to really follow Morrissey's career, which is odd as I do like the whole punk/new wave/post punk scene very much. But I started listening to him a bit for this and a bit depressing but quite good.

(Image description: a photo of the Smiths backstage in 1984 by Tom Sheehan.  From left to right Andy Rourke [a white man with brown hair and a leather jacket. Below that he has on a shirt with what I think is a crow on it. He has his bass slung around his neck and his hands behind his back. He has his head slightly cocked], Morrissey [wearing a striped shirt with a low neck, long necklaces, and square glasses. He has his arms crossed], Mike Joyce [pale with black hair spiked up and his bangs falling into his face. He has on a Smiths t-shirt and is mostly hidden behind the others], and Johnny Marr [pale with a black mop top with long bangs, he is thin with an angular face, he is wearing a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He has his guitar slung around his neck and fingers on the frets.] End ID)

Orientation: Humasexual (A word of Morrissey's own creation meaning "attracted to humans" but I will go into why, in Morrissey's case, it seems to fit under the asexual umbrella.)

I'm breaking my own rule here. Morrissey does not call himself "asexual," but uses his own term: humasexual. But as he defines the term and the nature of his sexual/romantic orientation it fits under the aspec umbrella. At one point Morrissey identifed as a bisexual who "hates sex" and later a "non-practicing bisexual," but be later abandoned that terminology. By the 2010s he was very open on the exact nature of his orientation.

While I would not go up to him and demand he identify as aspec the experience he describes does fit in fairly neatly into our letter of the Alphabet Soup. Again, I would not demand anything of him. He is a human person. Sexual orientation is, in the end, highly personal and individual. Do not be The Guy/Gal/Person. In the end everyone is entitled to name and define their own experience.

It may seem odd that a man who writes a lot about sex/sexual desire in his music could be asexual, but I don't think writing is necessarily indicative of the writer's true feelings.  Morrissey agrees, saying time and time again from his earliest fame that he is writing a general story, not a biography. He says of his lyrics that "It was very important for me to try and write for everybody...nothing is ever open and shut.". Remember, while the artist always leaves a trace of themself in their art it is not always in the most obvious way.

I believe his humasexual might be closer to demi (or perhaps gray) than it is to utterly asexual. Aspec, but not at the zero/zero point, when we get to the quotes section I will explain further.  Morrissey is definitely not aromantic. But he was intentionally celibate until his mid-thirties. It was then he had his first serious relationship, all by his own admission, not being interested in sex much before that.  He still seems to have stints of celibacy. Sex as a "maybe" or a shrug rather than a necessity. And again it took a deep personal connection to his partner for him to even feel the urge to have sex. Indeed, he claimed to "hate" sex before that.

I hope to clear things up in the quotes section when I let Morrissey speak for himself, which he has done, extensively. I included quotes from his most recent public discussion on the matter from 2013.

(Image Description: a more recent photo of Morrissey performing on stage this one in color. He has graying hair now and is slightly larger than he was as a younger man, though he is not overweight. He is just less trim. He is wearing a dark suit. His face is wracked with emotion, eyes closed, mouth open. He has one hand in front of him, open palmed. The other holds the mic to his mouth.  End ID)

“Unfortunately, I am not homosexual. In technical fact, I am humasexual. I am attracted to humans.  But, of course . . . not many.”

-Morrissey in a statement from October 2013 (quoted by Time Magazine. Emphasis in original as it is the same in multiple sources) (I think this should be obvious. Again, labels are entirely up to the person using them and thus I am not applying one to Morrissey, but clearly he could stand under the ace umbrella mspec romantically and aspec sexually)

"[F]or the first time in my life the eternal ‘I’ becomes ‘we’, as, finally, I can get on with someone, Jake [Owen Walters] and I neither sought not needed company other than our own for the whirlwind stretch to come.”  

-Morrissey in his 2013 memoir Autobiography.  (Walters was his first serious relationship.  The relationship began in 1994 and ended in 1996. It describes sentiment echoed by many demisexuals "'I' becomes 'we'" and "finally I can get on with someone". Also the idea of solitude may reflect an aspec relationship.)

"Girls remained mysteriously attracted to me, and I had no idea why, since although each fumbling foray hit the target, nothing electrifying took place, and I turned a thousand corners without caring … Far more exciting were the array of stylish racing bikes that my father would bring home.”

-Morrissey on being a teenager in that same memoir

"I don't recognise such terms as heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and I think it's important that there's someone in pop music who's like that. These words do great damage, they confuse people and they make people feel unhappy so I want to do away with them."

-Morrissey in a 1985 interview. (I don't agree with him in the least, my label makes me very happy and I know it makes many other people happy [although I did feel like this before I had my asexual label.] I think he might have been projecting. I think his not quite fitting into anything made him uncomfortable and it shows why he might not be inclined to stick to a traditional label and instead invent his own.)

[Nick] Kent: …[Y]out write a lot about homosexual longing.

Morrissey: I've always said that I leave things very open and that I sing about people. Without limitation. And I don't think that automatically makes me homosexual.

Kent: What about...sexual relationships?

Morrissey: I don't have relationships at all. It's out of the question.

Kent: Why?

Morrissey: Partly because I have always been attracted to men or women who were never attracted to me. And I was never attracted to men or women who were attracted to me. So that's the problem. I've never met the right person.

-A 1985 interview with Nick Kent, quoted by David Brent in Morrissey: Scandal and Passion (2004) (not finding "the right person" seems quite demi to me. He also says that is "part" of the reason. So there is probably a more complicated reason too. Also of note, Morrissey doesn't like Kent [or at least didn't at the time] so odds are he was disinclined to further articulate his most personal life to him. But that is purely speculation and it is dicey waters even speculating that much.)

(Image Description: the album cover of You are the Quarry. It shows Morrissey on a red background holding an old fashioned Tommy gun and wearing an old fashioned pin stripe suit. He takes up most of the left side of the image. Beside him on the right it says "Morrissey, You are the Quarry." End ID)

[bigyack-com]

A Look at Davos Through the Years

1971

The first meeting of the World Economic Forum, then called the European Management Symposium, convened in Davos, Switzerland, organized by Klaus Schwab, in collaboration with Hilde Stoll. (They married shortly afterward.)

1973

Aureilo Peccei, an Italian industrialist, delivered a speech calling for balancing economic goals with environmental concerns.

1974

Political leaders were invited for the first time, and the European Energy Commissioner asked the United States to cut fuel consumption by 5 to 10 percent.

1976

In an effort to engage with society at large, the conference began inviting a wider slate of speakers, including Ralph Nader, the consumer rights advocate.

1980

Henry A. Kissinger, a former secretary of state, warned that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan posed a fundamental challenge to the United States.The Economist wrote: “Europe’s industrialists are never happier than arguing with such folk what is wrong and what is right with free enterprise. After all, any economic system that gives you a tax-deductible week in Davos at the height of the ski season must have something to recommend it, mustn’t it?”

1981

In a harbinger of the Iran-contra affair, the Austrian chancellor warned that the United States’ support of dictatorships in Latin America could harm its relations with European powers.Lt. Col. Oliver North before a hearing on the Iran-contra affair in the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1986.Credit...Chris Wilkins/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

1982

A Saudi prince, Saud ibn Faisal, said the United States and Europe should address the wrongs done to the Arab world, including brokering the establishment of a Palestinian homeland.

1984

China announced a $1 billion plan to import Western technology. The New York Times reported, “Diplomats at the meeting here said China’s growing demands for modern Western technology raised strategic problems for the Western countries.”

1985

“The key word you hear at the Davos sessions is disintervention,” The Financial Post reported. “What that means is downsizing government, selling off public-sector companies, reducing government regulations, lowering tax burdens, and encouraging success rather than subsidizing failure.”

1986

The Greek prime minister, Andreas Papandreou, and Prime Minister Turgut Ozal of Turkey averted war with a face-to-face meeting.

1987

Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister of West Germany, urged the West to be receptive to the perestroika and glasnost initiatives begun by Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the Soviet Union.

1988

Asher Edelman, the managing general partner of Plaza Securities Co., gave a blistering speech, decrying business leaders “who are not only unethical but immoral,” and was met with loud booing.

1989

Carlo Rubbia, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984, said the consumption of fossil fuels was a significant threat to life on earth and urged investing in nuclear fusion reactors to counteract the greenhouse effect.

1990

The East German prime minister, Hans Modrow, and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany met just two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall.The Guardian reported: “A spiritual breakfast with Mother Teresa, a contact lunch with Ted Heath, dinner with the Prince of Darkness, Richard Perle, and a fiesta mexicana paid for by one of the most indebted countries, were among the delights available here yesterday as some of the most important people in the world (some might say self-important) assembled for an annual bout of networking.”

1992

Nelson Mandela, the head of the African National Congress, and South Africa’s president, F.W. de Klerk, shook hands, in their first meeting outside their country.

1994

Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister, and Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, reached a tentative agreement on settlements in the Gaza Strip and Jericho.

1995

Russia assured world leaders that it was committed to a market economy after the fall of the Soviet Union. “The course of reform won’t turn back,” said the first deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais.

1996

Bill Gates addressed Microsoft’s competitive landscape, saying: “There’s still a chance for Apple. It’s tough, though. It will take a great leader to stop the downward spiral.”

1997

The Swiss president, Arnold Koller, expressed regret for his country’s role in the Holocaust to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. “We’re serious when we say we want the full truth also about the troubling time of our history,” Mr. Koller said.

1998

The gathering that later became known as the Group of 20 was assembled for the first time at Davos.

2000

In the wake of protests in Seattle the previous fall, Mike Moore, director general of the World Trade Organization, said as he went to Davos, “For the first few months of this year, the W.T.O. will adopt the posture of the swan serene on top of the water and paddling furiously under the water.”

2002

In a show of solidarity after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the World Economic Forum was held in New York, at the Waldorf Astoria, the first time outside Davos.

2003

As the United States laid the groundwork for war in Iraq, world leaders were harshly critical at Davos, saying the case for war had not been fully made.” I think the evidence is there, and I think the evidence is clear,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said.

2004

The economist Samuel Huntington coined the term “Davos Man.”

2005

Bono, Angelina Jolie and Sharon Stone were among the celebrity attendees.During a panel discussion on the relative success of the Iraq war, Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism analyst leading the Washington office of the RAND Corporation, said: “In terms of perception, we’ve already lost the war. I believe that a cult of the insurgent has emerged from Iraq.”The British prime minister, Tony Blair, voiced support for the Kyoto Protocol, which the United States had declined to sign on to. “There are differences that need to be reconciled,” he said. “And if they could be reconciled or at least moved forward, it would make a huge difference to the prospects of international unity, as well as to people’s lives and our future survival.”

2006

A report on avian flu published at Davos stated that the disease’s “impact on society might be as profound as that which followed the Black Death in Europe in 1348. That plague caused a fundamental transformation of socio-economic relations in Europe.”

2007

Nouriel Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics, warned at a panel of the increased use of derivatives as financial instruments. “The amount of leverage in the system is growing at rates that are scary,” he said. “We don’t know if derivatives are diffusing risk or concentrating it. The risk of something systemic happening is rising.”Thomas Russo, chief legal officer of Lehman Brothers, disagreed, saying, “Risk is spread out in the financial services industry now much greater than ever before.”

2008

George Soros said that systemic failure might already be upon us, and that the current state was “not a normal crisis but the end of an era.” Fred Bergsten, the director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, nevertheless said a global recession was “inconceivable.”

2009

After the global credit-market meltdown and the failure of several major banks in the United States, the mood at Davos was described in news reports as “subdued,” “shaken,” “resigned” and “a little humbled.”During a debate over fighting in Gaza with the Israeli president Shimon Peres, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, stormed off the stage and vowed never to return to Davos.

2010

The director James Cameron said in a speech: “I always used to turn down invitations to Davos, since I know plenty about making movies, but nothing about economics. This year, I changed my mind — after all, we’ve seen from the last year that it turns out no one here knew anything about economics either.”The Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said the company would stop censoring its search results in China. “We love what China is doing as a country and its growth,” he said. “We just don’t like the censorship. We hope to apply some negotiation or pressure to make things better for the Chinese people.”

2011

The Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, said inequality could lead to long-term social unrest. “Politically, I believe we are at a turning point,” he said. “There are signs in Europe of more nationalism, more racism, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitism, fundamentalisms of all types.”

2012

In a speech, Klaus Schwab said that capitalists “have sinned” and that “people feel it’s a difficult time. They are irritated.”Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, was the event’s only female co-chair.

2013

The World Economic Forum offered a free extra spot to any company bringing a female delegate, but as one veteran female attendee told The Observer, “Lots of firms just don’t have a woman senior enough to send.”Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said that pay for executives and bankers must be cut to avoid another crash. “Excessive inequality is corrosive to growth; it is corrosive to society,” she said. “I believe that the economics profession and the policy community have downplayed inequality for too long.”

2014

Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, promised not to evacuate the West Bank settlements.Delegates participated in a “Refugee Run,” meant to simulate the conditions of being a displaced person. Orders like “Get down on the ground, heads down!” “Get up, into the tent, go to sleep!” were yelled at them.

2015

More than 100 attendees observed 10 minutes of silence in a conference room, as part of a presentation on mindfulness. “Even Goldman Sachs is doing it,” Bill George, a member of that company’s board, said of meditation. He added, “Here we are in this beautiful country, and has anyone bothered to look up at the mountains?”

2016

Leonardo DiCaprio accepted the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award for his environmentalism, saying in his acceptance speech: “We simply cannot afford to allow the corporate greed of the coal, oil and gas industries to determine the future of humanity. Those entities with a financial interest in preserving this destructive system have denied, and even covered up, the evidence of our changing climate.”Leonardo DiCaprio at Davos in 2016.Credit...Remy Steinegger/World Economic Forum

2017

The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, said “no country would emerge the winner from a trade war.”

2018

President Trump delivered a speech, declaring the United States “open for business.” He said: “The world is witnessing the resurgence of a strong and prosperous America. I’m here to deliver a simple message. There has never been a better time to hire, to build, to invest and to grow in the United States.”

2019

Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish environmental activist, delivered a speech beginning: “Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire.” She added: “At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed.” Read the full article

[daggerzine]

Teen Movie Hell author, Mike “McBeardo’ McPadden speaks!

Ok, so the second I saw the title I was hooked. I mean, come on, Teen Movie Hell: A Crucible of Coming-Of-Age Comedies From Animal House to Zapped. Having been born in the mid-60’s I came of age right when many of these movies were being released and of course I had to see every single one.

But, I didn’t see every one, not even close. I thought that because I watched Class and Zapped a few decades ago that it made me some kind of expert? Well, I was dead wrong.

Mike “McBeardo” McPadden is the real deal. In this 350 plus page tome McPadden reviews hundreds of movies, many ones I had never heard of. He digs deep. He really gets to the meat of it all. 

I was so curious about the origins of the book and his fascination with this genre of movies that I had to toss some questions his way and being the true gentleman that he is was more than happy to answer them.  Read below and in the meantime pick up two copies of this book (because you’ll wear out the first copy).

 Thank you again to Mike McPadden!

 Do you remember where you were and when it was that you decided you wanted to write this book?

It was in 1994. I was at the Tail o’ the Pup hot dog stand with my great friend Aaron Lee. We were on a lunch break from our editorial jobs at Hustler magazine.

 One of the most profound bonding elements in my early friendship with Aaron was our devotion to the movie review compendiums that so impacted and shaped who we were—particularly the annual Leonard Maltin guides, the Medved Brothers’ Golden Turkey Awards books, Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film and, above all, the work of author Danny Peary, in particular his series of Cult Movies books.

 Aaron and I just sort of hit on the idea at the same moment—“Let’s write a book about teen sex comedies!” In time, our paths split professionally. I moved back to New York. Aaron went into stand-up comedy.

 Over the next 25 years, I kept at the teen sex comedy book in one form or another. Aaron went on to a terrifically successful Hollywood writing career and was an Executive Producer of Family Guy. But—hey!—I got to write Teen Movie Hell!

 Why the title- Teen Movie Hell?

I’m a fan of calling the book what it’s about, as in the case of Cult Movies. That’s why Heavy Metal Movies is titled just that. So, initially, the name of this book was. There was a time when that might have flown. Now is not that time.

 A version of the book almost got published in 1999 under the title I Lost It in the Locker Room!, an allusion to Pauline Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies. At the eleventh hour, the publisher shut down the division that was handling my book and laid off my editor, so ILIITLR got scuttled.

 At Bazillion Points, the books started life as Going All the Way. Then publisher Ian Christe came up with the almost perfect title Last American Virgins.

 Finally, as we were doing edits, I came up with the idea to have an art show as the book’s release party and I thought—“How can I make the idea of participating in the show palatable to all these subversive artists I know and admire, beyond just saying, ‘It’s about Porky’s movies!’?”

Anne Elliott of the mighty Sideshow Gallery in Chicago offered to host the show. Sideshow specializes in witchy-groovy-occulty iconography, and I’d recently attended a show there full of devil imagery. That’s when the name “Teen Movie Hell” hit me. And, in short order, it just made perfect sense to apply that to the book—these movies took me through the hell of adolescence and they may well have sent society to hell at the same time.

 In addition, Bazillion Points specializes in books about heavy metal, hardcore, and punk rock, and it has a very metal aesthetic. So calling the book Teen Movie Hell automatically made it feel like it was more of a piece with the other Bazillion titles.  

  From an intro in the book it appears that music and film zines both played a part in your inspiration (Conflict, Rollerdeby, two of my personal faces, etc.). How do they play a part?

 I discovered zines in 1980 by way of The Uncle Floyd Show Gazette, a Xeroxed newsletter dedicated to a brilliantly hilarious and self-aware kiddie show that aired from New Jersey. I got a subscription.

 A year or two later, the New York Daily News ran a profile of Rick Sullivan, publisher of the horror zine, The Gore Gazette, also from New Jersey. I love New Jersey. I ordered a Gore Gazette and it blew my 12-year-old mind.

 From there, it was a short leap to tracking down The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film and understanding that it, too, had started as a zine. Then, leaning into punk culture as a teenager, zines became a crucial element of my existence, though they weren’t always easy to track down at first.

 At the end of the ’80s/dawn of the ’90s, zines erupted with people doing surprising, personal things beyond just reviewing movies and music. I found that very inspiring. Gerard Cosloy’s hilarious, backhanded brashness in Conflict was a huge influence. Lisa Carver’s Rollerderby made it clear to me that anything was possible.

 All that led to me publishing my own zine, Happyland, in 1991.

 Aaron Lee and I met by mail after he sent me his zine Blue Persuasion in 1993. It was the best.

 What was the criteria for inclusion of the movies in the book?

 In cultural terms, the book covers the 20 years between American Graffiti in 1973 and Dazed and Confused in 1993, with a little smudging on either side into the years around them.

 What the movies have in common is that they’re about teenagers and were made specifically for a teenage audience looking for a good time. The marketing angle has a lot to do with it—“Hey, kids! There’s a party raging up on the screen here and you’re invited! All you have to do is buy a ticket or take that VHS box cover to the rental counter!”

 Exceptions exist. Bachelor Party, for example, is about clowns in their mid-to-late 20s, but they act like teenagers and it’s essentially just transferring the format to another setting. Same with Police Academy.

  How long did it take you to complete the book?

 In one form or another, I worked on it in spurts over 25 years. But, in earnest, once I got the Bazillion Points contract, it took three years.

 For those of us around when these movies were being released why do you think they play such a huge part in our brains? Is it just the sex or something else?

 What comes to mind is a bit of wisdom from Lorne Michaels. He said that anytime somebody tells him what they think were the best seasons of Saturday Night Live, it’s almost always the period when they were in high school—because you’re allowed to stay up late enough to see it, you’re watching the show by yourself or with friends rather than with your parents, and you’re getting jokes that maybe even just a year earlier would have sailed over your head.

 I think it’s the same with these movies. Fast Times at Ridgemont High opened in theaters on the very first Friday of my freshman year of high school. Ferris Bueller opened four years later the exact day after I graduated. That period represents the very heart of the teen sex comedy genre and I was there, being a teen. These movies were made about us and, more importantly, for us.

 How did Bazillion Points respond when you told them of your idea for the book?

Bazillion Points published my book Heavy Metal Movies in 2014 and did a superhuman job with it. Bazillion honcho Ian Christe and I have long talked about teen comedies and, back in the ’90s when I was pitching a book on the topic, it turned out he actually was too! I’m glad our knuckleheaded dreams got deferred and we were able to make it a reality together.

 How was the response been so far?

 So far, so cool.

 Of all the movies you reviewed what is your personal favorite?

 The two best-made films in the book are American Graffiti (1973) and Risky Business (1983), followed closely by Animal House and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Those are legit classics of cinema I love each one of them.

My heart truly belongs, however, to lunatic outliers on the order of King Frat (1979), Zapped! (1982), Joysticks (1983), Screwballs (1983), The Party Animal (1984), and Hamburger: The Motion Picture (1986)

  What’s next? Care to spill any upcoming ideas?

Back in 2015, I announced Teen Movie Hell way earlier than I should have. Lesson learned. There’s more to come, but I’m playing it close to the coconut buttons of my Hawaiian shirt.

 The man himself 

  www.teenmoviehell.com

https://www.bazillionpoints.com/product/pre-order-teen-movie-hell-the-crucible-of-coming-of-age-comedies-from-animal-house-to-zapped-by-mike-mcbeardo-mcpadden/

 Here’s my review of the book, posted earlier in the month

https://daggerzine.tumblr.com/post/184504282732/teen-movie-hell-a-crucible-of-coming-of-age

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Kyrik, Earl Norem, Stormbringer RPG, Denny O’Neill

T.V. (RMWC Reviews): In 1973, Tsuburaya Productions released several shows as part of the company’s 10th anniversary. The first one to see release was Fireman (or Magma Man in some markets), which began airing on Nippon Television on January 7, 1973, running until July for 30 episodes.

Warfare (Aeoli Pera): The typical special forces trainee who passes selection has a higher rank (officers were far more likely to pass than enlisted), at least a bachelor’s degree, high general personality factor with extremely high conscientiousness, no children, and verbally tilted IQs averaging in the 120s. This study looks at Ranger school but it’s true across all special operations services in the Western world. Please note that, except for measuring the ability to do pullups, these exact predictors could be used to select head girls for graduate departments in the humanities and social sciences.

Fiction (Wasteland & Sky): Interested in superheroes? If you’re reading this post then there’s a good chance you do! But how much? Check out this new bundle of hero books compiled by immortal SF author Kevin J. Anderson. The offer is for a limited time, so don’t miss out! The description for the bundle is as follows: The Up, Up and Away Superheroes Bundle – Curated by Kevin J. Anderson: If reading is your kryptonite, I’ve put together a superpowered StoryBundle—thirteen books with marvelous heroes, supervillains, secret identities, mutant powers, and extraordinary gentlemen (and ladies).

Popular Culture (Legends of Men): Why do these guys virtue signal? They’re saying this type of thing to other readers of S&S and REH and the pulps. The entire readership obviously enjoys these genres with as much or as little diversity as they already have. Past works cannot be changed and what made them popular once is more likely to make them popular again than changing the nature of what they are. So do some readers feel the need to virtue signal to other readers?

Reading (DVS Press): How many times have you seen a movie and though, “Man, the book was so much better,” or had a friend who read the book say the same to you? I can definitely say that the cases where the movie is better than the book are far outweighed by the reverse – probably in the range of 20:1. In fact, the only writer whose work seems to function better on screen than on paper is Stephen King, and even then there are plenty of books in his exceptionally large canon that are much better than their cinema counterpart (anyone remember The Dark Tower? I hope not).

Science Fiction (John C. Wright): Sometimes in this life we see justice done. The Nebula Awards have just honored Gene Wolfe with a Grandmastership. The honor is overdue, and all lovers of literature should rejoice. Gene Wolfe is the Luis Borges of North America. He is the greatest living author writing in the English language today, and I do not confine that remark to genre authors. I mean he is better than any mainstream authors at their best, better in the very aspects of the craft in which they take most pride.

Culture War (Kairos): This is why they hate Japan. This the material manifestation for why they can’t handle the Beautiful and seek to degrade before they destroy; the humiliation is intended as much to assuage the abuser’s amygdala as it is to afflict the victim’s, a “No You, Christcuck!” retort as they rip the beautiful apart before finishing the job. The cruelty is part of the process by design. The shitlords–God bless you all–at /pol/ noticed that this applies to all of the cultural attacks.

Art (DMR Books): When Earl demobilized, he went into magazine illustration, mostly for the “Men’s Adventure” mags. Such magazines have also been called “men’s pulps” and “sweat mags”. Essentially, they were magazines that somewhat carried on from the actual pulps–which died out in the 1950s–but were printed on “slick” paper. A significant percentage of their readers were veterans of World War Two and Korea who were looking for manly stories featuring action and beautiful women.

Comic Books (Diversions of the Groovy Kind): As most of you know, Groove-ophiles, Denny O’Neil, one of the most influential writers of the Groovy Age passed away at the age of 81 on Friday, June 12. Much has been written about O’Neil during the past week, and that’s how it should be. During the 1970s, O’Neil changed the way we would think about Batman in particular and comics in general forever (in tandem, naturally, with artist Neal Adams, mostly, but also with a host of other artistic luminaries from Irv Novick to Mike Kaluta to Jack Kirby to Mike Grell).

Robert E. Howard (Don Herron): Something I didn’t know much about, was a bank robbery that had occurred in the little town of Cisco on December 23, 1927, over 80 years earlier. The so-called Santa Claus Bank Robbery was a story I had heard about, of course, but the Kris Kringle business had conjured up images of a gang comprised of members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the Bowery Boys. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

RPG (Black Gate): Chaosium’s Stormbringer! was a licensed product based on Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné secondary world fantasy series. The game engine used modified Basic Roleplaying mechanics; in particular, magic worked very differently in Stormbringer than in Runequest. Characters could come from a wide variety of backgrounds; power-gamers preferred certain back-grounds over others because there was no pretense of game balance between them.

Heinlein (Black Gate): It’s almost impossible to discuss Robert A. Heinlein’s The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel about Parallel Universes without revealing and thus spoiling the plot devices of it and its 1980 prequel/sequel, The Number of the Beast—. Heinlein, first Grand Master of the SFWA, for decades acclaimed as the Dean of sf, no longer pleases everyone. Some readers, especially academic critics, have denounced both books as grossly self-indulgent and even worthless. Others, like the brilliant Marxist professor H. Bruce Franklin (in his important 1980 study Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction) catch the feel of Beast: “a cotton-candy apocalypse — frothy, sweet, airy, mellow, light, festive, whimsical, insubstantial” (199).

Sword-and-Sorcery (Ken Lizzi): I’ve read a few of Gardner Fox’s Kothar books. So when I saw his name on the cover of Kyrik Fights the Demon World I didn’t hesitate to snatch up the book. No one will claim that Fox was a master stylist. Take this paragraph from page one of Demon World. And so Makonnon quested through spatial emptiness into lands that had known him, long and long ago. He sent his mind across unfathomable distances, seeking, hunting, searching for that which so infuriated him.

RPG (Cyborgs and Sorcerers): Vancian Freeform Magic. I know that sounds like a contradiction in terms.  It isn’t.  You’ll see. I love the idea of free-form spell systems because they allow for endless creativity, and for me, creative problem-solving is the biggest source of fun in RPGs.  In practice though, people often come up with a few favorite spells they cast over and over.  This system was designed to prevent that by continually varying the tools in the free-form spellcaster’s toolbox. It’s a noun-verb system like Ars Magicka, except the nouns and verbs are not skills you’re permanently trained in.

Tolkien (Tolkien and Fantasy): The details of Tolkien’s epistolary friendship with the US editor, writer and sculptor Sterling Lanier (1927-2007) are difficult to ascertain, and various accounts differ as to the chronology and extent of their correspondence.  In 1973, Lanier wrote that “it began in 1951” and amounted to some “dozen or so letters we exchanged over the years.” In a 1974 fanzine profile of Lanier by Piers Anthony, it notes that Lanier had had “ten years of correspondence” with Tolkien. In 2016,  a book dealer had for sale six letters from Tolkien to Lanier, plus one from Tolkien’s wife.

Science Fiction (M. Porcius): I enjoyed my recent look at the 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories with Leigh Brackett’s “The Dancing Girl of Ganymede” and Henry Kuttner’s “The Voice of the Lobster,” so, to take a break from my rereading of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, I propose spending some time reading more stories by Brackett and Kuttner from Thrilling Wonder (we might end up checking out some Thrilling Wonder contributions by Brackett’s husband, Edmond Hamilton, as well.)

RPG (Swords and Stitchery): I have used & abused B4 The Lost City adventure & its inhabitants  for years now a venerable pulp  module created by Tom Moldvay.  “”The Lost City” (1982) was the first adventure written entirely for the second edition Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (1981). No surprise, then, that it was written by the author of that set, Tom Moldvay. ” Today I’ve been thinking about specifically adapting this module as perhaps a starter to Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea second edition as an introductory module.

History (Outlook India): Tucked into Pakistan’s remote northwestern hills, along the border with Afghanistan, is a cluster of three villages whose residents are still trying to preserve their language and culture in the face of advancing modernity and religious conversion. The tribe, known as Kalash, is said to have descended from soldiers of the army of Alexander the Great who travelled this way in 324 BCE. However, many scholars deny the story even though it has not been established finally yet how these people, their language, dress, and their nature-worshipping culture—in marked contrast to the Islamic culture that surrounds them—evolved and survived through the centuries.

Fiction (Dark Worlds Quarterly): I used to use the words “Pulp-descended fiction” and it was the source of RAGE m a c h i n e Books. I wanted to capture that feeling that good Pulp writing gives you. What that really means is I grew up on authors who wrote during the Pulps and those who followed, they too influenced by those five decades of magazine publishing. The world has since moved on, with television and paperback novels, comic books (now called “graphic novels”). Despite this, Pulp remains with us. Not in the packaging but under the surface.

Sensor Sweep: Kyrik, Earl Norem, Stormbringer RPG, Denny O’Neill published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[mastcomm]

A Look at Davos Through the Years

1971

The first meeting of the World Economic Forum, then called the European Management Symposium, convened in Davos, Switzerland, organized by Klaus Schwab, in collaboration with Hilde Stoll. (They married shortly afterward.)

1973

Aureilo Peccei, an Italian industrialist, delivered a speech calling for balancing economic goals with environmental concerns.

1974

Political leaders were invited for the first time, and the European Energy Commissioner asked the United States to cut fuel consumption by 5 to 10 percent.

1976

In an effort to engage with society at large, the conference began inviting a wider slate of speakers, including Ralph Nader, the consumer rights advocate.

1980

Henry A. Kissinger, a former secretary of state, warned that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan posed a fundamental challenge to the United States.

The Economist wrote: “Europe’s industrialists are never happier than arguing with such folk what is wrong and what is right with free enterprise. After all, any economic system that gives you a tax-deductible week in Davos at the height of the ski season must have something to recommend it, mustn’t it?”

1981

In a harbinger of the Iran-contra affair, the Austrian chancellor warned that the United States’ support of dictatorships in Latin America could harm its relations with European powers.

Lt. Col. Oliver North before a hearing on the Iran-contra affair in the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1986.Credit…Chris Wilkins/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

1982

A Saudi prince, Saud ibn Faisal, said the United States and Europe should address the wrongs done to the Arab world, including brokering the establishment of a Palestinian homeland.

1984

China announced a $1 billion plan to import Western technology. The New York Times reported, “Diplomats at the meeting here said China’s growing demands for modern Western technology raised strategic problems for the Western countries.”

1985

“The key word you hear at the Davos sessions is disintervention,” The Financial Post reported. “What that means is downsizing government, selling off public-sector companies, reducing government regulations, lowering tax burdens, and encouraging success rather than subsidizing failure.”

1986

The Greek prime minister, Andreas Papandreou, and Prime Minister Turgut Ozal of Turkey averted war with a face-to-face meeting.

1987

Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister of West Germany, urged the West to be receptive to the perestroika and glasnost initiatives begun by Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the Soviet Union.

1988

Asher Edelman, the managing general partner of Plaza Securities Co., gave a blistering speech, decrying business leaders “who are not only unethical but immoral,” and was met with loud booing.

1989

Carlo Rubbia, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984, said the consumption of fossil fuels was a significant threat to life on earth and urged investing in nuclear fusion reactors to counteract the greenhouse effect.

1990

The East German prime minister, Hans Modrow, and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany met just two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Guardian reported: “A spiritual breakfast with Mother Teresa, a contact lunch with Ted Heath, dinner with the Prince of Darkness, Richard Perle, and a fiesta mexicana paid for by one of the most indebted countries, were among the delights available here yesterday as some of the most important people in the world (some might say self-important) assembled for an annual bout of networking.”

1992

Nelson Mandela, the head of the African National Congress, and South Africa’s president, F.W. de Klerk, shook hands, in their first meeting outside their country.

1994

Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister, and Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, reached a tentative agreement on settlements in the Gaza Strip and Jericho.

1995

Russia assured world leaders that it was committed to a market economy after the fall of the Soviet Union. “The course of reform won’t turn back,” said the first deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais.

1996

Bill Gates addressed Microsoft’s competitive landscape, saying: “There’s still a chance for Apple. It’s tough, though. It will take a great leader to stop the downward spiral.”

1997

The Swiss president, Arnold Koller, expressed regret for his country’s role in the Holocaust to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. “We’re serious when we say we want the full truth also about the troubling time of our history,” Mr. Koller said.

1998

The gathering that later became known as the Group of 20 was assembled for the first time at Davos.

2000

In the wake of protests in Seattle the previous fall, Mike Moore, director general of the World Trade Organization, said as he went to Davos, “For the first few months of this year, the W.T.O. will adopt the posture of the swan serene on top of the water and paddling furiously under the water.”

2002

In a show of solidarity after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the World Economic Forum was held in New York, at the Waldorf Astoria, the first time outside Davos.

2003

As the United States laid the groundwork for war in Iraq, world leaders were harshly critical at Davos, saying the case for war had not been fully made.” I think the evidence is there, and I think the evidence is clear,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said.

2004

The economist Samuel Huntington coined the term “Davos Man.”

2005

Bono, Angelina Jolie and Sharon Stone were among the celebrity attendees.

During a panel discussion on the relative success of the Iraq war, Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism analyst leading the Washington office of the RAND Corporation, said: “In terms of perception, we’ve already lost the war. I believe that a cult of the insurgent has emerged from Iraq.”

The British prime minister, Tony Blair, voiced support for the Kyoto Protocol, which the United States had declined to sign on to. “There are differences that need to be reconciled,” he said. “And if they could be reconciled or at least moved forward, it would make a huge difference to the prospects of international unity, as well as to people’s lives and our future survival.”

2006

A report on avian flu published at Davos stated that the disease’s “impact on society might be as profound as that which followed the Black Death in Europe in 1348. That plague caused a fundamental transformation of socio-economic relations in Europe.”

2007

Nouriel Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics, warned at a panel of the increased use of derivatives as financial instruments. “The amount of leverage in the system is growing at rates that are scary,” he said. “We don’t know if derivatives are diffusing risk or concentrating it. The risk of something systemic happening is rising.”

Thomas Russo, chief legal officer of Lehman Brothers, disagreed, saying, “Risk is spread out in the financial services industry now much greater than ever before.”

2008

George Soros said that systemic failure might already be upon us, and that the current state was “not a normal crisis but the end of an era.” Fred Bergsten, the director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, nevertheless said a global recession was “inconceivable.”

2009

After the global credit-market meltdown and the failure of several major banks in the United States, the mood at Davos was described in news reports as “subdued,” “shaken,” “resigned” and “a little humbled.”

During a debate over fighting in Gaza with the Israeli president Shimon Peres, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, stormed off the stage and vowed never to return to Davos.

2010

The director James Cameron said in a speech: “I always used to turn down invitations to Davos, since I know plenty about making movies, but nothing about economics. This year, I changed my mind — after all, we’ve seen from the last year that it turns out no one here knew anything about economics either.”

The Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said the company would stop censoring its search results in China. “We love what China is doing as a country and its growth,” he said. “We just don’t like the censorship. We hope to apply some negotiation or pressure to make things better for the Chinese people.”

2011

The Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, said inequality could lead to long-term social unrest. “Politically, I believe we are at a turning point,” he said. “There are signs in Europe of more nationalism, more racism, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitism, fundamentalisms of all types.”

2012

In a speech, Klaus Schwab said that capitalists “have sinned” and that “people feel it’s a difficult time. They are irritated.”

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, was the event’s only female co-chair.

2013

The World Economic Forum offered a free extra spot to any company bringing a female delegate, but as one veteran female attendee told The Observer, “Lots of firms just don’t have a woman senior enough to send.”

Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said that pay for executives and bankers must be cut to avoid another crash. “Excessive inequality is corrosive to growth; it is corrosive to society,” she said. “I believe that the economics profession and the policy community have downplayed inequality for too long.”

2014

Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, promised not to evacuate the West Bank settlements.

Delegates participated in a “Refugee Run,” meant to simulate the conditions of being a displaced person. Orders like “Get down on the ground, heads down!” “Get up, into the tent, go to sleep!” were yelled at them.

2015

More than 100 attendees observed 10 minutes of silence in a conference room, as part of a presentation on mindfulness. “Even Goldman Sachs is doing it,” Bill George, a member of that company’s board, said of meditation. He added, “Here we are in this beautiful country, and has anyone bothered to look up at the mountains?”

2016

Leonardo DiCaprio accepted the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award for his environmentalism, saying in his acceptance speech: “We simply cannot afford to allow the corporate greed of the coal, oil and gas industries to determine the future of humanity. Those entities with a financial interest in preserving this destructive system have denied, and even covered up, the evidence of our changing climate.”

Leonardo DiCaprio at Davos in 2016.Credit…Remy Steinegger/World Economic Forum

2017

The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, said “no country would emerge the winner from a trade war.”

2018

President Trump delivered a speech, declaring the United States “open for business.” He said: “The world is witnessing the resurgence of a strong and prosperous America. I’m here to deliver a simple message. There has never been a better time to hire, to build, to invest and to grow in the United States.”

2019

Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish environmental activist, delivered a speech beginning: “Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire.” She added: “At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed.”

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/business/a-look-at-davos-through-the-years/

[jasonmcgathey]

DiMarco’s

Concerned the draft reserves in our keg might not hold through morning, we start marching, up Bethel and across a deserted bank parking lot to the nearby neighborhood watering hole, DiMarco’s. A divided, four lane concourse of revving engines and weekend mad revelers, strip mall facades on both sides lit up indexing, variously, every known shade of the rainbow, this stretch of Bethel still sizzles with a heat only unexplored turf can sustain. Not only this stretch but the wealth of Upper Arlington beyond where, having conquered campus in our peculiar slipshod way, which is to say incompletely, but the best we’re ever likely to, may very well stand my next great project. Cataloging this terrain, or any fraction of the buffer separating their world and ours, or another series of blocks entirely. We cavort in myriad clusters like zoo animals gone AWOL, and I’m suddenly reminded of those January nights scouting out High Street for the very first time. The feeling that anything can happen and you’re on the edge of some tremendous discovery, a sensation you can never explain, nor one you’re ever capable of replicating on command.

DiMarco’s is a simple dive bar with a pair of real dartboards along the back wall, one pool table near the front picture window and not much else. Booths around the rim, and wobbly mismatched tables in the middle, square and shoved together in blocks of two or three. Jukebox topheavy with 1980s hair metal the clientele has never stopped listening to, one large screen television between the pool table and the entrance. This place might not have much of that elusive element, class, but enough that nobody’s cracking someone else over the head with a pool cue. Everyone here’s a friend, including the squat blonde middle aged barmaid Jan, quick to smile, her slightly pudgy right hand man Zerby, wiry black curls distributed sparsely across his prematurely balding pate, large black eyeglasses lending him the appearance of an owl. They are always here, I’m told. A schedule as religious as the price slashes they apply each trip to the bar, just because we know Doug and the Yanik sisters.

DiMarco’s has at no point ever been my favorite bar in town, but I sure have spent a ton of time here, nonetheless. Enough friends who lived up this way did consider it their top spot, to where the rest of us wound up here constantly by default. There’s so many random memories swirling around my head about this place, as is often the case, that it’s difficult to determine what episodes or details to share.

I know I’ve spent at least two Halloweens here, in part, of which that photo up top documents one. This would be the year that a really sharp looking brunette flashed her tits at the entire room, and Miles – though dressed like a doctor – raised both of his arms like a football referee and announced, “that’s a field goal!” This makes the highlight reel, to be sure, and is also a great example of the classic Miles comment, memorable despite or because of not making 100% perfect sense…even though you basically know what he means anyway. Otherwise, on this particular outing, I’m going with the self-explanatory bathrobe and pipe look, while Lisa, though she’s removed it by this point, had earlier adopted some sort of slutty kitten mask.

As far as other memories are concerned…Roy, Doug Fogle and I once caught a ride here in a pizza delivery girl’s pickup, in an absolute downpour. A bunch of us had been at Polo’s and virtually everyone else in our crew already left on foot for DiMarco’s. By virtue of hanging around just a smidgen two long, the three of us are caught up in this rain, though we don’t know it until stepping out the front door.

“Hey,” Roy says, spotting a pizza joint next door, “let’s wait in there until this lets up.” 

We walk over and begin rattling the locked glass door. The lights are still on, there are two girls working behind the counter, and an Asian couple is milling around in the lobby. So what gives? Finally, the Asian lady strides over and unlocks the door, to the visible consternation of both employees. 

“We’re closed,” one of the girls calls out as our motley trio staggers in. Apparently, the two ladies were making up one last order for this couple, and that was to be the end of their night.  

“Here,” the other, nicer girl offers, a modest looking brown haired chick, “we’ve got two whole pizzas left over – you guys can have them.”  

We thank her in an appropriately profuse fashion, and Roy hands a pie each to Fogle and me. Then he lays three dollar bills on the counter before we leave just as abruptly as we came, and in no better shape. The rain hasn’t abated any yet here the three of us are standing beneath the same awning, except encumbered now with the additional weight of two pizzas.  

The nice girl bursts through the glass door, jogging to a nearby truck, expertly toting a piping hot pizza bag in one hand which bears the well known company logo. One last delivery, it seems, before her night is through, before she can wash her hands of fools like us – that is, until her next shift in hell comes calling. 

“Hey, can you give us a ride up to DiMarco’s?” Roy shouts across the parking lot, long after she’s passed us. She’s standing beside her truck now, fishing for keys, and offers no immediate reaction to the question, or whether she’s even heard it. 

“I’m not supposed to,” she shouts back to us, “but okay. Come on!” 

Sprinting over to join this chick before she changes her mind, Roy jumps into the shotgun seat while Fogle and I are left sitting like a pair of rain drenched idiots in the bed. She tears out of the parking lot and only then do I realize we’re still holding the pizzas, also, too moronic to keep them inside the truck with Roy. Still, weighing the pros and cons of this arrangement stacks up well for us, better than walking, and the cardboard boxes somehow fare better in the rain than we do.  

Two minutes later, we arrive at DiMarco’s. Roy and Fogle sprint inside, while I stop to have a few kind words with our driver. Inviting her to either come in for a drink or else swing by Doug’s apartment later, though she laughs off each suggestion before driving away. I have no choice but to join the others, now, and meet them inside. 

II.

I happen to remember the night Damon first met the Yanik sisters, too, for whatever reason, even though nothing about it is all that remarkable. I think this is because we’d been in town for almost a year, and Alan and I both had already enjoyed some scattered bedroom adventures with Lisa, not to mention partied with these people an unholy amount for months on end. Yet here our third roommate had somehow not even made their acquaintance, not only the sisters but this entire crew.

Then again, our lives are often more compartmentalized than we think. Coworkers we’ve worked beside for years upon years, though they’ve never met our families, to give one example. Or, like how this particular gang never really ventured down to campus or Grandview much, just as my campus and Grandview friends were almost never up here.

Bored on some random winter weeknight, I decide to call them up, having not seen these folks for a number of weeks myself. Since Doug moved away and I left Kroger, that outrageous era had ended and I hadn’t been on this northwest end of town much. Learning now that a bunch of them are heading to DiMarco’s, Damon and I decide to ride up there ourselves.

Their younger brother Tommy now occupies Doug’s old couch, and Dane, who’s gotten into one bad situation after another over the course of a few weeks, has wound up getting fired from his most recent job, at a department store, for not showing up and dicking around when he did make it in. Then he busts out the windshield of Maria’s car during a nasty fight, and Mike Nelson drops him to the ground with a haymaker and he’s kicked out of their pad as well, exiled from the charmed circle of friends.  

I introduce Damon to everyone – seated at one table in the dimly lit other half of DiMarco’s, the half away from the bar, is the cool but somewhat spacey Charlie, a part-time drummer, his stringy black musician’s hair now almost as long as Damon’s; the ever talkative and impossibly busty redhead, Jen McBride; Lisa with her admittedly comparable breasts, dark blonde locks currently worn straight and halfway down her back; and her sister Maria, a brunette, whom we are fortunate to catch in a really vocal mood this time around. The two of us squeeze in beside them and brace ourselves for this conversation. 

Junior, Tommy, and their preppy jock friend Cooper, who I remember from one other party back in the spring, are playing pool nearby, while the girls relate to us the latest adventures and trending gossip concerning everyone else. Meanwhile, Damon sits looking bored and sipping on a beer, or else trying to strike up a conversation with Lisa and Jen, even though they didn’t know what to make of this longhair character in horn rims. 

Although, it is possible he’s having a better time than it appears. “I knew I’d be in trouble meeting these fat girls with pretty faces,” he whispers to me at one point, after downing a couple brews. Even if Lisa’s ruining the good cheer by bitching incessantly about her roommates. Finally, the clock reaches two thirty and house lights are coming on, as we pay the ever present bartending duo and head for the doors.

“Jesus Christ, Dude!” Damon exclaims with a sigh as we steps outside, “they seem like nice girls and all, but man, that one was getting on my nerves.”

“She’s usually not that bad,” I explain, which is true.

“And what about that other one, the redhead, what was her name, Lisa?” 

“No, Lisa was the blonde,” I correct.

“Well, whatever, she was the one sitting on the outside, right? I couldn’t believe she was bitching about everyone not cleaning their rooms! Maaaaaaan, I’d tell that bitch to fuck off!“

“Well, they’re usually not that bad,” I tell him, “especially after you get a couple beers in them. They throw good parties though, and they do have some nice looking friends.” 

III.

They used to keep decks of cards behind the bar here and DiMarco’s, and possibly still do, as we’ve played many a game of euchre here. There was a long running tradition, and may still be, of pool tournaments played blatantly for cash in this bar, and nobody batted an eyelash. Then again, I don’t remember ever seeing law enforcement around these parts, and the help situation was always remarkably consistent, with Jan and Zerby here just about every night. So you weren’t going to catch any heat from them, either.

That TouchTunes jukebox at the very least had an REO Speedwagon album on it. This I know because Lisa, who I constantly berated for her somewhat horrible tastes in music, was particularly fond of that one, would play it here often. At some point along the line, though sleeping together off and on for about a decade, we did try actually dating for approximately an eight month stretch there in the middle. One night she was at this juke and that infernal Speedwagon disc was blasting Time For Me To Fly, while Lisa and Jen F stood there still picking out further tunes, and Jen told her, speaking of me, “Lisa, this song is for you. It’s time for you to fly.”

Despite this period (or maybe because of it, as the more Lisa would yell at me, the more inclined I was to laugh in her face), I always was and continue to be thought of as somewhat of a zany, hopeless goofball with this crew. It’s funny how you get off on a certain foot with various scenes, be it socially, or with work, or with family, and nothing much can ever really change this. You begin to realize it’s a combination of elements contributing to this phenomenon: a little bit of people only seeing what they expect to see, a little bit maybe of you falling into your familiar role with each circle, but then also, I half suspect sometimes, it almost seems like life is throwing events in everyone’s lap to bolster these impressions. Even one night here in DiMarco’s where Lisa’s been screaming again and Tommy’s threatening me with, “don’t do anything stupid!” won’t change the dynamic, is pretty much forgotten about five minutes later.

“She doesn’t listen to anything, dude,” I tell him.

“It’s my fuckin sister – you think I don’t know that?” he retorts.

Perhaps riding around with pizzas in the rain isn’t the best idea, if you’re trying to dispel some image. Even so, in the late 90s I was dating this perfectly fine looking brunette named Stacy, however briefly. I’m pretty sure that the first time I ever came out with her around this group, we were at DiMarco’s. At any rate, it was one of the few occasions I was ever with her, around this bunch. We’ve been here a while and she says something about wanting to dip over to Polo’s. So the two of us say goodbye to everyone, climb in my car and drive over there. Stacy and I sit at the bar and order one beer…and then she completely disappears. She saw somebody she knew across the bar and was going over to say a quick hello, and this was the last I saw of her that night.

I was more than a little embarrassed at the time about my pathetic glasses, thus would never wear them. So my eyesight wasn’t the greatest to begin with. Nonetheless, I did sit there for quite a while, nursing my beer, and even made a cursory lap or two of the place. May have possibly ordered a second brew, even. In this pre-cell-phone era, this basically represented the extent of your options. Therefore, despite not exactly rushing into this decision, I eventually shrugged it off, hopped back in my car…and returned to DiMarco’s alone.

“Where’s Stacy?” everyone asks, baffled by this turn of events.

“I have no idea,” I tell them.

Of course the entire mob – which, now that I think about it, was fanned around one of those larger central tables, itself a rarity, instead of spread like normal all over the bar – is howling, clapping their hands together, pretty much on the verge of spewing beer out through their noses. I was unwittingly playing the same old part as always. I guess it’s somewhat amazing that Stacy and I actually went out some more after this. But I never quite lived this one down. Nor did I ever bring her to DiMarco’s again.

IV.

Though pretty much everyone else has moved on, we do still swing by here from time to time, of course. It was here one night that it became obvious Damon was really hitting it off with this Maryland chick, who worked with Tommy, and the two of them soon turned into a serious couple. At some point, a window was installed connecting DiMarco’s with the Ange’s Pizza next door, and there became even less of a need to leave your barstool than before. Fluke reunions across the years have almost always meant a pit stop in this place is required, if it involves any of this old gang. Like for instance, the last I’ve seen of such disparate characters as Miles or Jen McBride, these occasions have transpired right here. I seem to remember hearing something about Jan and Zerby buying the place, even, though I’ll have to research that – but either way, I like to think that the two of them are still behind the bar, every night, just like always.

  The post DiMarco’s appeared first on Love Letter To Columbus.

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[caveartfair]

Meet Norm, the Painter-For-Hire Beloved by L.A.’s Leading Artists

Installation view of “This Brush for Hire: Norm Laich & Many Other Artists” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2018. Photo by Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art.

L.A.’s most unlikely art world celebrity is known simply by one name: Norm. His superfans include artists John Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner, and his skills range from Renaissance-era methods of wall-painting to joke-telling. (One favorite: A dyslexic walked into a bra….) “He’s like Prince,” says Meg Cranston, an artist who has known and worked with him for several years. “Everyone knows Norm.” Yet in his day job, Norm Laich does not play the lead, but rather the supporting act. Through his business, LA Designs Signs, he has assisted an estimated 100-plus artists in bringing their work to life since the 1980s.

This month Norm, 62, finally takes the starring role. At the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), the city’s new kunsthalle in the downtown arts district, he is the subject of a retrospective, not as an artist—he makes deadpan text pieces and abstract graphic signs under his own name—but as a fabricator. “This Brush for Hire: Norm Laich & Many Other Artists” presents a roll call of some of L.A.’s greatest (and most irreverent) names in Conceptual and text-based art, for each of whom Norm has played the invisible hand, turning idea into fully executed object.

Norm Laich painting John Baldessari’s A Painting That Is Its Own Documentation, 1966-present. Still from This Brush for Hire: Norm Laich & Many Other Artists, 2018. Film directed by Pauline Stella Sanchez. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Some of the works here are existing pieces that Norm labored on years ago; several are site-specific installations or wall pieces that Norm brought to life in earlier exhibitions, which he recreates at ICA LA once again. Of the latter category, there’s Stephen Prina’s Monochrome Painting (1998–99; recreated 2018); Mike Kelley’s iconic set of office conference rooms, first shown in the era-defining “Helter Skelter” at MOCA, Los Angeles in 1992; and a line of text by Weiner that runs along the floor of the space. They’re joined by contributions from Barbara Kruger, Baldessari, and Cranston, as well as younger artists like Amanda Ross-Ho.

The exhibition is a tribute and a conceptual art piece of its own, masterminded by Baldessari and Cranston, along with Norm—who preferred the idea of presenting a retrospective of his business, rather than “just another painting show” of his own sign works (a proposal that was initially on the table). According to Cranston, Norm’s numerous former artist clients were quick to grant permissions for the show—“because it was Norm, they all said yes immediately.” Some of their pieces amounted to nothing more than a set of instructions, dependent on Norm for the manual labor and draftsmanship required to materialize them.

Prina’s work, for instance, consists of a simple manual for a wall painted in monochrome aquamarine and emblazoned with the words “MONOCHROME PAINTING” in Kabel font. Norm first created this piece for Prina in the late 1980s; this latest iteration took him and an assistant four days to complete at ICA LA.

Installation view of Mike Kelley, Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (With Copy Room) For an Advertising Agency Designed By Frank Gehry, 1991, in “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1992. © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo by Paula Goldman/MOCA. Courtesy of the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.

Baldessari’s A Painting That Is Its Own Documentation (1966–68)—a canvas featuring painted text that tells the story of its own origins and records each subsequent exhibition outing—requires new lettering to be added each time it’s shown. Norm said that in the past, when Baldessari’s work wasn’t so valuable, making fresh iterations of it came with less angst. Back then, he felt he had the “freedom to give a little more flair to the lettering.” When the piece traveled to San Diego in 1996, for example, Norm took the liberty of giving the new words an italic flourish.

This time around, he had several people peering over his shoulder, and he found himself feeling rather shy. The piece was recently donated to SFMOMA and traveled to ICA LA, with an escort who kept an eagle’s eye over proceedings. An ICA LA film crew was also following Norm around through the installation of the show. All of this resulted in him painting a font “that was way more conservative than usual,” he says, the letters of which are dignified, upright, and formal.

The biggest hurdle, though, came with recreating Kelley’s work. The installation consists of a cluster of actual office cubicles that manifest the late artist’s proposal for workspaces at the corporate headquarters of the advertising firm Chiat/Day, designed by architect Frank Gehry in the 1980s. The rooms are decorated with satirical and mocking illustrations blown up to mural scale—prankish schoolyard cartoons run amok. The imagery riffs on employee jokes and scribbles Kelley would find from time to time in the administrative spaces of CalArts when he was a student there. The “conference room,” for example, features an image of a toddler sitting on a toilet and reaching for some toilet paper; “No job is finished until the paperwork is done!” reads the text beneath. Another shows a maniacal, besuited office worker pointing toward the exit. “Would it upset you terribly,” goes the script below, “if I asked you to take your silly-ass problem down the hall, perchance to find someone who really gives a damn?” A list of rules in a faux-meeting room grants total authority to women: According to rule number five, “THE FEMALE IS NEVER WRONG.” The ad firm, which had initially invited Kelley to submit a proposal, ultimately balked at his irreverent designs.

Scott Grieger, United States of Anxiety, 1995. Courtesy of the artist.

Norm worked with Kelley to realize the piece for “Helter Skelter” back in the early ’90s, and suggested they employ a technique used to render fresco paintings during the Renaissance. The method goes something like this: The images are projected onto white butcher paper, and their outlines are traced with small perforations. The paper is then applied to the wall and rubbed with charcoal powder, which filters through the holes, forming a loose outline of the images. These drawings are then painted over, and any excess charcoal wiped away. The original butcher paper templates survived from the ’90s and could be reused, but it still took Norm, Meg Cranston, and a handful of assistants a week and a half—working long, 12-hour days—to bring the office cartoons to life at the ICA LA.

This and other works in the show—like Scott Grieger’s black map of America, superimposed with “The United States of Anxiety”—hit a nerve at this moment in national discourse. And while it’s true that many of L.A.’s Conceptual art greats are white men, a certain unease around gender is explored in another Norm-executed work here by Kay Rosen. Titled Various Strata (1996/1998–99), it’s a wall painting that displays a stacked decrescendo of three words: “HIM,” “HYMM,” and “HMMM,” the stiff male pronoun seemingly dissolving into the suggestion of a funeral prayer and then an expression of flaccid skepticism.

Installation view of “This Brush for Hire: Norm Laich & Many Other Artists” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2018. Photo by Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art.

This needling of authority also underpins the subversive nature of this exhibition—revealing and celebrating the humble laborer rather than the genius auteur, and questioning the very possibility of authorship. Norm doesn’t take credit for these works, which he’s physically produced, but Cranston has a more nuanced view. Asked if she and Baldessari intended for this show to be a hat tip to Norm, she says, unequivocally, yes. “There are lots of artisans behind the creation of art. It’s true of most art-making,” Cranston says. “John Baldessari has made that very clear. Films are very honest about that—there are awards for different roles.” (She also considers Pauline Stella Sanchez, the director of a film about Norm that accompanies the exhibition, and Jamillah James, the ICA LA’s curator, among others, to be co-creators of “Brush for Hire.”)

The fact that Norm is an artist in his own right—and not just any artist, but a sign-painting artist—helps bolster his appeal as a collaborator among L.A. artists with strong roots in that tradition. “He completely understands art-making,” says Cranston. “It’s a common experience to work with fabricators who scratch their heads and say, ‘Well, why the hell would you want to do that?’” Not so with Norm, who once gigged as a sign painter in Detroit, painting billboard ads for liquor, cars, and cigarettes after attending art school in Toronto—and who has enormous admiration for the work of artists like Baldessari and Cranston.

He speaks a common language—wry, deadpan, and resolutely egoless—which can be seen in the one artwork in the exhibition for which he’s the sole author. Laich’s Never Die (2015) is a brightly colored, makeshift fast-food sign in the shape of a wobbly green speech bubble that’s filled with menu items from a roadside diner. Scrawled in black between listings for cheeseburgers and shakes (and their corresponding dollar signs) are two words, rendered vertically: “Never Die.” It’s the perfect distillation of a certain California ethos that undergirds “This Brush for Hire”—a droll streak of humor and sincerity in a city of flat signs and immortal ambitions.

from Artsy News

[oselatra]

Whither the Rep

Its destiny is not in the stars, but ourselves.

The Arkansas Repertory Theatre last week produced the greatest drama in the 44-year history of the stage last week when it announced its debt was so deep it had to cancel its last play of the season and bring down the curtain indefinitely.

The news got a standing "Oh, no" from actors and audiences who knew that Little Rock — and Arkansas — had something special in its professional theater. The Rep has a reputation of great performances among theatergoers and as a great place to work among the many actors who've come to Little Rock. The idea that The Rep might close brought into sharp focus what that would cost Little Rock — fortunately, before it's gone, not after.

The drama has been building for quite some time, thanks to a dive in ticket sales and a faltering capital campaign. The course of theater never does run smooth, the Bard might say, but finding itself without the means to stage its final 2017-18 season production, "God of Carnage," which was to open in June, the theater's board of directors darkened the house.

The secured and unsecured debt — including $1.6 million in bank loans, including mortgages — is in total "north of $2 million," Brian Bush, chairman of The Rep's board, said last week. The board is trying to raise $750,000 to $1 million immediately to settle vendor debt and begin paying off the Bank of the Ozarks, which Bush said has been "cooperative and intimately involved in what's going on for at least six months." The board is also forming a group, "The Next Act," to talk about what form The Rep should take to be sustainable.

The Rep does have assets: Its theater at Main and Sixth streets and two apartment buildings for its out-of-town actors have been appraised at more than $6.5 million, Bush said. That makes it "real estate rich and cash poor," he said. Selling its real estate "is on the table," though the fact that The Rep has a place for its actors to stay has been one of the great draws for them to the Arkansas theater.

The Rep had raised $1.7 million during the quiet phase of a capital campaign the past couple of years, Bush said, but had hoped to raise $2.7 million during that phase. The total goal of $5.2 million would have retired all debt and created a cushion for the future, but with declining revenues — The Rep could only fill 47 percent its seats this season, Bush said, and campaign cash had to be spent to put on the plays.

The Rep's staff will be cut from 30 to 10 as of May 8. Producing Artistic Director John Miller-Stephany is among those losing his job. The theater education program, which breaks even, will continue through the summer.

There may be some good news: Potentially waiting in the wings is a $1.8 million grant The Rep has applied for from the Windgate Charitable Trust of Siloam Springs, which has made several multimillion-dollar gifts in the past few years to the arts, including $40 million last year to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville to create an art and design district and $20.3 million to UA Little Rock and $15.5 million to UA Fort Smith for their fine arts buildings. Should The Rep receive the grant, it would have to match it.

***

"What I can tell you," actor Patrick Halley said last week, "is The Rep had a sterling reputation in New York as a wonderful and warm and incredibly artist-friendly place to work. The way I got my first audition there was a friend I knew had worked there — I begged him, 'Could you put in a good word for me?' " Since then, Halley has appeared in a number of Rep productions, including "The School for Lies" last October.

"What always set The Rep apart was, some places you would go and work in a metropolis with a ton of options as far as culture goes. The audiences at The Rep always stood out as excited and engaged and grateful and you really got a sense of the impact that your work was having in the community." Not every audience is like that, he said.

The Rep's staff of designers "are at the top of their game," Halley said, "and that's not always common. Folks like Linda Parlier [assistant to the production manager] and Alan Branson [sound design and engineer] and Mike Nichols [technical director and set designer], the costume shop — they had a world-class team."

Halley called Bob Hupp, the producing artistic director from 1999-2016, "an inspiring leader" and managing director Mike McCurdy "one of the kindest and sweetest men on the face of the earth."

Halley was in Fayetteville when the news The Rep would suspend operations got out.

"The Rep has been so good to me," Halley said. "When I got the news, it felt like someone has passed away. I was so very, very sad."

On Friday, the Friends of the Arkansas Repertory Theatre announced a Rally for the Rep to be held Tuesday, May 1, in front of the theater, with music by the Greasy Greens, and special friends of the theater, including founder Cliff Baker, the director from 1976-1998 and a guest director for the past 17 years, will attend. By Monday, 1,300 people had clicked the "Interested" button and more than 200 people had donated a total of $73,000.

"In a strange way," Halley said, "the level of outcry speaks to how special it was." As Joni Mitchell sang, you don't know what you've got till it's gone.

Candyce Hinkle has been an actress for 40 years, and has appeared in plays at The Rep and other local theaters, as well as in such nationally released movies as the Coen brothers' "True Grit."

"The Rep has been my heart, honey, and this is just devastating," Hinkle said. "You can go anywhere in Central Arkansas and see talented people tell good stories, but when you go to The Rep ... . You don't realize how supported they are by technical artists. Mike Nichols' sets, the ability to create atmosphere by sound and lights. It's such a team effort to put on the shows that they do. That is what we don't get anywhere else. It's a professional jewel in our midst."

Hinkle is convinced that there is enough support for The Rep that it can reopen and stay open. "It doesn't have to come back as the grandiose giant it had become. Even if it comes back with a different flavor, but the same dedication to technical support and quality of performances: That's what we have to save."

The school must go on, as well, Hinkle said. "How many lives has that program changed? Just to give those kids that. They are treated professionally: It's not a babysitting opportunity. It's hard work: You hold a kid to a standard, and they're going to meet it. It's strictly professional, it's not just fun — it's work to get to the fun."

***

"I took a couple of days of heartache and mourning," Cliff Baker said from his home outside Mayflower, but now he's ready for action.

Baker came to Arkansas from Missouri in the 1960s to enroll in the Arkansas Arts Center's bachelor of fine arts program, which in its short time drew national accolades and a visit from The Juilliard School at its closing to recruit some of its actors. After working in theater outside Arkansas for a while, Baker returned to visit friends "and they said, 'Let's do a play,' and I rented a storefront ... and they were all kinky plays," Baker said.

The Arkansas Philharmonic was also short-lived. Support for a new theater came from old-money folks who were thrilled to see a higher level of theater established in Little Rock. The Rep sold 300 season tickets at a fundraiser in the posh Edgehill neighborhood "and we didn't have a theater and we didn't have a season," Baker said.

The theater opened in what had been Hunter Memorial Methodist Church, across the street from MacArthur Park, and though the venue was humble, the theater staged ambitious productions, from the breakout gay-themed play "The Boys in the Band" (performed at the Arts Center before its Off-Broadway premiere) to musicals "Marat/Sade," "Threepenny Opera" and "Ain't Misbehavin."

The actors were young, the budget was a shoestring, and even if Baker rehearsed a play for two weeks, "If I knew it was going to be bad, we just didn't do it."

"In the nonprofit theater world, I don't think you ever feel like you are on your feet," Baker said. But in the 1980s, when the budget for The Rep reached $500,000 "and the actors weren't having to do everything," he decided it was time to look for a larger home. The Rep moved to its building on Main, with its larger theater and production space, in 1988. Its operating budget is $4 million.

"I think the idea of a professional theater made all the difference" to the Little Rock audience, Baker said. "And people felt like they may not always like a particular play, but they knew it was going to be well done and there would be elements they would remember — the performances or the design."

Baker doesn't believe people have lost interest in live theater. Little Rock and North Little Rock support The Weekend Theater, The Public Theatre, Celebrity Attraction productions at Robinson Center Performance Hall, the Argenta Community Theater, the Arkansas Arts Center's Children's Theatre and Murry's Dinner Playhouse. But those venues — primarily Celebrity Attractions shows in the renovated Robinson — also present competition.

Baker does think some of the excitement is missing. People can't expect a big "joyous hit" like "Sister Act," which Baker last directed at The Rep, every time they go to the theater. And a theater can't sustain itself by planning that the success of one big show will carry the others.

Now, with the "Second Act" strategizing, Baker is thinking about how to reopen The Rep in a model that would be sustainable. "That's where I'm focusing. I'm calling friends and colleagues and and asking what works, what doesn't work.

"It's an age-old dilemma for nonprofit theater. The Rep kind of overgrew and couldn't support it."

***

Ginger Pool, producing artistic director of Mill Mountain Theatre in Roanoke, Va., has felt The Rep's pain. So when Pool heard about The Rep's crisis, she called board member Ruth Shepherd and offered to help in any way she could.

In 2009, Mill Mountain, which had its roots in a playhouse established in 1964, found itself $860,000 in debt. Its debt wasn't related to real estate, but because for a decade it had over-produced, employed a fulltime professional staff of 23 with benefits, suffered high overhead and staged "a little bit of vanity theater, producing shows that Roanoke wasn't supporting. The quality never dropped, but when the audience is not listening to you ... ."

And so Mill Mountain ceased operations, keeping only Pool, the director of its revenue-producing education program. The fulltime staff and 16 contract employees and 12 interns were let go. It cashed in its Actors Equity Association bond.

So Pool got to work by meeting one-on-one with vendors, negotiating such things as payment plans and tax credits and "asking for forgiveness. ... It was the hardest work I've ever done, and the most rewarding." Within a year, all but $75,000 of the debt had been paid off or negotiated.

For a while, Mill Mountain's children's theater put on the only productions, on holidays. The theater realized "Roanoke hasn't given up on us yet," Pool said, when it was announced the youths would perform "Annie": The musical was a sellout before the play opened.

It took Mill Mountain four years to have a "soft reopening." A theater that once produced 14 shows on its main stage a season now produces three. The new business model, Pool said: "We have made a promise that each individual production will make money standing by itself. We are not in the frame of mind, do this giant show to pay for this riskier show. ... That's a slippery slope for theaters. ... So we look at what we're choosing, and if we have any hesitation if this show can't stand alone, we throw it out. We drill down to worst-case scenarios, really analyzing everything, before we announce [the season] to the public."

Mill Mountain still does theater that might be called art rather than entertainment, but does it in its small black box theater. It has also added Mill Mountain Music, twice-a-year concerts.

"I will say people don't donate money to pay off your debt. There are going to be angels in the community, but [their gifts are] not going to be of the magnitude that your problems are over," Pool warned.

***

Ironically, The Rep has been the anchor of development on Main Street, in what Mayor Mark Stodola calls the "Creative Corridor." Its educational program in a renovated historic building catercornered from the theater along with Ballet Arkansas's studio and a private gallery have supported the idea of a downtown arts district .

The mayor learned of The Rep's financial troubles a couple of weeks ago, he said. He said he'd approached Celebrity Attractions, which has a substantial marketing budget, about the possibility of the company's taking a Rep show on the road, and noted that the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau supports The Rep with a contribution of $50,000 a year. The city made a small contribution last fall by buying tickets for a group.

Stodola said The Rep had also broached the idea that perhaps the city could support the theater by buying the theater building and leasing it back to The Rep for a nominal sum, as is done in other cities. But Stodola said that idea was, for him, a no-go. "Other organizations that we support, they are city commissions, like the Arkansas Arts Center or the Museum of Discovery or the military museum," Stodola told the Times. If it were to become a commission, The Rep board would have had to give up its governance, Stodola said, which was something it was reluctant to do.

Board chair Bush said The Rep is open to collaborations with colleges and universities and other theaters.

***

Perhaps you are asking yourself, what sort of self-respecting city can't find the audience to keep its professional theater open? Former Producing Artistic Director Hupp, who is now artistic director at Syracuse Stage on the campus of Syracuse University in New York, said competition from the rise of local theater groups is a factor, if not the factor, for The Rep's woes.

"Celebrity Attractions has been performing [in the past], but they've never been able to bring in the tours they're bringing in now [thanks to the $70.5 million renovation of Robinson]. I mean, look at 'The Lion King,' 'Phantom of the Opera,' a tour of 'Les Mis' ['Les Miserables']."

"One of the things that's great about The Rep is the intimate relationship between the audience and the performers. So, that always played pretty well and distinguished The Rep from Celebrity Attractions. But the new model, and the amount of money the city put into the renovation of Robinson, definitely has an impact" on The Rep's ticket sales, Hupp said.

To those who are skeptical about competition's role in The Rep's trouble filling seats, Hupp insisted there is "legitimacy to the external factors."

Too, The Rep's real estate burden, which includes both debt and ongoing maintenance, is unusual, Hupp said. "The expense of owning those properties has always been a challenge for The Rep," he said.

The former director said he was saddened, but not surprised, by the news of The Rep's suspension. But he said The Rep can return.

"If there were some combination of grassroots support and either city leadership or private leadership that comes in and helps stabilize the theater, there is a path forward. There are people who feel very passionate about The Rep. You've seen the social media posts that have come out. That initial reaction of surprise and shock — if that can move beyond that initial emotional reaction to real activism, real organization, then The Rep has a great shot of sustaining itself in a reimagined form."

Here's how Hupp puts the question of what it says about a city that lets its professional theater fail this way: "I think the question people who live in Little Rock have to ask is, 'Is the situation with The Rep a canary in the coal mine?' Is this indicative of other, more challenging issues with the city?

"A thriving city should have thriving arts. And the arts organization has to be responsive and also provide leadership and vision for what the arts mean to the community. ... A healthy organization, wherever you are in the country, has to generate earned income and the city has to show its partnership in that equation through philanthropic dollars. And that's public support from the city itself and private support from those who have means and can help."

Whither the Rep

[omcik-blog]

New Post has been published on OmCik

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Subprime is now ‘nonprime’: High-risk mortgage lending is back

It was about a decade ago that Dan Perl chucked it all in to go surfing in Mexico. As a veteran underwriter of subprime mortgages, he’d seen enough by April 2007 to know that there was serious trouble ahead. So he pulled down the shutters, took an extended break in Baja, California, and then lay low for a few years, trading loans for a New York firm, Carl Marks & Co.

But now he is back in the game, leading a small band of lenders making subprime loans once more. Or “nonprime”, as they prefer to call it these days. The sector is on course to produce about $10bn this year — a tiny slice of America’s $1.6tn overall home-loan market but one that’s growing rapidly.

Plenty of people told Perl, 68, that he couldn’t bring this stuff back so soon after the global financial crisis, and after regulators all over the US radically tightened rules on mortgages. People said he was risking his net worth, that he’d “be sued into oblivion”.

.

“How many times we hear that, Kyle?” he asks, turning to his protégé, 39-year-old Kyle Gunderlock, who was a VP of sales at Perl’s old firm and is now president of the new one, known as Citadel Servicing Corp, based in Irvine, California.

“‘You guys are going to get f***ing arrested,’ is the one I always remember,” says Gunderlock.

The way Perl and his peers see it, there’s nothing shady or menacing about the business of subprime. On the contrary, they say, specialist lenders in this area are performing a vital service for the world’s largest economy. For every comfortably off professional who could walk into a branch of Chase or Wells Fargo and get a home loan without any fuss, they argue, there are many more who would struggle. People who are self-employed or on variable incomes, for example, may not check all the boxes a big bank needs. Ditto new immigrants with thin credit histories, or people with a few scratches and dents in their files.

“Making credit available to borrowers who are subprime is national policy and it is an important part of economic growth,” says Julian Hebron, head of sales at RPM Mortgage in Alamo, California. “It’s untrue to call it a scourge.”

But what’s worrying some economists is a feeling that we’re on a slippery slope; that the same forces which fed the crisis last time round — rampant demand for yield among investors, skewed incentives on Wall Street and a government determined to relax regulatory restraints — could feed another.

Under President Donald Trump, for example, agencies are under orders to review just about every financial rule that emerged under Barack Obama. In June, the Treasury department put out a report saying that tight underwriting standards were partly to blame for “anaemic” growth in housing, which accounts for almost one-fifth of GDP.

The market for securitising subprime loans is picking up, too, spreading the risk of default in much the same way as before. Fitch, the credit rating agency, expects $3bn of issuance of nonprime mortgage-backed securities (MBS) this year, up from about $1bn over the previous 18 months. (Back in January, it was predicting $2bn for the year.)

Meanwhile, some old characters are re-emerging, including a few who gained a certain notoriety a decade ago. Kyle Walker, the former head of Fremont, a big mortgage firm that was rapped by federal regulators for “unsafe” practices in March 2007, is back running a nonprime shop called HomeXpress in Newport Beach, California. Dan Sparks, a former Goldman Sachs trader mentioned more than 500 times in a Senate report on the mortgage meltdown, is now buying low-grade loans from a hedge fund up in Stamford, Connecticut. (Walker did not respond to requests for comment and Sparks declined to comment.)

All of this is happening without a proper reckoning from the last time around, says Richard Bowen, a former chief underwriter at Citigroup, which ranked as America’s top subprime lender in 2007. Bowen says he tried to raise the alarm internally about rampant fraud in mortgage applications, before being stripped of underwriting responsibilities. He left the group in 2008. He draws a contrast with the savings and loan crisis in the US in the 1980s, after which about 800 senior bankers went to jail. The running total from the crisis that began in 2007? Zero. Even though it was “many, many, many” times worse, says Bowen, “no one has been held accountable. And I can assure you it’s not because of a lack of evidence.”

On the morning I meet Perl, on a blazingly hot day in June, he’d been up the hills behind his house in San Juan Capistrano with his white Labrador Ella. Now he’s showered and holding court in his office, dressed in jeans, loafers and a checked shirt.

He was born in Brooklyn to a conservative Jewish family but grew up in Sherman Oaks, a relatively spacious suburb of Los Angeles, and Santa Monica. After a degree from UCLA and an English teaching job at Santa Monica High, he formed a loan brokerage in the mid-1970s with his college pal Bill Ashmore, who now runs Impac, another mortgage firm based a few miles up the San Diego Freeway from Citadel.

After the crash of 1987, Perl-Ashmore parted ways; Perl into subprime (or “Bs and Cs”, as lower-grade loans were called then) and Ashmore into “Alt-A”, slightly classier yet not quite prime. In the 1990s Perl’s business grew strongly, partly on the back of a loan he invented called the NINA — aimed at customers with “no income, no assets”. He was known as the Big Kahuna.

But by 2005, says Perl, it was clear that things were slipping out of control. His outfit, then known as First Street, was a top 20 underwriter nationwide, in a sector which produced about $1tn of subprime mortgages — about one-third of the total US mortgage market — that year. Also clustered in Orange County were some of the best-known subprime shops in the country, such as New Century, Ameriquest and Fremont.

But margins were shrinking and loans were being written that should never have been written. At one point New Century had a 2 per cent error rate, meaning that one in every 50 of its borrowers never made a single payment. The company’s collapse in early April 2007, owing $8.4bn to banks including Morgan Stanley, Barclays and UBS, was one of the defining moments of the crisis.

Mike Fierman, managing partner and co-CEO of Angel Oak of Atlanta, Georgia, was also in the thick of it back then, running a firm called SouthStar Funding. He says he had no choice: if he wanted to compete, he had to drop standards. Like Perl, he bailed in April 2007, after Goldman and Lehman Brothers said they’d had their fill of subprime. But until that point they and other investment banks had hoovered up everything he’d offered them. They’d then wrap it up into MBS, on which credit rating agencies — competing between themselves to win the most business — would typically slap an attractive rating.

“Everyone was complicit,” says Fierman. “You felt trapped; investors were demanding more loans than could be produced in a responsible way. The only way to produce that kind of volume was to be irresponsible.”

Brokers were going after “gardeners and serving maids and house cleaners and gas-station attendants and strippers on poles,” says Perl. “That’s not lending. That ain’t the way you do it.”

He got out about 18 months before the collapse of Lehman brought the world economy to the brink of ruin. “Honest to God, Ben, do you ever just get a bad vibe?” he asks me. “Do you ever walk down a dark hall and say, ‘This is not a place I should be?'”

This time it’s different, say the lenders. Thanks to the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, the nonprime loans being written now bear little relation to the sludge that stunk up the system a decade ago.

Perl and Gunderlock say they spent weeks going through the 800 pages of Dodd-Frank that was relevant to mortgages, as they looked to crank up the machine again. There were all kinds of proscriptions on funding and closing and servicing a loan, says Perl, but in the end it came down to this: “People have to be relatively reasonable about how they treat borrowers. You can’t lie, you can’t cheat, you can’t steal.”

Gone, as a result, are some dubious features that caused trouble last time round, such as zero deposits or low teaser rates that adjusted sharply higher in two or three years. Gone, too, are the negative amortisation loans that allowed borrowers to pay less than the interest due, so that the loan balance actually grew.

There’s no more “stated income” either: whatever the borrower declares, the lender has to check by looking at pay stubs and tax returns, rather than assuming it’s the truth.

Granted, standards in nonprime are generally looser than those that apply to mortgages eligible to be bought by government agencies such as Fannie Mae. Such loans are known as “qualified mortgages”, or QM, and they account for the vast majority of America’s home-loan market.

But today every mortgage has to conform to an overarching standard known as ATR, or “ability to repay”. Unless a lender can be convinced in eight separate ways that the borrower has the means to pay the thing back, it can be sued down the track if the loan goes bad.

The new regulatory framework is “actually pretty rational”, says Matt Nichols, founder and CEO of Deephaven Mortgage, who set up the Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm in 2013 after more than a decade running Goldman’s residential mortgage business. So far he’s bought about $1bn of nonprime loans from a network of 100 or so brokers, and has resold about half of that into the MBS market.

In a $250m MBS deal in June, more than 40 per cent of borrowers who got mortgages bought by Deephaven had had a prior “credit event” such as a bankruptcy, foreclosure or short sale, according to Kroll, a credit rating agency. The deal was roughly six times oversubscribed, nonetheless.

“Ability to repay, as a rule, is common sense,” says Nichols. “You’ve got to rely on something other than their word for it, right?”

Perl and others note that investors in these new classes of nonprime MBS have extra degrees of comfort. Under Dodd-Frank reforms that took effect in 2015, sponsors of a deal need to retain an interest of at least 5 per cent of the aggregate credit risk of the assets they’re turning into securities. It’s known as “skin in the game”: if originators are on the hook for losses, the theory goes, they’ll take a lot more care over what they’re producing.

Before the crisis, there was no minimum ownership, resulting in mortgage firms simply flipping all kinds of dross at Goldman or Merrill or Bear Stearns. “This is not an originate-to-sell model; it’s an originate-to-own model,” says Fierman of Angel Oak. His firm, which buys nonprime loans from other brokers as well as originating its own, has been the most active of MBS issuers, completing four deals since 2015 worth a total of $630m. He says that Angel Oak has gone well beyond the basic 5 per cent threshold, owning as much as 10 per cent of its MBS deals at various points. “Trust has to be built with investors,” he says. “They’re watching us closely.”

Some of the big names on Wall Street have already tiptoed back in. Pimco, the world’s biggest bond house, has 25 per cent of the equity in Perl’s Citadel, according to a person familiar with the ownership structure. Blackstone, the private equity giant, has a cluster of nonprime investments, including a stake in Bayview Asset Management, a firm which buys mortgages from Coral Gables, in Florida.

Will the big US banks get back into subprime? Inevitably, says Guy Cecala, CEO and publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, the industry bible. He notes that overall mortgage originations in the US have slipped about one-fifth this year, mostly because a rise in interest rates has caused refinancing business to drop.

“At the end of the day, every lender out there, unless they want to see their business decline, has to look at alternative products,” he says.

In the meantime, other banks are taking supporting roles. Credit Suisse and Nomura, for example, are supplying lines of credit to originators and underwriting securitisations of subprime mortgages. Fitch, DBRS and Kroll, the credit rating agencies, have given their stamps of approval to a succession of securitisation deals.

Even Standard & Poor’s, which paid $1.4bn in 2015 to the US Department of Justice to resolve a probe into ratings inflation, is back on the scene, rating five deals this year. (Moody’s, which settled with the government in January this year, has yet to re-appear.)

Some investors, for their part, are reluctant to dive in. Tracy Chen, a fund manager at Brandywine Global in Philadelphia, says she’s tempted, but wants the MBS market to increase to about $20bn in total before she would feel comfortable trading in and out of positions. “The market is still not very transparent, and there’s not much trading volume. I need to wait for it to scale up before I enter.” The caution is understandable: she was at UBS in the run-up to the crisis, when the Swiss bank took tens of billions of dollars of losses on its subprime portfolio.

But even the more cautious investors may change their minds, in time. As long as interest rates stay near historic lows, “anyone will scramble for what yield they can find”, says Bowen, the ex-Citigroup whistleblower, who now lectures on ethics.

He cites the sale of junk bonds in August by Tesla, the trendy carmaker that is still consuming much more cash than it is earning. The $1.8bn deal, which lacks restrictions to stop Tesla issuing more debt whenever it wants to, is “insane”, he says.

For now, loan books are in good shape. At Impac, just a handful of non-QM loans written over the past three years are more than 60 days delinquent, says Ashmore, the CEO. Only one loan is in foreclosure, among about 2,200 in total.

He expects the total nonprime market to increase to $100bn before long. “I believe if I can deliver superior risk-adjusted returns, there’ll be more than enough capital.”

At Citadel, which normally aims a notch or two below the typical Impac customer, in terms of credit score and debt-to-income ratios, there are seven foreclosures among 3,500 or so loans. That has prompted Perl to push out the boat a bit. In August he launched a new loan called “The One”, allowing a self-employed borrower to qualify based on one month’s bank statement rather than the usual 12.

The move has “got everyone a little nervous”, he admits, despite a long list of safety features. But he reckons he has another four to five years of “clear sailing” before the market starts to turn once more.

One regret? Not trademarking “nonprime”, which he thinks he coined five years ago.

As for “subprime”, he never liked it.

“It sounds kind of Neanderthal, doesn’t it? It sounds almost like you’re a monkey and humans are better. But nonprime has a nice ring to it.”

More from the Financial Times:

[junker-town]

How Notre Dame went 4-8, and why things will get better in 2017

Get your jokes in now, because the turnaround is likely on its way.

We never had a problem with Notre Dame officials, but after the war, some of their fans began driving us crazy. They began writing letters saying that other schools should imitate Notre Dame, not just in winning, but by winning absolutely cleanly and honestly. Sure, who doesn't want to do that? But no one could get players like Frank Leahy could...

Also the fans said that Notre Dame sets an example that other schools could follow if those schools didn't like cheating so much. I really got angry when they started applying that to Purdue, as if we [Purdue] cheated.

— Lafayette Journal & Courier sports editor Gordon Graham, Onward to Victory: The Creation of Modern College Sports

One of the things I enjoyed about writing my latest book, The 50 Best* College Football Teams of All Time (and hey, if you don’t enjoy your own book, who will?) is how you can trace how perceptions of certain programs changed over time. Notre Dame is the best example.

There are two Notre Dame teams in the book (which, in anti-social fashion, isn’t actually about the best teams at all): the 1924 team that won the Irish’s first Rose Bowl and the 1947 team that is typically called one of the most talented of all time. In between the first and the second team, all of college football began to look at Notre Dame in a completely different light.

The 1924 team was a plucky squad, abused in some stadiums for the school’s Catholic backbone and going out of its way to put a good face forward for both school and religion. Look at these wholesome boys who will pray before the game and help you up after bowling you over!

The 1947 team was, by any account, no less wholesome. But the Irish were the heavyweight champion of the world by this point. Their connections with the Naval academy had helped to allow the school to maintain a high level of talent during World War II, and with loose postwar transfer rules and the name of NOTRE DAME lording over the sport, Frank Leahy was able to amass so much talent in South Bend that third stringers who never saw the field would find success in professional football.

Plus, as with any program or coach who purports to represent more than just football, the Irish brought some pretty irrepressible fans with them as well.

All of this is a long way to say that, even seven decades after that 1947 team and its fans lorded Irish perfection over all the land, when Notre Dame suffers a frustrating season — say, losing a ton of close games on the way to a 4-8 record — fans of other college football teams are going to enjoy it immensely. That’s just how things go.

Fun fact: Brian Kelly’s Notre Dame Fighting Irish went 4-8 last season. It really happened. Buy rings if you want. Definitely make posters and memes. Lord knows plenty on this little corner of the Internet have. But don’t expect it to happen twice.

I have long noted how, when you look at a given year’s S&P+ rankings, you can pretty quickly point out the teams that are likely to rise and fall the next year (from a records standpoint) by simply looking at the standout records. My favorite example is 2011, when both 7-6 Texas A&M (eighth in S&P+) and 8-5 Notre Dame (11th) seemed out of place, ranking much higher than their records suggested they should have. The next year, the two teams went a combined 23-3.

It doesn’t always work out in such a clean manner, but the bottom line is, sometimes your record doesn’t match your on-paper quality. That usually rectifies itself quickly.

That Notre Dame went 4-8 last year is certainly unique; it was only the second time since 1963 that the Irish won fewer than five games. The Gerry Faust era of the early-1980s is notorious for its mediocrity, but Faust’s Irish never went worse than 5-6.

That the Irish went 4-8 with a pretty good team is even more remarkable.

Best teams to finish with four or fewer wins (per S&P+), 2005-16:

2016 Notre Dame (4-8, plus-10.5 S&P+ rating, 26th)

2007 Washington (4-9, plus-9.8, 26th)

2013 Florida (4-8, plus-9.7, 33rd)

2005 Arkansas (4-7, plus-7.5, 33rd)

2012 Arkansas (4-8, plus-7.4, 39th)

2009 Virginia (3-9, plus-6.8, 35th)

2013 TCU (4-8, plus-5.1, 50th)

2008 Arkansas (4-8, plus-4.8, 41st)

2005 Washington State (4-7, plus-4.3, 46th)

2008 Baylor (4-8, plus-4.3, 42nd)

This list is both a warning sign and reason for hope. Of the nine non-Notre Dame teams above, five saw their records improve, sometimes dramatically, the next season.

In 2014, TCU’s Gary Patterson made some assistant coach changes, freshened up his offense, and went 12-1.

2009 Arkansas improved to 8-5 in Bobby Petrino’s second year in charge.

2006 Arkansas improved to 10-4.

2014 Florida improved to 7-5.

2006 Washington State improved to 6-6.

2009 Baylor didn’t improve because of a quarterback injury, but 2010 Baylor improved to 7-6, and 2011 Baylor soared.

At the same time, of the seven non-Notre Dame teams on the list that didn’t dump their coaches immediately, four had done so within two years. The bad feelings a season like this engenders are hard to overcome.

2016 in review

2016 Notre Dame statistical profile.

Here’s the most positive spin I can put on last season: Kelly didn’t lose the team. The Fighting Irish stuck together well enough that they continued to lose close games to good teams deep into the season. Sometimes a team collapses; Notre dame did not. In fact, it did the opposite.

First 4 games (1-3): Avg. percentile performance: 60% (~top 50) | Yards per play: ND 6.4, Opp 6.2 (plus-0.2)

Next 4 games (2-2): Avg. percentile performance: 74% (~top 35) | Yards per play: ND 5.6, Opp 4.4 (plus-1.2)

Last 4 games (1-3): Avg. percentile performance: 78% (~top 30) | Yards per play: ND 6.2, Opp 5.6 (plus-0.6)

After a dreadful defensive start, Kelly fired defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder four games into the season. That he hired him in the first place was a bit of an indictment, but there’s no question the defense improved after the change. The offense, meanwhile, remained mostly steady aside from a monsoon-addled 10-3 loss to NC State.

Notre Dame played at a top-30 level or so for most of the last two-thirds of the season. But the losses continued — by seven points to Stanford, by one point to Navy, by three points to Virginia Tech. The season finished with the first not-so-close loss (45-27 to USC), but even in that game the Irish created more scoring chances and won the field position battle, creating a decent opportunity for a win that didn’t come.

Kelly has had a fascinating relationship with close games at Notre Dame. His Irish lost five of their first seven one-possession finishes, then won 15 of 18. They lost three in a row and won five of six and have now lost eight of nine. Do the Irish have another drastic change in direction left?

Offense

Full advanced stats glossary.

Todd Graham has struggled the last couple of seasons as Arizona State head coach; after going 20-7 in 2013-14, he’s gone just 11-14 since. Defensive collapse has been the major cause — ASU ranked 114th in Def. S&P+ in 2016 — but losing assistants hasn’t helped.

Graham has churned out aggressive, speed-happy assistants throughout his career; he employed Chad Morris (now SMU’s head coach) and Gus Malzahn (Auburn) long ago at Tulsa, and it’s probably not a coincidence that his ASU offense regressed a bit in 2016 following the departure of longtime assistants Mike Norvell and Chip Long to Memphis. Norvell became head coach, Long became offensive coordinator, and despite losing all-world quarterback Paxton Lynch to the NFL, the Tigers continued to play at a top-40 level offensively last fall.

Long only has the single year of coordinator experience, but you could see how Kelly might be attracted to him as a potential energy booster.

With a pass-first attack, Memphis ranked 46th in Adj. Pace and excelled at creating one-on-one matchups and solo tackle opportunities. A trio of rushers (including two freshmen) combined for 1,838 yards at 5.9 per carry, and the combination of quarterback Riley Ferguson and receiver Anthony Miller combined to connect 95 times for 1,434 yards.

One could see similar numbers from Notre Dame this year. Running back Josh Adams combined decent efficiency (42 percent of carries gaining five-plus yards) with above average explosiveness, junior backup Dexter Williams was a bit all-or-nothing, and four-star freshman C.J. Holmes could be ready to play a small role.

Adams and company will be running behind a well-seasoned line that ranked 18th in Adj. Line Yards and returns five four of last year’s starters. Three of the four have started for two years, and the line could get a boost from young talent in the form of redshirt freshman blue-chippers Tommy Kraemer and Liam Eichenberg.

Matt Cashore-USA TODAY Sports

Equanimeous St. Brown

Meanwhile, it’s easy to think that the Brandon Wimbush-to-Equanimeous St. Brown combination could thrive. St. Brown averaged 10.9 yards per target as a first-time No. 1 target, combining big-time efficiency (57 percent success rate) with high-end explosiveness (16.6 yards per catch).

Most of last year’s battery mates — sophomore Kevin Stepherson, junior C.J. Sanders, tight end Durham Smythe — return, as does tight end Alizé Jones, who averaged 10.6 yards per target in 2015 before missing last year because of academics. And if the spring is any indication, four-star sophomores Miles Boykin and Chase Claypool could be ready to play steady roles as well.

This offense should have all the pieces Long craves for creating mismatches and big plays. Wimbush’s only real experience so far came in going 3-for-5 passing and ripping off a 58-yard touchdown run against UMass in 2015. His athleticism is obvious, and if he’s ready to live up to his blue-chip status, this offense will hum. That’s still an “if” until proven otherwise, though.

Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images

Brandon Wimbush

Defense

It’s even easier to see what Kelly saw in Mike Elko. The longtime Dave Clawson assistant produced high-caliber defenses as Bowling Green defensive coordinator (31st in Def. S&P+ in 2012, 52nd in 2013) and found immediate, sustained success following Clawson to Wake Forest. While Wake’s offense hasn’t been good in what feels like decades, the Demon Deacons ranked 28th in Def. S&P+ in 2014 and 22nd in 2016.

With an experienced front seven and an ultra-young secondary, Wake created havoc up front and played things safe in the back. The Deacs also had one of the best red zone defenses in the country, allowing just 3.8 points per scoring opportunity (first downs inside the 40).

Elko inherits a defense that was so young last year that it’s still pretty young. He’ll be relying on sophomores in the front (tackles Jerry Tillery and Elijah Taylor, end Daelin Hayes) and back (corners Julian Love, Donte Vaughn, Troy Pride Jr., and Shaun Crawford, safeties Devin Studstill and Jalen Elliott). And while there are blue-chippers galore on the roster, few of them reside in the secondary.

Still, this was a legitimately strong pass defense in the middle of the season, from when VanGorder was fired until the last two games against Virginia Tech and USC.

First 4 games: 64% completion rate, 14.3 yards per completion, 154.2 passer rating

Next 6 games: 57% completion rate, 10.8 yards per completion, 110.7 passer rating

Last 2 games: 69% completion rate, 11.5 yards per completion, 155.7 passer rating

Granted, that midseason sample includes the monsoon game against NC State and the Army and Navy games, but there’s still obvious potential here, especially the Irish can keep the same first string on the field for a longer period of time. Eleven different DBs averaged at least 0.8 tackles per game last year; only six played in all 12 games. That’s a sign of a rotation that is larger than a coach wanted it to be.

Matt Cashore-USA TODAY Sports

Drue Tranquill

The front seven only has to replace three contributors, but end Isaac Rochell, tackle Jarron Jones, and linebacker James Onwualu were maybe the Irish’s three best havoc guys last year, combining for 29.5 tackles for loss, six sacks, and 10 passes defensed. The linebacking corps is particularly experienced, and between Nyles Morgan, converted safety Drue Tranquill, Greer Martini, and Asmar Bilal, he should have the attackers he needs there.

Firing VanGorder had an immediate effect last year. After allowing 200-plus rushing yards in three of their first four games, the Irish only did so three times in the last eight, and two of those instances were against option-heavy Army and Navy, who combined to pass for just 61 yards.

Even without Rochell, Jones, and Onwualu, this should be a strong front seven. The question is, how quickly can Elko come to trust the secondary? I would expect him to play things conservatively in the back, as he did at Wake.

Matt Cashore-USA TODAY Sports

Nyles Morgan

Special Teams

Special teams didn’t really help the cause. After ranking 35th in Special Teams S&P+ in 2015, the Irish fell to 80th because of shaky place-kicking range and woeful punt coverage. Tyler Newsome averaged a booming 43.5 yards per punt (26th in FBS), but opponents averaged 15.1 yards per return (123rd).

Ace return man C.J. Sanders was able to make up some of that difference, but if Newsome can avoid outkicking his coverage quite so much, this could theoretically be a top-50 unit even if kicker Justin Yoon’s range doesn’t change much.

2017 outlook

2017 Schedule & Projection Factors

Date Opponent Proj. S&P+ Rk Proj. Margin Win Probability 2-Sep Temple 67 15.5 81% 9-Sep Georgia 20 3.8 59% 16-Sep at Boston College 76 14.7 80% 23-Sep at Michigan State 44 7.1 66% 30-Sep Miami (Ohio) 88 23.9 92% 7-Oct at North Carolina 38 5.7 63% 21-Oct USC 7 -4.7 39% 28-Oct N.C. State 27 7.8 67% 4-Nov Wake Forest 64 14.8 80% 11-Nov at Miami 18 -1.3 47% 18-Nov Navy 71 18.3 85% 25-Nov at Stanford 12 -6.3 36%

Projected S&P+ Rk 17 Proj. Off. / Def. Rk 24 / 25 Projected wins 8.0 Five-Year S&P+ Rk 14.3 (9) 2- and 5-Year Recruiting Rk 10 / 8 2016 TO Margin / Adj. TO Margin* -4 / 0.7 2016 TO Luck/Game -1.9 Returning Production (Off. / Def.) 57% (58%, 56%) 2016 Second-order wins (difference) 7.2 (-3.2)

In terms of trust with the fan base, it’s possible that having such a bad year with such a demonstrably solid team is harder to overcome than a random collapse like, say, 2016 Michigan State’s. Notre Dame lost close games in about every way a team can lose a close game. It’s a new year, and Brian Kelly has two new coordinators with him to right the ship. But until the Irish indeed turn things around, then they remain the absurd underachiever that went 4-8 last year.

Still, a turnaround is realistic at worst and likely at best. Notre Dame dealt with preseason turnover in the defensive backfield and was juggling freshmen and sophomores in the back all year. The Irish encountered setback after setback but were as good in November as they were in September. Kelly brought in an exciting new defensive coordinator and an offensive coordinator with energy to burn.

It’s really easy to talk yourself into a significant Irish bounce back in 2017, in other words, and the numbers have your back if you choose to do so. S&P+ projects Notre Dame 17th in the country, and despite a schedule that features five opponents projected 27th or better (and only one projected worse than 76th), the Irish are the projected favorite in nine games and are expected to win eight on average.

This is all well and good. But it’s hard to forget that Notre Dame was projected 11th, with a likely 9-3 record, last year. The Irish underachieved the rating by a little and the record by a lot. And seasons that are disappointing to this degree are hard to overcome.

I wrote in last year’s preview that, in overcoming quarterback injury and remaining in the Playoff hunt all the way to the end of the year, Brian Kelly had pulled off his best coaching performance in 2015. He followed that up with his worst. His recent performances have flipped as significantly as his close-game fortune. Can they both flip back this fall?

Team preview stats

All preview data to date.

[usamotorscycle-blog]

2017 Grand National Roadster Show Report

As the event’s name implies, this show, first launched in 1949, focuses on four-wheeled vehicles albeit not all technically qualifying as “roadsters” which back in the day meant an open two-seater minus doors and even windshields. Tracing the nomenclature further, “roadster” initially was the label attached to a horse well-equipped for traveling, and later applied to bicycles and tricycles of the late 1800s. Sportiness was the operative word no matter the size of the chassis, so “roadster” could include the full spectrum of cars from an everyman’s Model T to a celebrity’s 16-cylinder Caddy. It’s noteworthy that “roadster” is an American creation, the Brits calling such cars a “two-seater tourer.” So, to stretch the rules a bit, motorcycles, in that they are very “open” and often offer seating for two, have found their way into the Grand National Roadster Show, including this year’s 68th running of the event. First staged in Oakland, California, a.k.a. the Oakland Roadster Show, this go-around was the 14th year the GNRS was held at the Pomona Fairgrounds Fairplex. Along with some 500 show vehicles, a section was set aside for motorcycles as seen here. Best Flat-out Flathead

You gotta dig the four-stack of drag pipes that make some beautiful flathead music. Jeff Leighton (Orange, CA) brought his stellar 1942 UL flathead Big Twin. ULs first appeared in ’38, and their success brought Harley-Davidson out of the Depression doldrums. Best Candlestick Pipe Bike

Builder Ryan Grossman got on the “Green” bandwagon with his appropriately named Alien’s Poison 1947 FL sporting an exposed OHV powerplant and reach for stratosphere ape-hanger bars. Out of this world green paint was sprayed by Matt Busby, engraving by Nick Potash. Note mega hand-shifter. Do It In The Dirt

Tank slapping Harleys and Indians made for one helluva display of TT racers, all thanks to the efforts of the Hell on Wheels MC. Best Bear Of A Bike Display

John Edward’s 1959 Panhead wore a biker tuxedo black paint job, its visual impact heightened by rolling it over a hopefully oil resistant furry friend. Is it just me or do you notice how the bear’s eyes follow you, and why is it laughing? Best Trident Missile Panhead

This exhibit – brought all the way from Osaka, Japan, and the Revolt Custom Cycles shop by designer/builder Masao Inoue – is a ’53 custom 1450cc Panhead named Trident. The paint reflects its ocean theme in the wave-like elements as well as the anchor-shaped sissy bar. Braking is activated by the left grip, the oil tank integrated into the rear fender, an O.G. king ’n’ queen seat, plus tons of metal fab and chroming. Best Brass Monkeying Around Bike

Andrew Ursich wrenching from his portside garage in Long Beach, CA continues to build non-stop show winners, the 1980 Sportster-based Brass Monkey leading the parade. Last year at the 2016 Grand National Roadster Show one of his bikes was judged “America’s Most Beautiful Motorcycle.” Best Go Big or Go Home

The exceptionally talented designer/builder Kiyo Mitsuhiro, working out of his Gardena, CA shop, Kiyo’s Garage, mind-melded this double-engined, Weber-carbed 1620cc, 1972 Honda CB, entering it in the Competition category. The bike is heading to El Mirage to make a record-breaking attempt.

Special Double Feature: Best Tasting, Most Far-Seeing Triumphs – Root Beer Barrel and Binocular Bike

In this case, we’re looking at a pair of bikes created by the same builder and the only Triumphs appearing at the GNRS. The attention to detail and novel innovations made both Trumpets a stand-out and, fortunately, the builder Anthony Robinson happened to show up while I was salivating over the two Britsters. Now Anthony builds his bikes in Palmdale, CA, but via his company A-C Garage Door Company earns his keep installing heavy-duty garage doors all over California for the likes of Edwards Air Force Base, all the Home Depots, and others. Both bikes are of the 500cc variety. The white bike with #69 gas tank seen further below is based around a Triumph Daytona, thus is dual carbed. The other is a ’61 standard single carb model. He calls the #69 bike “The Root Beer Barrel” because of its wood/steel band motifs. The other is tagged “La Mosca” which translates to fly, thanks to the fly eye-like tank graphics, the observation made by his wife. Says Anthony, “She made a deal with me that I could build anything I want as long as I didn’t use any business money or personal money. Since I own a garage door company, I took the old ones we replaced and recycled them, using the money to build the Root Beer Barrel bike. It took me two years, but that’s how I did it. The “La Mosca” bike is also a real kick in the pants to ride and actually has great suspension with the girder front and posting seat. I just want to build bikes that have the vintage feel and that you could just jump on and go racing.” Final Results: When the winners were called up to the podium, Anthony had to make the trip twice since both First and Second Place wins in the European Class went to La Mosca and the Root Beer Barrel bike. Greatness is the Details – “La Mosca”

The custom gas tank was fabbed by friend R.J. at Lucky Mother Garage. How Low Can You Go?

Hardtail frame benefits from an original 1937 Triumph T-80 Girder front end and a pair of mountain bike seat shocks. The leather seat was glove-stitched by Javier. Shocking Developments

Anthony repurposed a non-working 1960s battery charger, gutted it and stuffed all his electrics and 12-volt Antigravity mini-battery into it. Carb is a single 628 Mikuni. The oil tank is two conjoined old fire extinguishers. Stamp of Excellence

Motor rebuilds were entrusted to Dean Collins originally from the UK. Triumph drag pipes were sourced from Factory Metal Works. Anthony also fabbed the Triumph-inscribed motor mounts out of billet. All That Glitters

Matt Egan painted both bikes, spending half the year at home in Australia, half in the U.S. Anthony opted for copper leafing rather than gold leafing to bring out the warm patina. Looking Forward

Anthony has racked up 13 first place wins even though he’s only been building bikes for two years. His work is garnering national attention, and he was recently invited to a slew of upcoming events. High Octane “Root Beer Barrel” Bike

Note the “board track” feel of the ’69 T-100’s display platform. Bars were turned upside down to give a ’30s racer feel. The seat is an iconic Messenger unit. Springer front end is originally from an H-D 45 Servi-car. Beauty Ingrained

Paint by Mike Eagan replicates the use of rare woods in the bike’s design. A 7/8ths steering stem was another rare find. A Plate Full

Signature Triumph scoop front brake got treated to chrome, brass, zinc and aluminum polish for high-contrast functional art. Brakes all around are original drums. Note unique handmade brake stays. By Machine And By Hand

Using his CNC machine, Anthony milled out the conical hubs. The engraving is special in more ways than one. The 12-year old son of a friend did the hand engraving, the young man dealing with Asperger’s. Says Anthony, “He did an amazing job.” Seeing Is Believing

Notice the key switch in the 1941 Naval binocular case? Yes, inside you’ll find all the electro stuff and lithium battery. Reversal Of Fortunes

Not a photo foul-up. Carbs and exhaust have switched places. Dual 628 Mikunis feed the Daytona cylinders. Get A Grip

Cool use of a 1950s vintage wrench to serve as a headlamp attachment. Mixed Messages

Chrome, brass, and cork conjure an eye pleasing potpourri. Cone of Unsilence

Anthony hand-crafted the stainless pipes as well as all hanger and hardware gizmos. Z Is For Zebra

At first glance, I thought it was a recycled skateboard, but no, another bit of rarity, a slab of exotic Zebrawood no less; straps are stainless. For tires, Anthony opted for Coker repops of old Firestone and Goodyear rubber. Postscript: Best Dream Team

Our pick for Best of Both Worlds, Chip Foose Design and Ken Reister’s Rod Shop double-feature custom car/custom bike. Sure the car is awesome and would look cool as a tow vehicle, but let’s focus on its bike buddy. Over 4,800 hours went into crafting the 125 HP RevTech V-Twin-powered super swoopy by master builder Foose. The bike features one-off Foose Metalsport wheels, 262 chrome parts, 596 fabricated components, Goldammer forks, hidden gas tank, you name it. Actually, the bike’s named XPRESSION. News Flash! At the end of the competition, the Foose bike’s owner, car builder Ken Reister, took home the event’s America’s Most Beautiful Motorcycle Award. And the AMBR Winner (4-wheeled) is…

If you were wondering which of the cars took home this year’s “America’s Most Beautiful Roadster “ (AMBR) top award, that went to a very Kustom 1937 Packard designed by Eric Black and built by Troy Ladd at Hollywood Hot Rods for owner Bruce Wanta. Under that long, long hood is a honking Lincoln V-12. Parting Pic

Best downsized ’55 Merc roadster and pilot. Click to Post

[totallymotorbikes]

2017 Grand National Roadster Show Report As the event’s name implies, this show, first launched in 1949, focuses on four-wheeled vehicles albeit not all technically qualifying as “roadsters” which back in the day meant an open two-seater minus doors and even windshields. Tracing the nomenclature further, “roadster” initially was the label attached to a horse well-equipped for traveling, and later applied to bicycles and tricycles of the late 1800s. Sportiness was the operative word no matter the size of the chassis, so “roadster” could include the full spectrum of cars from an everyman’s Model T to a celebrity’s 16-cylinder Caddy. It’s noteworthy that “roadster” is an American creation, the Brits calling such cars a “two-seater tourer.” So, to stretch the rules a bit, motorcycles, in that they are very “open” and often offer seating for two, have found their way into the Grand National Roadster Show, including this year’s 68th running of the event. First staged in Oakland, California, a.k.a. the Oakland Roadster Show, this go-around was the 14th year the GNRS was held at the Pomona Fairgrounds Fairplex. Along with some 500 show vehicles, a section was set aside for motorcycles as seen here. Best Flat-out Flathead You gotta dig the four-stack of drag pipes that make some beautiful flathead music. Jeff Leighton (Orange, CA) brought his stellar 1942 UL flathead Big Twin. ULs first appeared in ’38, and their success brought Harley-Davidson out of the Depression doldrums. Best Candlestick Pipe Bike Builder Ryan Grossman got on the “Green” bandwagon with his appropriately named Alien’s Poison 1947 FL sporting an exposed OHV powerplant and reach for stratosphere ape-hanger bars. Out of this world green paint was sprayed by Matt Busby, engraving by Nick Potash. Note mega hand-shifter. Do It In The Dirt Tank slapping Harleys and Indians made for one helluva display of TT racers, all thanks to the efforts of the Hell on Wheels MC. Best Bear Of A Bike Display John Edward’s 1959 Panhead wore a biker tuxedo black paint job, its visual impact heightened by rolling it over a hopefully oil resistant furry friend. Is it just me or do you notice how the bear’s eyes follow you, and why is it laughing? Best Trident Missile Panhead This exhibit – brought all the way from Osaka, Japan, and the Revolt Custom Cycles shop by designer/builder Masao Inoue – is a ’53 custom 1450cc Panhead named Trident. The paint reflects its ocean theme in the wave-like elements as well as the anchor-shaped sissy bar. Braking is activated by the left grip, the oil tank integrated into the rear fender, an O.G. king ’n’ queen seat, plus tons of metal fab and chroming. Best Brass Monkeying Around Bike Andrew Ursich wrenching from his portside garage in Long Beach, CA continues to build non-stop show winners, the 1980 Sportster-based Brass Monkey leading the parade. Last year at the 2016 Grand National Roadster Show one of his bikes was judged “America’s Most Beautiful Motorcycle.” Best Go Big or Go Home The exceptionally talented designer/builder Kiyo Mitsuhiro, working out of his Gardena, CA shop, Kiyo’s Garage, mind-melded this double-engined, Weber-carbed 1620cc, 1972 Honda CB, entering it in the Competition category. The bike is heading to El Mirage to make a record-breaking attempt. Special Double Feature: Best Tasting, Most Far-Seeing Triumphs – Root Beer Barrel and Binocular Bike In this case, we’re looking at a pair of bikes created by the same builder and the only Triumphs appearing at the GNRS. The attention to detail and novel innovations made both Trumpets a stand-out and, fortunately, the builder Anthony Robinson happened to show up while I was salivating over the two Britsters. Now Anthony builds his bikes in Palmdale, CA, but via his company A-C Garage Door Company earns his keep installing heavy-duty garage doors all over California for the likes of Edwards Air Force Base, all the Home Depots, and others. Both bikes are of the 500cc variety. The white bike with #69 gas tank seen further below is based around a Triumph Daytona, thus is dual carbed. The other is a ’61 standard single carb model. He calls the #69 bike “The Root Beer Barrel” because of its wood/steel band motifs. The other is tagged “La Mosca” which translates to fly, thanks to the fly eye-like tank graphics, the observation made by his wife. Says Anthony, “She made a deal with me that I could build anything I want as long as I didn’t use any business money or personal money. Since I own a garage door company, I took the old ones we replaced and recycled them, using the money to build the Root Beer Barrel bike. It took me two years, but that’s how I did it. The “La Mosca” bike is also a real kick in the pants to ride and actually has great suspension with the girder front and posting seat. I just want to build bikes that have the vintage feel and that you could just jump on and go racing.” Final Results: When the winners were called up to the podium, Anthony had to make the trip twice since both First and Second Place wins in the European Class went to La Mosca and the Root Beer Barrel bike. Greatness is the Details – “La Mosca” The custom gas tank was fabbed by friend R.J. at Lucky Mother Garage. How Low Can You Go? Hardtail frame benefits from an original 1937 Triumph T-80 Girder front end and a pair of mountain bike seat shocks. The leather seat was glove-stitched by Javier. Shocking Developments Anthony repurposed a non-working 1960s battery charger, gutted it and stuffed all his electrics and 12-volt Antigravity mini-battery into it. Carb is a single 628 Mikuni. The oil tank is two conjoined old fire extinguishers. Stamp of Excellence Motor rebuilds were entrusted to Dean Collins originally from the UK. Triumph drag pipes were sourced from Factory Metal Works. Anthony also fabbed the Triumph-inscribed motor mounts out of billet. All That Glitters Matt Egan painted both bikes, spending half the year at home in Australia, half in the U.S. Anthony opted for copper leafing rather than gold leafing to bring out the warm patina. Looking Forward Anthony has racked up 13 first place wins even though he’s only been building bikes for two years. His work is garnering national attention, and he was recently invited to a slew of upcoming events. High Octane “Root Beer Barrel” Bike Note the “board track” feel of the ’69 T-100’s display platform. Bars were turned upside down to give a ’30s racer feel. The seat is an iconic Messenger unit. Springer front end is originally from an H-D 45 Servi-car. Beauty Ingrained Paint by Mike Eagan replicates the use of rare woods in the bike’s design. A 7/8ths steering stem was another rare find. A Plate Full Signature Triumph scoop front brake got treated to chrome, brass, zinc and aluminum polish for high-contrast functional art. Brakes all around are original drums. Note unique handmade brake stays. By Machine And By Hand Using his CNC machine, Anthony milled out the conical hubs. The engraving is special in more ways than one. The 12-year old son of a friend did the hand engraving, the young man dealing with Asperger’s. Says Anthony, “He did an amazing job.” Seeing Is Believing Notice the key switch in the 1941 Naval binocular case? Yes, inside you’ll find all the electro stuff and lithium battery. Reversal Of Fortunes Not a photo foul-up. Carbs and exhaust have switched places. Dual 628 Mikunis feed the Daytona cylinders. Get A Grip Cool use of a 1950s vintage wrench to serve as a headlamp attachment. Mixed Messages Chrome, brass, and cork conjure an eye pleasing potpourri. Cone of Unsilence Anthony hand-crafted the stainless pipes as well as all hanger and hardware gizmos. Z Is For Zebra At first glance, I thought it was a recycled skateboard, but no, another bit of rarity, a slab of exotic Zebrawood no less; straps are stainless. For tires, Anthony opted for Coker repops of old Firestone and Goodyear rubber. Postscript: Best Dream Team Our pick for Best of Both Worlds, Chip Foose Design and Ken Reister’s Rod Shop double-feature custom car/custom bike. Sure the car is awesome and would look cool as a tow vehicle, but let’s focus on its bike buddy. Over 4,800 hours went into crafting the 125 HP RevTech V-Twin-powered super swoopy by master builder Foose. The bike features one-off Foose Metalsport wheels, 262 chrome parts, 596 fabricated components, Goldammer forks, hidden gas tank, you name it. Actually, the bike’s named XPRESSION. News Flash! At the end of the competition, the Foose bike’s owner, car builder Ken Reister, took home the event’s America’s Most Beautiful Motorcycle Award. And the AMBR Winner (4-wheeled) is… If you were wondering which of the cars took home this year’s “America’s Most Beautiful Roadster “ (AMBR) top award, that went to a very Kustom 1937 Packard designed by Eric Black and built by Troy Ladd at Hollywood Hot Rods for owner Bruce Wanta. Under that long, long hood is a honking Lincoln V-12. Parting Pic Best downsized ’55 Merc roadster and pilot. 2017 Grand National Roadster Show Report appeared first on Motorcycle.com.

[caveartfair]

1960s Chicago Gave Birth to a Colorful, Frenetic Art Style That Is Still Gathering Steam

An Affair In The Islands, 1972. H.C. Westermann galerie 103

The Chicago Imagists of the 1960s and ’70s created colorful, energetic paintings and sculptures that often riffed on vernacular sources (comic books, pinball machines) and the eccentricities of American culture. Barbara Rossi’s colorful, corporeal shapes piled atop each other like jumbles of internal organs. Jim Nutt drew and painted grotesque figures that evoked brightly lit freak shows. Gladys Nilsson rendered overlapping bodies, simultaneously in their own worlds and parts of a larger, chaotic mass. Suellen Rocca created busy, symbol-laden canvases. A flat aesthetic triumphed over any attempt at realism or depth. This work diverged from that of the Imagists’ East Coast contemporaries; as the New York Pop artists developed an impersonal, mass-produced aesthetic, their Midwestern counterparts were making artwork that was more carnival than Campbell’s soup.

It can be complicated to discern who was, and who wasn’t, a Chicago Imagist, but in general, the term applies to a wide swath of artists who lived and made figurative work in the city from around the 1950s through the 1980s. They showed together at the Hyde Park Art Center beginning in 1964, giving each cluster of exhibiting artists its own quirky moniker. Instead of turning to advertising and consumer culture as their East Coast counterparts had, these artists infused a zany, psychic energy into their drawing-driven practices. Indeed, tracing the careers of the Chicago Imagists offers a narrative about American art that diverges from popular New York-centered conceptions—and presents issues that transcended locale.

Summer Salt, 1970. Jim Nutt "Surrealism: The Conjured Life" at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2016

Measure 4 Measure, 1994, Bird, 2001 and Pynkly Furnashed, 2002, . Gladys Nilsson Leslie Hindman Auctioneers

The oldest group, the Monster Roster—a name given by critic Franz Schulze as a nod to the Chicago Bears’ nickname, the Monsters of Midway—responded to the horrors introduced by World War II and the state of post-war America. Some of the men had been soldiers themselves. Leon Golub, who’d served as an army cartographer, infused his work with violence and suffering. Throughout his six-decade career (he died in 2004), Golub rendered beheadings, brawls, and torture scenes. His process itself was brutal—he used a meat cleaver to distress his paintings.

Nancy Spero, to whom Golub was married, similarly manifested an ardent political streak as she depicted mothers, children, and prostitutes through a feminist lens. Fellow artist June Leaf created fine-lined, often nightmarish scenes. In sum, the works were frequently dark, both in style and substance. Subsequent Chicago art diverged in cheerier and more frenetic directions, while still remaining deeply psychological.

According to Tang Museum director Ian Berry and Chicago gallerists John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, the more light-hearted artist H. C. Westermann (known, since around the late 1950s, for his quirky found-object sculptures and dystopian illustrations) provides a link to the younger Imagists. Don Baum, a member of the former group who helped curate the younger Imagists’ shows, offers another connection. This September, Corbett, Dempsey, and Berry will mount “3-D Doings: The Imagist Object in Chicago Art, 1964–1980” at the Tang. For a group of artists traditionally associated with two-dimensional works, the curators offer a more complex, multimedia story.

Gigantomachy II, 1966. Leon Golub The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Many Imagists, says Corbett, were impressed with Westermann’s level of craftsmanship, “the personal touch that he gave to all of the work,” and his “perverse streak.” Diverging from their predecessors, the Imagists who came after the Monster Roster employed an aesthetic more akin to comic books than horror films, though they retained an element of the grotesque (Karl Wirsum’s vivid, cartoonish-yet-disfigured forms are particularly emblematic of this).

“You just feel a sensibility start brewing,” Dempsey says about the particular era that the Tang show focuses on: 1964 to 1980. “We talk about an accent: a collective group of people have a similar accent. Doesn’t really mean they’re thinking about the same things, but there’s an energy that’s pervasive in the air and you can almost tangibly feel that in this date range.”

The Tang exhibition will include Westermann’s Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea (1958). Comprised of pine, cast-tin toys, glass, and other various materials, the work appears to be a cabinet with an alien’s one-eyed head on top. Written in bottle caps, Westermann’s initials adorn the inside of the wooden door. The object becomes a kind of personalized fetish, combining kitsch and craft. Similar details distinguished the frames of work by Ed Flood, a younger Imagist. He and Nutt adorned the backs of their paintings with double entendres, stylized notes to preparators, and other secrets that remained between the artists and those who handled and owned the work.

Untitled (Head Study for Awning Series), 1966. Karl Wirsum Derek Eller Gallery

Muscular Alternative, 1979. Christina Ramberg "Surrealism: The Conjured Life" at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2016

“I think all these details foreground the warmth and the intimacy of this work, which makes it stand apart from other work being made in these decades in other cities,” says Berry. Dempsey describes the effect as playfully adversarial. “It’s an interactive relationship, almost like engaging someone in a card game.” These elements also connect the group to the Surrealists, who invoked parlor games, dreams, and subconscious drives in their own practices. According to Berry, both the Imagists and their European predecessors shared a desire to look inward.

This simultaneous coyness and amiability could coincide with darker, more disturbing, obliquely political material. Christina Ramberg painted headless bodies (often female), wrapped in tight or suggestive garments. Ideas about constriction and expectations for women abound in her paintings, which sometimes feature flat, broad swaths of dim colors (no bright yellows or reds here). As Dan Nadel wrote recently, “Until her final series of paintings, Ramberg always kept her distortions ‘clean’—no matter how disturbing the imagery, the surface and the final shape would be immaculately formed and delineated.”

Notably, Ramberg was part of an exhibition group called False Image, showing with her husband, Philip Hanson, as well as Eleanor Dube and Roger Brown. (The Imagists were intensely whimsical in their naming, calling other subsets of the group the Hairy Who, the Nonplussed Some, and Marriage Chicago Style.)

Brown enjoys perhaps the strongest legacy of the False Image artists: his former home, which is still filled with the myriad objects he collected throughout his life, and accessible to today’s public as the Roger Brown Study Collection. Masks, toy cars, figurines, crosses, road signs, baskets, and more relics of everyday life in America are on view throughout the rooms and along the staircase.

Unbelievable Refuge, 1980. Ray Yoshida Leslie Hindman Auctioneers

In fact, many of the Imagists were collectors. According to Corbett, the Maxwell Street Market (Chicago’s major flea) was a treasure trove for Ramberg, Hanson, Wirsum, and Ray Yoshida. Yoshida himself had a unique influence on other Imagists: He taught many of them at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Yoshida amassed large collections of printed matter, from comics to cookbooks. The former, in particular, inspired his “specimens”: collages that resembled a scrapbook page filled with clippings.

Yoshida, born in Hawaii in 1930 to a Japanese immigrant father and a mother of Japanese lineage, was also the only artist of color associated with the Chicago Imagists. Though the group was far more equitable across gender lines than contemporaneous movements centered on the East Coast (Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop art), it was still very white. Yet the Imagists derived plenty of inspiration from the non-white cultural production that surrounded them in Chicago. Perhaps most famously, Karl Wirsum’s Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (1968) depicts the well-known African American singer and performer. Corbett and Berry describe the Imagists’ significant engagement with, and love for, the music and multimedia of their time. “It was a much more complex set of relationships in an insanely segregated city,” says Corbett.

The Tang is just one of many institutions to celebrate the Imagists within the past few years. At Milan’s Fondazione Prada, curator Germano Celant closed a show this past January, “Famous Artists from Chicago. 1965–1975.” The project suggests the Imagists’ widespread appeal and an international interest in a movement that was thriving far from global art centers.

Matthew Marks Gallery exhibited work by the Hairy Who in a 2015 group show, placing the group members in dialogue with San Francisco Funk Art figures such as Peter Saul and the Detroit-based Destroy All Monsters group, which included Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw. Curated by Nadel (who’s become one of the Imagists’ biggest champions with his writing and curation), the show proposed that, operating beyond the mainstream art world, these artists turned to figuration inspired by advertising, primitive art, comic books, and other sources once dismissed as lowbrow.

Installation view of “The Chicago Show” at 56 Downing St., Brooklyn, 2018. Photo by Johannes Berg. Courtesy of Alexandra Fanning Communications.

Placing the Imagists in a contemporary context, Chicago-born curator Madeleine Mermall has curated “The Chicago Show,” an exhibition in a Brooklyn townhouse, on view through May 20th, that pairs the work of Nutt, Yoshida, Westermann, and their ilk with that of emerging Chicago artists who similarly revel in cartoonish figuration. “There’s this strong, special community right now,” Mermall says. “They’re all working together and showing together and putting on DIY shows.”

One of the exhibited artists from the younger generation, Darius Airo, recalls a corner of the Art Institute of Chicago where he first noticed the work of Ed Paschke and Karl Wirsum. His own acrylic painting, Chicago Faucet Venus (2018), features a very pink, heavily distorted female form with a fractured face. Another participant, Jenn Smith, says that what interests her in the Imagists’ work is a feeling of “holding your cards close to the chest. How much information to reveal and how much to conceal. Like a sexual repression.” She also admires their sense of humor and flat treatment of the figure. A third artist, Bryant Worley, is presenting a 2018 work entitled Dic Pics, which features tattooed men in cowboy hats. He goes so far as to call the Imagists “my entryway into painting as I know it today.”

This renewed attention to the Midwestern group seems to only be getting started. Derek Eller, who has shown Wirsum since 2010, says that since then, he’s seen “a lot more interest here in New York, and probably internationally.” While Barbara Rossi recently enjoyed a small solo exhibition at the New Museum, many of the Imagists have yet to receive major museum retrospectives. This fall, however, the Art Institute of Chicago will mount a group show, as will Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in London in spring 2019. Corbett thinks it’s time, and the recent wave of shows contributes to a certain momentum. “We’ve seen in the last five, six, seven years a whole bunch of small survey shows that have set things up for the opportunity for incredible, career-spanning exhibitions,” he says. Before long, Chicago’s distinct aesthetic accent should be more pervasive than ever.

from Artsy News