Review: 'Orbit: The Seventies'

Orbit: The Seventies is a fairly bizarre attempt to convey the biographies of four key stars of seventies rock in comic form. The weirdness starts on the cover with prominent portraits of Steven Tyler and Bruce Springsteen. Neither singer is a focus of this book. Rather, it tells the tales of David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Keith Richards, and Michael Jackson. 

Orbit begins with a cursory biography of Bowie that often reads more like bullet points than a proper story. The telling is so slapdash that the writer makes it seem as though Bowie divorced his first wife because she attempted suicide. While some panels are well rendered, much of the art looks like it was made with GIMP's cartoon filter.

A lot more thought went into the section on Alice Cooper, which uses kids messing with a Ouija board as a means to relate Cooper's story in a suitably spooky/silly manner and acknowledges when myth and fact get muddled. The inorganic, Saturday Morning cartoon style art is not exceptional, but it is more consistent and individual than the sloppy, generic art in the Bowie chapter. 

The Keith Richards story uses an unspecified overdose as a way into telling his story, although that device is quickly abandoned for another quick bolt through a career too complicated to adequately convey in twenty pages of speech bubbles and pictures.  The grey, smeary art looks like it was rendered with debris from an overused ash tray. It's appropriate to its subject but terribly ugly. 

The weirdest chapter is reserved for the weirdest artist in this book of weird artists. A sort of Jiminy Cricket character narrates a hagiography that outright dismisses all charges that Michael Jackson was a child molester. It would have been more moral and truthful to take a less firm stance on that touchy and controversial subject, but I guess it's naive to think that any life can be accurately and satisfactorily captured in a twenty page comic.

Review: 'John Waters: Indecent Exposure'

Wait a minute. John Waters is an artist? A rather multifaceted artist? I consider myself a fan, but this is news to me. That Waters is not just the uncontested King of Trash-ola but also a photographer and collaborative sculptor who has been the subject of his own art show is a revelation. The works displayed in that show at the Baltimore Museum of Art (of course) are featured in a new book called John Waters: Indecent Exposure.

So what should you expect from Waters’s non-cinematic art? Oh honey, you know what to expect! You’ll laugh! You’ll die from shock! You’ll puke! You’ll see the faces of Hollywood stars projected onto butt cheeks (Rear Projection, 2009)! You’ll see a disturbing 3D tableaux involving an infant with Michael Jackson’s adult head crawling toward a tyke with Charles Manson’s deranged coconut (Playdate, 2006). You’ll see some of cinema’s most iconic moments subtitled in pig Latin (Pig Latin, 2008)! You’ll see a Jackie O doll dolled up as Divine (Jackie Copies Divine’s Look, 2001)! You’ll see Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot (Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot, 1996)!

So like Pink Flamingos and Polyester, Waters’s museum-worthy work delights in scatology, celebrity, and hilarity. One does not usually expect to laugh out loud when viewing fine art, so prepare yourself for that shocker too.

Waters’s work will be a gas for those with a taste for bad taste, which makes the presentation in Indecent Exposure a bit frustrating. While his photos of his TV screen and weird sculptures completely lack pretension, the layout and text content of this book sometimes succumbs to that vice. The images are often shrunk down to postage-stamp size to make room for vast vistas of empty, white space, which is a crime that too many art books commit. 

As for a series of analytical essays, the only writer who really taps into the spirit of Waters’s work is Robert Starr, whose “Queering the Pitch” is both enlightening and funny. The others feel inappropriately academic. Initially, I wondered how Waters, himself, would react to such pieces. Would he roll his eyes at them or revel in them as scrumptiously kitsch? Based on the lengthy interview with the artist that wraps up the text side of Indecent Exposure, I think Waters may unironically approve. Here he reveals that there is actually serious, artistic consideration behind works depicting title cards of the shitty movies that were supposed  be screened on the planes destroyed on 9/11 or a picture of a flower that squirts viewers in the face if they get too close to it. The interview is also very valuable for what it reveals about Waters’s artistic process, such as the fact that he conceptualizes his sculptures while Tony Gardener, the guy who created killer-doll Chuckie and the fake breasts Selma Blair wears in A Dirty Shame, sculpts those uncanny likenesses of Jackson, Manson, and the rest. Needless to say, the interview is the biggest kick textual kick in Indecent Exposure. 

Review: 'Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks' (New Edition)

Prince’s genius made him the most exciting and original artist of the eighties, but his mystique is what made him such a fascinating star. In his 2011 biography, Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks, Ronin Ro struck the right balance by giving readers enough information to lead us through the timeline of Prince’s life without removing the mask completely. Perhaps this was a conscious decision by the author. Perhaps Ro simply couldn’t crack that deliberately veiled persona, leaving quite a bit of Prince’s behavior—particularly during his apparently one-sided war with Warner Brothers during his Love Symbol/Slave phase or when he skipped out on the U.S.A. for Africa recording session to go to a Mexican restaurant—seeming random and impulsive. The author sprints through the artist’s early life. By page eleven, Prince has already quit his first band and is prepping his solo career. That may be frustrating for some readers, but fans who understand what a private person Prince was will appreciate the distance.

Yet, Inside the Music and the Masks isn’t at all unsatisfying, offering the broad strokes of Prince’s career peppered with enough odd anecdotes to make the trip as fun as a ride on the back of that purple Prince cycle. We learn of his friendly rivalry with Michael Jackson that climaxed with the Purple One bonking the Prince of Pop in the nuts with a ping-pong ball. We learn of Prince’s calamitous impromptu appearance on stage with Jackson and James Brown and his hilarious mockery of Bruce Springsteen during a shared performance. Less humorously, we learn that Prince had suffered an overdose on drink and pills (aspirin,of all things) as long ago as 1996, though the author typically offers no real insight into what exactly went wrong. In the wake of Prince’s death, this will be something a lot of readers need.

The latest edition of Inside the Music and the Masks adds a new afterword to address the end of Prince’s career, but this new chapter is even more fast-paced than the rest of the book. Ro covers the last six years of Prince’s life in as many pages, focusing more on the negative media reaction to the artist’s death than on how or why it happened. This new chapter offers a bit of a skewed version of the aftermath of April’s tragic events. I read quite a bit about Prince’s death, and the majority of it was respectful and not overly speculative. I certainly hadn’t read any of the rumors that he had been dying of AIDS or that he’d been reduced to a “pauper” that Ro read. I’m sure such crackpot theories are out there, but by mainly focusing on the rumors, Ro gives the impression that such theories were in the majority. Consequently, the tone of his afterword is much more bitter than the evenhanded book he’d published five years ago, reserving sharp words for fans and journalists alike. A new introductory chapter is similarly off-putting as Ro chides those who criticized the first edition of his book, mocks Prince’s fashion sense, crows about how the fact that he isn’t a big Prince fan makes him a worthy biographer, and really tests his readers’ gag reflexes by signing off as “Hardcore King.” Readers who purchase the latest edition of Inside the Music and the Masks would do well to skip the arrogant and unnecessary introductory chapter and manage their expectations when reading the new final one. Otherwise, Ronin Ro’s book is still a very, very good Prince biography.

Review: 'Michael Jackson: The Making of “Thriller”: 4 Days/1983'

Calling The Beatles pop’s all-time greatest band, Jimi Hendrix its all-time greatest guitarist, or “Thriller” its all-time greatest video isn’t terribly original. There’s still a reason such opinions are so persistent and pervasive: they’re true. “Thriller” may not be the greatest song—it’s not even the greatest song on Thriller—but a great video is equal parts striking music, visuals, and performance. “Thriller” married a singer/performer at his peak powers with visual artists John Landis and Rick Baker who’d just made the best horror film of the eighties, An American Werewolf in London. “Thriller” was a sheer “lightning in a bottle” moment.

We can’t get a super accurate representation of Michael Jackson’s gifts in Douglas Kirland’s new book Michael Jackson: The Making of “Thriller”: 4 Days/1983 since a book can’t move (though the moving-MJ hologram on the front cover is as close as it gets). The incredible visuals of Landis, and particularly, Baker are on full display though. The centerpiece of the book pores over the painstaking processes of Baker’s application of the iconic cat-man and zombie makeups. Yet it’s the small moments that really thrill: the nostalgia-defining shot of the eighties’ biggest star playing a Donkey Kong arcade game, Landis drinking a Tab and showing his star how to be a scary monster, and some shots of Jackson in cat makeup without his contact lenses that provide a peek at the man behind the monster. Most arresting of all is a sequence devoted to the removal of the zombie makeup. It looks really, really painful. Then in the final shot of the sequence, Jackson looks like he has simply shaken off the pain. His is the face of a true pro.

The introduction by journalist Nancy Griffin, who wrote a far more extensive and revealing piece on the video-shoot for Vanity Fair in 2010, and her interview with on-set photographer Kirkland are nice, but a video with such a complex production and far-reaching history could have used more text. However, Griffin and Kirkland are determined to keep the focus on the photos and can’t be blamed for allowing such unforgettable images to howl for themselves.