Acapulco Gold (book)

Pengo's 2023 Summer Book Club

I have always been in love with marketing. As a kid, I wanted to sell things. I don’t mean I wanted to make money (I’m still no good at that) I wanted to create product for others to acquire from me.

An artist does, too, but an artist is very particular about what they create. I wanted to make and to find an audience for things people wanted. I would design cereal boxes and candy wrappers. I made greeting cards. I wanted to be a graphic designer, I guess. 

I did try taking courses in design, at Ohio University, and at Kent. But I was never very successful. Mom said I should have gotten a job at American Greetings, and she was right.

I embraced my role making posters and other promotional materials for Guerrilla and Dobama. I was happier designing the posters for Bad Epitaph than I was directing the plays.

Long before becoming engrossed in the TV program Mad Men, which is ostensibly about the business of advertising, I had read a book in high school called Acapulco Gold by Edwin Corley. Written in 1972, it’s an in-depth description of one Madison Avenue advertising executive, told with the same kind of hard-drinking, hard-playing bravado of that aforementioned 21st century TV program, though this story focuses on the account of one firm working secretly to get the jump on federal approval for the recreational use of cannabis.

"Mind Your Own Business" poster
Guerrilla Theater Company (1994)
I drew this!

How would a commercial advertising firm promote weed?

The more amusing aspects of this fable set aside (are they amusing? I cannot tell if the casual racism, sexism and homophobia exhibited by the main protagonist is meant to comment on the mores of the time, or the author’s actual sensibilities and does it make any difference) as a teenager I was largely compelled by the occupation itself – how to create a campaign for the product.

Currently, I am writing the adaptation of a book, a different book, a book for children, and it also tells the story of a product (to be sure, an entirely different product) from first idea to development to marketing and national exposure. 

This children's book is tightly focused on the mission to succeed and how, as is often the case, the effect these decisions have on the lives of those around the actors involved can get lost. Capitalism creates many orphans.

Play a Day: Junk Bonds

Lucy Wang

For Sunday, I read Junk Bonds by Lucy Wang whose work is posted at New Play Exchange.

Here's a story. Twenty-five years, I had burned my prospects to the ground. My ex-wife was gone, my theater company had broken up, I was waiting tables, living alone, and needed a hernia operation.

So naturally, I auditioned for a play.

In 1994 Junk Bonds received the Chilcote Award for Best Play at the Cleveland Public Theatre 13th Annual New Plays Festival, and received a full production there in May 1995.

I believed I was perfect for the role of Connor, a hyperkinetic trader in his early 30s and losing his hair, but instead was offered the role of Kent, an ex-Marine in his "early-to-mid 40s" which is to say someone entirely unlike me. I was sorely miscast and should have turned down the part outright, and that is a lesson I offer to my young protégés. You feel like you have to say yes to absolutely everything, even if it doesn't feel right. I tell them there is always another play.

The scene is a financial services firm, the plot regarding one trader sinking the company through incremental, overwhelming loss. A quarter century on, the script is as relevant as ever. But it is a time capsule from when the trading floor was dominated by men and the business was done almost entirely over the phone. Before the internet, before 9/11, before the housing meltdown of 2008, and yet it could happen again.

Wang's rapid-fire banter, chatter and verbal abuse is deliriously loopy, poetry in and of itself, where masculaine toxicity is a sport, one the protagonist Diana, a Chinese-American, the new girl, has to learn or lose.

I didn't understand half of what I was saying, way back then. That's okay, the director didn't either. What I should have caught was the use of the word "junk" as in heroin. Because this play is totally about addiction.

Who should I read tomorrow?

The Time Machine (book)

Its very title, The Time Machine (1895) suggests that H.G. Wells’ tale of time travel is the first such book to suggest a literal journey in time, through the use of a scientific machine specifically built for that purpose.

In fact, Wells did coin the term "time machine" though there were a few stories which played with the concept of traveling backward in time written prior to this piece, which was serialized before its being revised into a book.

In my play, On the Dark Side of Twilight, I trace the history of vampires in literature, and how the definition of their existence had changed from era to era. Some rules, like their need to drink blood, definitively defines what it means to be a vampire, and so has remained constant. That they cannot walk in daylight was not true at first, and has recently been dismissed.

Some fun might be had writing a similar story on the history of time travel, and what ideas our imaginations can accept, and which they cannot. Wells did not trouble himself with the idea of paradoxes, never questions whether his protagonist - who has no name, only The Time Traveler - or whether or not to kill Hitler, who would only have been six at the time, anyway.

In fact, Wells does not even venture into the past, only the future, and in doing so he sets in this one story several paradigms for our idea of time travel, many of which have never changed, and has inspired countless imitators.

Unlike Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which she doesn’t actually describe how man reanimates man, just that it happens, Welles describes a few precious materials which compose the machine and make it work. We now refer to this as Techno Babble, a term devised to describe every word anyone says on Star Trek.

The Future, as defined by Wells, is originally assumed by the Time Traveler to have one set of realities, and as his veil of ignorance is lifted, he discovers to his horror is something entirely else. This “Discoverer’s Error” is a mainstay of plots for Star Trek and Dr. Who - these programs often presenting the opposite discovery, that that which appeared monstrous was merely misunderstood.

Mary Doria Russell’s award-winning novel The Sparrow even lifts the central conceit of Wells’ mystery, the concept of two sentient in a symbiotic relationship where one exists as food for the other.

I found the final passages of The Time Machine extremely affecting, especially or due to their brevity, in the which the Traveler leaps millions of years into the future, twice, the witness the Earth in its final days. As the globe ceases to spin on its axis, and either the Sun expands or the Earth comes nearer to it, the seas crust with salt, all appears reddish or pink to the eye … and giant creatures described as similar in appearance to crabs roam the shore.

The Traveler is nearly attacked by one and manages to escape with alacrity. I couldn’t help but be reminded by Stephen King’s Gunslinger, who had no means of escape when set upon by mutant crustaceans on a foreign beach and was terribly maimed.

Wells’ uses his time machine to ask what if, and to play out a fantasy of a future time where the worst fantasy of man’s inhumanity comes to pass. There are several allusions to the downfall of humanity through Communism, but it is Capitalism which is the true culprit, how a permanent underclass will eventually turn on its master. The image of workers underground while idle classes play above (a literal image from the Victorian period) is reflected in films like Metropolis, and many others.

Time travel has always been a tool for writers to reflect their own time back to their readers in metaphors which are exciting and easy to digest, with or without Jessica Paré.

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (book)

WHAT IF ... The Original Marvel Bullpen Had Been A Socialist Collective ..?

The origins of the most indelible characters in DC Comics were created by artists and writers whose ideas were kept by the corporation, the enrich those who owned the company. These artists were paid for the work - the artwork, the pages - they produced. But the ideas remained the possession of the corporation, in perpetuity.

As long as you were an employee, you were paid a wage. Once you left, your characters - which in other industries we may compare to inventions, patented or copyrighted - remained behind. No residuals, no royalties, even the artwork itself was owned by the corporation for which it had been created. (See: Superman.)

So it was also with Marvel Comics. Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Steve Gerber - they did not own The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Howard the Duck.

Only Stan Lee benefited from his initial contributions to the early works of Marvel, because he never left. As the years went by, his self-made legend grew and he was able to capitalize on this and make a fortune. I will not debate whether he was anything more than an editor (to his dying day Kirby insisted Lee never wrote a word) but he certainly made himself the Ronald McDonald of Marvel Comics.

By the 1980s, management at DC and Marvel had learned that by providing incentives (let us not call them royalties) for popular work, they could encourage artists to create comics that would have the broadest appeal. In the case of Marvel, this also translated into cross-title storylines which increased their bottom line exponentially.

That's Capitalism.

For a brief period of time, the lasting effects of the so-called Silver Age of 1970s comics (for which people of my generation were so emotionally connected to) coincided with the glut of multiples titles for one character or team and "event" comics, so that everyone on board at that time lived in security and in a couple of cases, great wealth.

That lasted one or two years. And by that time (some would argue long before) the comics were awful to read and look at, and the emperor was revealed to have no clothes.

Hey, wait a minute! These are comics!

We've been reading comics!

Imagine an alternate Marvel Universe, where the original Marvel Bullpen (if there ever was such a thing) was a profit-sharing collective, where success for one was success for all. Where funding went to training the best artists and writers and editors. Where there was a strong, paid internship program, vacations and great health care for emphysemic illustrators?

Well. We know Steve Ditko would have no part of it. And no doubt a model like that would never produce an artist-entrepreneur like Todd McFarlane, or any of the Marvel-inspired blockbusters of the last ten years. They'd just continue producing low-grade pulp superhero comics strictly for the people who like to read them.

But unlike the What If titles of the late 1970s and early 80s - which always ended in disaster, as if to prove the correctness of the canonical storyline - perhaps this alternate universe would have had a happier ending, at least for the artists instead of the publishers.

'Nuff said.

Source: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

Randall Park Mall

Benjamin bear looks for his girl Missy in Randall Park Mall.
"Cleveland Is A Warm, Fuzzy Place" (1977)

"There's going to be a transfer of power ... from the central city to the southeast part of Cleveland ... I believe that after today the forces that want to keep downtown Cleveland intact had better get on their horse and start riding real fast."
- Randall Park Mall Developer Ed DeBartolo, 1973

Two million square feet of shopping ecstasy, the Randall Park Mall opened to the public on August 11, 1976. At the time it was the largest indoor shopping mall in the world. The city of North Randall had a population of 1,500. Randall Mall Park employed 5,000.

Randall Park didn't have one, but FIVE department stores; Higbee's, The May Company, Sears, JC Penney, and the Joseph Horne Company. The place was so big, some stores had two locations, one on each floor! There were over 200 hundred stores in all. And it was stylish -- marble columns, real tile floors, beautiful ceilings and futuristic ramps and crossovers.

The joy was short-lived however. With two years, the Beachwood Mall opened, siphoning away well-heeled customers, and the place began losing any of its original luster before the end of the 1970s. The place was just so vast, and little thought had gone into long-term maintenance. Attending the movie theater (and using its bathrooms) required trips up and down many staircases, and the theater (and its bathrooms) were filthy and dysfunctional. By the mid-1980s the mall was considered downright dangerous, and suburban residents began to refer to it as Vandal Dark Mall ... "dark" because, you know, the lights were out in all the closed storefronts.

Randall Park Mall closed in 2009.


UPDATE: Found this PD op-ed piece celebrating the opening of Randall Park Mall from August 1976.

Sources:
Wikipedia
Outside Cleveland, Snapshots of Poverty’s Surge in the Suburbs New York Times, 10/25/2011
DeadMalls.com
NewsNet5.com
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

Power (play)

POWER
A Living Newspaper
by Arthur Arent

ag·it·prop /ˈædʒɪtˌprɒp/ –noun
1. agitation and propaganda, esp. for the cause of communism.

I am leftist, I will admit it. Not a Leftist, I do not define myself that way, that is not me as a person. But my belief system veers to the left of center. I believe in tolerance and compassion, I accept alternate points of view, and often champion them. And I believe in the obligation of our society, our civilization, our government, to see to the needs and assistance of those who need assistance.

I am not a Communist. Neither am I a Capitalist, in its purest sense. I am against slavery. I am against slave-like conditions. I oppose starvation and want. I oppose fear, fear of oppression, of domination, either through direct threatening means, or by the endorsement and reinforcement of the dominant paradigm, of the necessity of an underclass, or workers doing all they can for little while the few live lives of unspeakable luxury and waste. And yes, that might make me sound like a Socialist. Today, over 55% of Americans believe the President is a Socialist, which means they don't really know what the fuck that word even means, but if they think Barack Obama is one, then paint me red and call me Uncle Joe.

Having said that, upon reading another "Living Newspaper" by Arthur Arent, I am not so sure I feel as strongly as I once did about the House Committee on Un-American Activities efforts at pulling down the Federal Theater Project.

The majority of work created by the FTP was non-political. There were many children's plays, and when conservatives called those productions out for indoctrinating the young against the Man, well that is probably because most good, strong children's stories do have moral lessons pertaining to fairness, honesty, being kind, and all kinds of messages that leave, I dunno, British Petroleum, for example, withering under scrutiny.

But these Living Newspapers are inarguably agitprop - they are propaganda which agitates. They are not well-told stories which inspire the mind or the heart. They are also not dispassionate portrayals of fact. In the case of POWER they are quotes taken out of context (Arent himself admitted this was a technique of The Living Newspaper, though he did not use that turn of phrase) and bent in such a way as to turn the viewer in a certain direction, and keep them pointed that way until a direct appeal is made; the audience is instructed, to-wit, to rise up, take a stand, to take action against the forces which oppress them. To stand with strong government and against big business.

Are these good ideas? If you can't find work and your children are dying before your eyes, well, sure, they are the only ideas. I didn't say it was wrong, or even proper to create this work. But reading it, I can understand why there are those who would believe that plays which champion the efforts of the current administration should not be paid for with public funds.