Re: The End Is Near - Joe's Garage
progea
On Dec 2, 2:15 pm, "Eric Gisin" <gi...@uniserve.com> wrote:
> http://www.reason.com/news/show/130358.html
> December 2, 2008, 04:00:00 | tcavana...@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh)
> Prophetic works always promise more than they can deliver. Fans of the Book of Isaiah still wait in
> vain for lambs, goats, and unicorns to make the dust fat with their fatness. And when was the last
> time anybody who really deserved it had his heart vexed, his blood poured over mountains and
> rivers, and his flesh fed to fowls and beasts, as promised by the prophet Ezekiel? More recent
> prophecies haven't worked out much better: The actual year 2001 sucked so hard that the estate of
> Stanley Kubrick should face a class-action suit for false advertising.
>
> But the late Frank Zappa's Joe's Garage now rises to that rare stratosphere of works applauded for
> their prescience when the future itself arrives. The mad, filthy 1979 rock opera (a hybrid of a
> cheap high school play and a say-no-to-music cautionary tale narrated by a creepy government
> official) has now been brought for the first time to the live stage, in a very faithful musical
> playing at Los Angeles' Open Fist Theatre.
>
> In Entertainment Today, reviewer Travis Michael Holder marveled at "how right that wildly un-PC
> social critic.Frank Zappa was in his pronouncement of what could be the future of America, a place
> where his outrageously predicted fascist theocracy, not to mention the Central Scrutinizer itself,
> have become all too real." The Los Angeles Times' Philip Brandes allowed that "the rock icon/avant
> garde composer/social satirist's cautions seem downright prophetic." L.A. Weekly's Steven Leigh
> Morris added, "Some people can just see things coming."
>
> Such claims for Zappa's prophetic gifts are commonplace. In a You-Tube comment on the musician's
> epic six-minute tirade "Flakes," Bob Cronley wrote: "I believe the original record came out in
> 1980, and it was sheer prophicy (sic). Frank warned us, but very few listened. Now, the Flakes are
> running our government, running our corporations, and programming our computers. This is the most
> important protest song ever, but it's too late, we are doomed for not listening. :)"
>
> Pat Towne and Michael Franco's production of Joe's Garage is an inspired, moving, hilarious
> adaptation of a concept album that Rolling Stone's Carter-era review said would be impossible to
> stage. As far as I know it's the first fully successful effort to bring rock's manic, shameless
> anarchy to legitimate theater.
>
> But was Frank Zappa's three-decade-old record really prophetic?
>
> Oh, it has its eerie overlaps with our science-fiction present. The album's scenario of a
> government so intent on "enforcing all the laws that haven't been passed yet" that it outlaws music
> was at the time a response to a crackdown by the Shiite Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, yet it received
> more recent resonance from the Sunni Taliban's pre-invasion music and kite flying bans in
> Afghanistan. Zappa's vision of perverted priests, prison sexual assault, and copulation with
> appliances (including a man-cyborg rough-sex death) surely feels contemporary. The
> circus/hootenanny vibe of Joe's Garage got an even more circus-like rehearsal during the mid-1980s,
> when Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center crusaded against explicit rock lyrics. And
> the following phrase (drawn from the strangely coherent storyline's narrator) should be inscribed
> on the wall of every federal building: "Cruel and inhuman punishments are being carefully described
> in tiny paragraphs so they won't conflict with the Constitution (which, itself, is being modified
> in order to accommodate THE FUTURE)."
>
> But in just as many ways Joe's Garage remains a relic of its time, not least in its adolescent gags
> about women and gays, which may have been daring or progressive in the '70s but now amuse only
> those of us who still giggle when we say "Uranus." The core idea of the story-that musical
> expression would no longer be free-clearly failed to transpire. The Parents Music Resource Center,
> which Zappa eloquently opposed on Capitol Hill, ended up providing little more than free
> advertising to some heavy metal bands. America endured an eight-year period during which Tipper
> Gore was just one assassin's bullet and one coma-inducing aneurysm away from an iron grip on
> federal power, yet here we are.
>
> It is ever thus within the rarefied genre of dystopian burlesque. Other examples of nightmares that
> didn't come true (hype notwithstanding) include Sidney Lumet's 1976 film Network and the genre's
> white whale, George Orwell's 1949 novel 1984.
>
> Orwell's creation received a special workout during its eponymous year. The United States of 1984
> could not have looked less like the former Eric Blair's vision of Airstrip One. But that did not
> stop "Orwell's Nightmare Vision Has Come True" thumbsuckers from being recycled in hundreds of
> newspapers for a full calendar year. In a characteristic example, the Manhattan School of Music's
> James Sloan Allen took to The Christian Science Monitor to announce that his inability to "get an
> undergraduate to make an objective and reasoned moral judgment" proved that "in truth, we [were]
> slipping into bondage of a more insidious kind, one that Orwell feared above all," making Orwell's
> "futuristic novel dramatically pertinent now in the United States." Not to be outdone, the organ of
> the Soviet Writers' Union announced that Orwell's "vision of the future is becoming a reality-in
> the United States," while the East German Leipziger Volkszeitung found that the book "has parallels
> with the real world of imperialism. through the increasingly total surveillance of citizens (in the
> West) by computers."
>
> Network, a witty attack on corporate media, does contain elements that now seem like prototypes of
> contemporary trends, among them its versions of politicized reality television and an early Bill
> O'Reilly
> figure in the bellowing, suicidal Howard Beale. Yet in its larger picture, the film is almost
> totally wrong. Paddy Chayefsky's script posits mainstream media becoming more outlandish and
> exerting ever greater control of the public imagination. In fact, the Captains of Consciousness
> become stodgier each year, and their grip on the public mind grows steadily more feeble.
>
> So why are dystopian visions still more popular than a truckload of Soylent Green? In recent years
> we've seen studio movies detailing human extinction through infertility (Children of Men) and the
> mental retardation of all humanity (Idiocracy), even a kid's picture in which environmental
> disaster drives the population underground and Bill Murray is president (City of Ember).
>
> Maybe the lure of dystopia is that it's one of the few remaining popular genres that seem to invite
> tragedy. Not cheap accidental tragedy, but the real kind, the inevitable, ironic kind where the
> hero gets disabused of his illusions in the instant after he is ruined. In Joe's Garage's less
> popular second half-like most musicals, it frontloads the crowd pleasers-political puckishness and
> dirty jokes give way to grim, violent, psychosexual despair. But Open Fist's staging elevates the
> whole thing into a kind of universal lament: Your culture will find one way or another to break you
> down; the gods will mock your attempts to escape or transcend; things that were supposed to be fun
> will end up feeling like rape. In the end, you will lose. That is the sad truth of every age, and
> why the prophets are destined to be half right.
>
> Contributing Editor Tim Cavanaugh is a Los Angeles-based writer.