Everything Under the Sun 2: Fictional Figures & Archetypes

Everything Under the Sun is a short series of posts we'll be doing here at the Aviary, motivated by a potential collaboration on a project that might end up being sort-of/kind-of personal. I have what amount to assignments of exploration of my own interests in particular areas, so I thought I'd put them out there to provoke any responses that you may find irresistible.


Fictional Figures of Interest


Batman (Dionysus) & Superman (Apollo)

It should be pretty clear by now that comicbooks experienced a kind of new golden age of interest in the 80s, prompted in no small part by Superman: The Movie's release in 1978. I was Superman for Halloween from a ridiculously low age for a few years. Once I was also Batman, and happened to get my picture in a local paper in that costume. My burgeoning teenage years were ushered in by the nearly-maudlin interpretation of Batman in 1989, and that locked me on a perfect course of obsession for the character. Frankly I think a significant cause of our current superhero movie boom has to do with all those kids like me growing up on them and now being in positions of power - decision-making and simply spending power.


The analogy of these two "World's Finest" and the Greek gods is not perfect. It is, in fact, pretty weak. It's just that there's a personal connection there for me. I played Pentheus in a college production of The Bacchae, which was the introduction to me of the idea that there was an essential opposition between Dionysus' chaos and Apollo's order. Batman is really all about order, but when viewed through a certain lens (e.g., Miller's Dark Knight Returns) he's a rule-breaker as opposed to Kal-El and his strictures of right and wrong. So personally, I see these two characters as representing different sides of me.


Superman is the ideal, an exceedingly humble person who has enormous power that he wields with faith. Not the religious overtones so many interpretations lay on him; rather, faith in goodness and human spirit. (Incidentally: really bugs me when he's portrayed as the Second Coming; seeing as he was created by two Jewish guys, if anything he's the First.) Miller calls him the Big Blue Boyscout, and I don't always see that as an insult. I was a boyscout.


It's only natural that I connected with Batman with such intensity when I was turning 13. The glasses I started wearing in 4th grade - that thrilled me at the time for the Clark Kent parallelism - had contributed to a wealth of factors making me a less-than-desirable layer of the social strata. Real adult problems were just starting to come through the bright-colored camouflage of childhood, so someone who turned adversity to their advantage, who had to grapple with seemingly uncontrollable emotion and impossible odds ... well. He's pretty badass, that Batman.


James Bond

I am no James Bond, nor would I want to be. But: I was raised on the movies by my dad, and they have indubitably influenced me. Plus there's a lot Wayne and Bond have in common.


Winnie the Pooh (NOT. DISNEY.)

This would be among my earliest, if not the earliest, influence on my imagination and understanding. My mother read me these stories with all the voices, just as hers had done, and I still can't help but use the characters as archetypes when analyzing group dynamics. I think something about my mom's reverence for the character of Pooh also influenced my thinking about philosophy. The Tao of Pooh is by now something of a cliché, but I certainly do find a lot of truth in Taoism.


Taran
Friend Davey is responsible for introducing me to the fantasy genre back in sixth grade with the Taran series, the Myth series and Narnia. In case it wasn't already growing obvious, I'm a sucker for the hero's journey when it comes to my fiction, and few have told that story as comprehensively as Lloyd Alexander when he takes Taran from young scamp to embattled leader.


Hamlet

I know. I KNOW. He's another one who caught me early but, even now as well-aware as I am of his many foibles, I less-than-three Hamlet. I have an alarming affection for righteous murderers with daddy issues.


John MacClane
Case in point. (Don't try to tell me he doesn't have daddy issues.) Die Hard is another of those movies I affectionately share with my dad. And it's incredibly over-revered, to the point of being another cliché. But I love it so. I can't get enough of a guy as absolute underdog, in a finite space, just getting the job done any which way he can. A hero flawed as hell, and in the end he's rewarded for his suffering with love. I mean: damn.


Perseus/Theseus/King Arthur

Speaking of flawed heroes. They don't all belong together - this is another personal lumping going on. In fact, Arthur really has a different brand of hubris than the other two. But they are each in their own way a crusading hero who meets with tragic just desserts. I like quests. I used to operate from them more, but they still appeal to me a great deal. Life is exciting to me when it's a puzzle, or a maze, or a dance with destiny.


Romeo/Mercutio
I had the good fortune to play Romeo - albeit a comic one - well past my prime for the role. He's a good archetype for me and the protagonists I've played in my youth. Hopeful to a fault, believers all. So I've always identified with Romeo and his longing. But I've also always wanted to play Mercutio, and always tried to give it up. I'm not born to be the wild one, but I'm drawn to them. A little of the old order/chaos dichotomy at play here. (Though once again it's nuts to associate Romeo with anything approaching "order" on his own.)


Morpheus

Speaking of tragic lovers. The nice thing about the dream king's blighted love life is that it's a consistent background action to his stories, until it isn't anymore and it destroys him (or he allows it to, depending on your view). In high school Friend Dave recruited me to pose as Neil Gaiman's Morpheus for a photo project, and gave me access to the whole run of the Sandman comics to boot. Still enjoy reading through them all to this day. He values duty and responsibility in a darker way than the Big Blue Boyscout. I wouldn't say I identify with Morpheus exactly, but I definitely had a touch of his brooding style in my teendom. I still want a pet raven.


Odin

Where are you? You're here! In his aviary! I took that name for the 'blog because of his ravens - Huggin and Muninn, thought and memory - but I like this old God with his one eye. There's something about Norse mythological figures that's satisfying from an iconic perspective, and I like this feeling that Odin has the wisdom of an old father, and a lot of the fallibility you expect from Greek gods. And let's not even get into how many of the characters on this list are Christ analogues at this point. Of course, my view of him is rather colored by how Mr. Gaiman has portrayed him in a couple of different mediums.


Martin Blank

From Grosse Pointe Blank, the John Cusack semi-satire film about a mercenary hitman returning to town for his ten-year high school reunion. This movie really resonated with my sense of humor, with its swift dialogue and plenty of deadpan, and Martin Blank is interesting as someone capable (all too capable in some regards) who's trying really hard to work some things out with very little success.


____________, P.I. (The Noir Protagonist)

If you scramble a lot of these together with a dash of my nostalgia for a time when men wore hats when they were outside, it's not hard to come up with the prototypical anti-hero. He's beaten down, he's got a job to do, he can't help but give you a peek past his gruff exterior to see that he might've really loved that dame ... once. It's not original. Men just love this shtick.


Well, this is quite a little list of heroes and anti-heroes. I could blame the media, but the fact is that from my beginning that's what's connected with me. Interestingly enough:

1. I haven't played too many outright heroes.
2. I haven't included here many of the archetypes I commonly portray on stage (reactionary straight man, fish-out-of-water, young idealist, etc.) nor much along the lines of commedia dell'arte archetypes.

I'll let the jury decide the why and wherefore of all that, though.

Decades

Fourteen is a dangerous age for boys. Things get a bit incongruous, just when you start to think you've got a few things figured out about how life and other people work. In my case, I also switched schools and had some new health complications that left me feeling pretty unstable, even hormones aside. So it may not exactly come as a surprise that I soon began spending my unsupervised afternoons after school at a large storm-drain tunnel with friends, learning how to blow things up.

Amateur arson is of interest to most boys, and I and my friend were boy scouts anyway, so we were well acquainted with some of the more expressive properties of fire. Burning plastic action figures was a popular form of this expression. One day while we were messing around with an open flame in his backyard, his brother pitched a small aerosol can onto the fire. We ran for cover, but after some uneventful time, his brother went to investigate. Lucky for him (and us) the bottle was nearly empty of whatever it had once sprayed, because it blew apart with a loud pop but only a small hiccup of flame. Giddy laughter ensued, and so did our afternoon sojourns to the tunnel.

It ran under Burke Center Parkway, and always had a little bit of a stream running through it connecting one of the many creeks that ran through the woods of our hometown. The walls were adorned with hasty graffiti at either end, and you could stand in the center and still have almost a foot from your head to the ceiling. We'd lay out a few wet logs for a baseboard to suspend our fire over the rivulet that ran through the tunnel, then set to burning a few disposable artifacts from my friend's vast collection of forgotten toys. We quickly realized that, though the smell wasn't exactly what you would call rewarding, burning plastic could make a very hot, very long-lasting flame.

I can't recall if it was our first trip there or not, but one day I brought a few spray paint cans harvested from my mother's craft collection in our basement. We set a few of our boyhood toys burning into a significant little inferno, and laid a large, full can of red spray paint in it. Then we ran for cover. I remember in particular that I and another of the hangers-on who were drawn to pyrotechnics ran a little too far to see, so we cautiously marched back a bit to see my friend's brother once again being the first to approach the as-yet uneventful inferno.

The tunnel amplified and directed the sound of the explosion, firing sound waves northeast and southwest and a jolt through our chest cavities. A belch of heat followed. A bright orange ball of flame worthy of Hollywood expanded from the fire, and a host of boys shouted in sudden, unabashed surprise. It would inspire us with its terror, and our experiments in delinquency from there on out would grow more and more bold and irresponsible. We thought we understood what a miraculous bit of grace it was that my friend's brother came away completely unscathed, but we didn't really. I don't think there was a single one of us who could have conceived of the reality of that kind of crisis.

Some ten years later, I returned to rehearsal on the debut of an original comedy entitled The Center of Gravity. It was a broad-strokes comedy with existential underpinnings, set in small-town Texas. Nevertheless, it was obvious to us now that we would need to change several references to "ground zero," a term that had less personal implication to us just a few days prior. What wasn't immediately obvious was how bad the air quality in lower Manhattan - where we were rehearsing in a free, abandoned office space in the West Village - would be. I was the one to call it quits first. We were losing precious days of rehearsal, and there was a certain shared ethic at the time of "getting back to it," but I could feel the particulates in my throat and the smell was everywhere.

After about an hour of watching the news and the Science Channel's series on rebuilding on the World Trade Center site, I stepped out of my apartment building in Queens today to buy a coffee from the Italian bakery down 30th Avenue. It was gray out, but cool and not humid, and I took a moment to look up and down the avenue. I smelled something familiar - synthetic materials burning, definitely some plastic. It seemed to be strongest up the avenue, away from Manhattan, which was both comforting and confusing. The first thing I looked for was panicked people. I have an instinct for this now, whether it's in person or on Twitter, as I did a couple of weeks ago when the office building I work in started swaying with the aftershocks of an earthquake.

A family was out on their stoop, chatting away. A woman in a red t-shirt looked at me as she walked by. No one was panicked. No one was coming out of their buildings to look around like me, no one was crying, holding one another or hunched over the open window of a parked car, listening to the radio. No one was walking determinedly away from somewhere, or even in a daze, wandering as though searching. After a few seconds, I decided that either it was a minor burning somewhere or I had simply imagined it. I'm not normally given to that kind of suggestion, but it wasn't inconceivable. I left my stoop to get my coffee.

Coffee's all done now, and instead of starting the dozen things I intend to do today, I've written this. While writing, my sister called to see if she could spend the night tonight on her way from Cape Cod down to her home in Baltimore. I'm grateful for that. I've missed her since she moved away from the city a couple of years ago, and I think the personal impact of today's anniversary is something I'm having some trouble articulating for myself. Sisters are good for clarity, whether anything ever really gets figured out or not.

I'm seeing a lot of people sharing their thoughts and feelings today, and I'd just as soon have kept mine private. Particularly because I can't really tell you what they are, exactly. I'm very lucky, and very grateful, to have made it this far in life intact, with so many of my friends and family still with me. I think gratitude is a thing we can always use more of, especially in the face of tragedy or inexplicable circumstances. It's a good emotion from which to make decisions and judgments.

Thank you.

Everything Under the Sun 1: Historical Figures

Everything Under the Sun is a short series of posts we'll be doing here at the Aviary, motivated by a potential collaboration on a project that might end up being sort-of/kind-of personal. I have what amount to assignments of exploration of my own interests in particular areas, so I thought I'd put them out there to provoke any responses that you may find irresistible.

Historical Figures of Interest

I'm a little ashamed to admit that I am more influenced by fictional characters - or even character archetypes - than I am by real human beings. That's not too surprising when you consider that I generally prefer DC Comics to Marvel. I like icons better than actual people.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Discovered Edward Snow's translations of his poetry while in high-teenage mode, full of romance and angst myself. (Snow I found first, and all other translations since seem to me to be lacking something. Hate when they slavishly follow the rhyme scheme.) It was like discovering poetry for the first time. My girlfriend of the time (my first real one; first love, truly) was a sort of inadvertent historian about a few people she was enthusiastic about (Artaud, Nin) and inspired me to poke around and learn more about the man behind the poetry. I learned about his connections to Lou-Andreas Salome and, by extension, Nietzsche, which seemed just a marvelous excuse to continue exploring angsty and existential teenage wonderings. Also learned of his connection to Rodin, which in that teenage way seemed fated, as my next true love introduced me to art museums and The Burgers of Calais facsimile in the sculpture garden in D.C.

Rainer had something of a confusing and tormented childhood, particularly with regards to his sexual identity, and he turned out to be something of a dick husband/father. I was surprised to see how similar our facial features were. I continue to think of him as an example of a great artist who sacrificed all moral considerations for artistic aspirations, which troubles me. I adore his art, and despise his personal life. Maybe I envy it, too, for its potential sense of freedom. Ironically, I wasn't aware of his Letters to a Young Poet – one of the more apt treatises for young, aspiring anythings – until long after discovering his poetry.

Anton Chekhov

A playwright I acted for on a couple of shows was fond of how similar he and I appear when I have my hair short and a goatee (no longer a favorite look of mine). I found this somewhat ironic, as I have never loved his work. At least at the time, I found The Seagull enjoyable, and that was about it. Not too long after I was introduced to his one-act plays by one of my mentors, and found them to be blissfully funny. This, plus the aspect of “required reading,” makes me question my initial reaction to his playwriting, but to date I haven't been able to bring myself to really sit down and tackle Cherry Orchard or Three Sisters again.

Buster Keaton

I'll never feel like I deserve Buster. My commedia dell'arte troupe decided a year in advance that our next show would tackle the theme of silent comedies, and we began research. This would become one of our (if not the) defining creative experiences, and the entire process had a profound impact on me as an individual artist. However, when the idea was hatched the creative forces that were guiding things - for whatever reason – attributed me to Chaplin, and the other male actor to Keaton. So for over half a year I did comprehensive research on Chaplin. It turned out that one of our fellow actors ended up directing the show, and her opinion was that I should be working on portraying Keaton, and the other fellow, Chaplin. So, after we had both done extensive research and developed pretty profound appreciations for one auteur, we switched. The effect of this was compounded for me by how much I respected/envied(loved?) this other actor – switching off at that point seemed...somehow terrible.

It was the right call. He was much better suited to understanding Chaplin's amazing pathos, that stays just the right side of maudlin, to absolutely devastating cathartic effect. As for me, I have a face that lends itself to a certain stoicism but, more importantly, I've spent some time studying acrobatics and am an aspiring thinker who appreciates the mechanics of things. Still and all, I feel blessed to have been “given” Keaton. He was an unequivocal genius, hysterical and inspired (and tormented, in a triumphantly private way) who continues to pretty much hold deity status in my heart.

William Shakespeare

Because: Come on. How about that sentence structure?

Edgar Allean Poe

Some of the first legitimate literature I was exposed to, and he was GOTH as FROCK. Don't forget he write some of the seminal detective fiction.

Nikola Tesla

Freaking lunatic. Also an impressive intellect. I love that we keep wondering if he was right about some of his more, shall we say, eccentric notions.

Leonardo Da Vinci

Similar to Tesla, just an irresponsibly multi-talented genius. I love guys who have the heart of a poet and the intellectual curiosity and capacity of an engineer. So, for that matter, see Buster Keaton too.

I'm sort of ashamed there's no American history figures here. I like Ben Franklin's renaissance spirit and flamboyant sense of humor. Toss Sam Clemens on there, too. Jefferson could write, and was an architectural mechanic, and Adams was an admirably stubborn-yet-romantic S.O.B.

But now we're just getting into common United States idols here. Let's wrap it up!

H&M

Found here. Compliments Friend Davey.

Joker

Court's still out on whether or not he is a midnight toker...