Review: A Drunken Dream and Other Stories by Moto Hagio

You can tell a lot about a culture by the popular entertainment that it shills to its kids — and you can discern even more by the taboo breakers within that landscape.

In both camps, plenty of junk piles up, but sometimes in tearing down the walls, new ways to view the world can be born from the wreckage. These taboo breakers don’t rely on the base and obvious realms of sex and violence that too many utilize for shock value purposes in masquerading as progressive entertainment.

In the world of Japanese comics, the genre of Shojo Manga is marketed to teenage girls, and for years the ensuing product reflected the traditional ideas of what girls should be. The typical vehicles for this view — frilly fantasies and melodramatic soap operas — were employed in publications that could seem like a brush-off from the male dominated industry.

Enter creators like Moto Hagio and others in a group now referred to as “The Magnificent 24-Year Group” who, in the late 1960s, began to inject the subject matter not only with stories that reflected the obvious changes in modern girlhood — and, by proxy, womanhood — but also the psychology of the changing times, as well as the traditional modes. These efforts often resulted in literate, somber, depthful and allegorical stories that investigated their themes through poetry and mysticism.

One of the prime practitioners of the form is Hagio, and this collection brings together some of her best work over a 30-year period for introduction to an American audience. Revealed in these pages are gentle but dark stories that are preoccupied with the loss and alienation that their intended audiences no doubt feel, often without any tangible reasons beyond the purely psychological.

Several stories stand out for cherry pickers, but you’ll be rewarded by each entry. The title story offers a science fiction setting for some gender-bending drama that investigates the notion of the inevitable in relationships that transcends chromosomes.

In one of the most powerful offerings, “Hanshin: Half-God,” Hagio tells the absurd story of Siamese twins, one a beautiful and rapturously adored half-wit, the other a horrendously ugly genius whose physical existence seems only to serve as a repository of extra nutrients for her sister.

In the Kafkaesque “Iguana Girl,” the idea of self-image and the way mothers pass it along to daughters is addressed through the story of Rika, who sincerely believes she is not a human girl but an iguana. It’s a grim absurdity that unfolds beautifully and emotionally.

Hagio is able to meet her audience on its own level while still peppering her tales with the understanding of someone past that age — sometimes her stories touch on some haunting moment from the past reflected on later by the character. This technique acknowledges the intensity of the teenage experience, while also placing it in a realistic context and offering the assurance that the strongest emotions live on through aging.

Profile: John Breiner

Sometimes breaking the rules turns out to be the best way to learn. With graffiti artists, that often comes in the form of breaking the law.

Artist John Breiner has curated a show for MCLA Gallery 51 at 51 Main St. that examines how young artists move past youthful indiscretions and retain that energy for gallery work.

The show “Quantum Spectrum” opens on Thursday, Sept. 30, with a reception at 6 p.m.

Even though Breiner has gathered a cast of street artists who spent much of their early years in the world of graffiti, his interest isn’t in what was, but rather, what happened after that. Breiner is fascinated by the transition and how each artist has dealt with it on his or her own creative terms.

“This show tries to find out if there is something that these artists are doing that motivated them as much as graffiti did as teenagers,” Breiner said during an interview this week. “We all grew up with similar backgrounds, and the motivation when I was young to paint outside, to paint in public, was to wake up the next day and have a photo of what you did the night before. Unfortunately, when you get into the real world and make a living, you have to go easy on the stuff that will get you in trouble.”

Breiner’s one promise to himself was not to create a graffiti show within the gallery. He just doesn’t think that works and believes that, within in a gallery setting, what has grown out of those early creative years and become part of mature art-making is far more interesting.

“As a teenager, I was definitely out running around at 3 o’clock in the morning, seeing some unique things. It makes me who I am and therefore makes the art what it is,” he said. “It’s the same for a lot of these artists, and I feel like there is an edge to them and that their work is worth being shown. I know them personally, so I know the different types of things people are doing, and I want the show to be that instead of the obvious, what everyone would expect to see.”

Profile: E.J. Park

It’s not quite a robot army poised to conquer the world, but New York City artist E. J. Park works to create mechanical automata that might steal both your heart and your intellect.

She began working on automata while in school, when she took a class called “Mechanisms and Things That Move.” Through that experience — which included her first encounters with the idea of using automata in performance — Park began enthusiastically building her own pieces.

Park believes that interacting with automata can be a heightened moment for people that takes ordinary and everyday functions out of their own context and into one of pure mystery and discovery.

“The experience of playing with automatons can be a magical experience for people because a very simple, mundane action such as turning a handle can bring about a complex and unexpected series of movements,” she said during an interview this week. “The ‘hidden mystery’ behind the magical moments in all automata is the mechanism.”

Many of Park’s pieces are built from wood — her experience with metal is limited, although she says metal can help make the structure of automata more sturdy and add to its longevity.

Fashioning mechanisms from wood is a challenge — accuracy can be difficult to create in the mechanical parts unless they are machine- or laser-cut. Even then it is hard to keep all the mechanisms functioning for long, since wood wears down. As a creative material, though, wood has other aesthetic and thematic advantages that metal does not.

“The reason why I chose wood as my main material is that I wanted to build the machine that doesn’t feel like a machine,” Park said. “For this show, I used different kinds of papers with the same reason. It was very interesting process, and I found a lot of potential ways to use paper.”

Profile: Lisbeth Zwerger

Austrian illustrator Lisbeth Zwerger was originally discouraged from even pursuing a career in drawing children’s books — decades later, she’s thrilled that she was able to follow her heart.

Zwerger’s work is currently on display at the Eric Carle Museum, 125 W. Bay Road, through Sept. 26.

Zwerger has worked as a children’s illustrator for over three decades. Over the years, Zwerger has leant her illustrative interpretations to stories like “Aesop’s Fables,” “A Christmas Carol,” “The Little Mermaid” and many others. She received the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1990.

Zwerger prefers illustrating classic tales for reasons of creative practicality, as well as personal taste. She prefers fairy tales, particularly romantic ones, and that is what she drifts toward in her books. She also finds one working advantage to that preference is that she never gets into quarrels with authors. She’s open to modern stories, but with the exception of her current project, an adaptation of “The Lion, The Unicorn and Me: The Donkey’s Christmas Story” by British novelist Jeanette Winterson, she seldom finds new works that interest her.

“I feel that the old stories have fantasy and imagination, and to me the new stories that I have come across are more educational and I don’t really like all that,” Zwerger said. “The ones I have come across are about how to win a friend or how to clean your teeth, things like that.”

Review: Various Artists – Roots of Chicha 2

It’s not as if compiler Olivier Conan doesn’t have enough on his plate — he’s a member of two bands, including Latin chamber musicians Las Rubias Del Norte, a co-owner of the club Barbes in Brooklyn, and also runs the label of the same name. In addition to the two volumes of Chicha music, Conan’s second band, Chicha Libre, covers songs from the Chicha genre. With this second CD volume, he not only adds to his pile of projects, but also offers another level to the Chicha sound as America experiences it.

In the 1960s, Chicha bands were borrowing sounds and ideas from English and American music and melding these with Cumbia — electric guitars and bass, Moog synthesizers and Farfisa organs all crept in.

The first group of these bands came out of the Amazon — bands such as Juaneco y Su Combo, and Los Tigres de Tarapoto. In the 1970s, large migrations to Lima saw the form reach a wider audience, with Lima-based bands including Los Destellos, Los Hijos del Sol and Los Diablos Rojos further popularizing — and tinkering with — the sounds.

These compilations are the result of a trip to Peru several years back — some record buying excursions there that introduced Conan to the world of Chicha. He had never heard it before and was heartened to realize there were still musical subcultures out there to be discovered.

That first compilation came out in 2007 — also reviewed in this newspaper. Three years later, Conan presents a follow-up that he characterizes in the liner notes as making up for what he felt was lacking in the previous one. I can assure you and him that there was nothing wrong with Volume 1 in the slightest, but Conan has focused on improving a good thing, devoting his energy to more time in Peru, more research, more interviews and a wider scope from which to choose the tracks.

Once again, he delivers a killer compilation with a superior accompanying booklet.

He also lets us know what’s happened in Peru since the last volume — a revival of the form, thanks to its legitimization by a “gringo” being so interested in it. This type of music was typically derided in its native country, seen as very low class, but Conan’s involvement, coupled with the death of a Chicha star in a car accident, com bined to draw mainstream media attention, and the floodgates opened.

In this volume, Conan opted for less commercial selections — not that it matters much to the North American listener, since it all sounds obscure and exotic to these ears. Defined by twangy, relentless guitar work, coupled with driving percussive elements, the music makes a great argument for homegrown multiculturalism.

Some of the songs featured do mix Latino eclecticism with sounds that don’t sound far removed from the middle section of The Doors’ “Light My Fire,” with the promised psychedelic jamming of the Chicha album’s subtitle. Many others evoke the world of surf music from the 1960s — as with the easy going exoticism of “Cumbia Del Desierto” by Los Destellos, the poppy warm-weather cheer of “El Aguajal” by Los Shapis, which is also noted for its strong Andean quality.

Equally, songs such as “Siboney” by Los Walkers and the rousing “La Danza Del Petrolero” by Los Wemblers De Iquitos don’t sound the worlds away from the output of ‘60s bands like The Revels that they actually are.

The latter bands’ “Lamento Del Yacuruna” brings this concept to a madcap level, mixing stronger Latin rhythm that drives the song with jungle hoots. Group Celeste’s “Como Un Ave” at times resembles something by Kid Creole, with fuzzy ‘60s guitar piercing the funk.

There’s plenty good in this collection, and I only hope there is room for Conan to unearth more and add to the richness of the sound he’s already unleashed on the 21st century.

Profile: Stan Ridgway

Stan Ridgway might be best known in the United States for his role in the ‘80s band Wall of Voodoo — his voice is imprinted on many a brain, thanks to their hit “Mexican Radio.”

It’s been more than a quarter of a century since that song became an MTV hit. Since then, Ridgway has forged his own acclaimed path in the music world as an eclectic singer-songwriter with a gift for storytelling and a muse that hails from a far different world than most.

His voice is as singular as they come. With a warbly, Western twang, his singing persona winds through the landscape he inhabits like some all-seeing scribe inhabiting the personalities that populate it with him.

“I’m not the greatest singer in the world, but I think I am pretty good,” he said during an interview this week. “If you can’t blow people out with your pipes, you end up writing in a certain way that involves their imagination, and you end up putting something together that is perhaps intriguing to them on a cerebral level. But if I sang like Tom Jones, I’d probably have a career singing ‘What’s New Pussycat.’”

His latest album, “Neon Mirage,” represents an altered course for Ridgway, hailed as more emotionally revealing that his usual songwriting. Over the course of the previous year, Ridgway faced the deaths of his father and uncle and his collaborator and friend, violinist Amy Farris, and found his original album plan changing course naturally.

“A number of things happened in my life over the last year that really pulled me to the side of the road for awhile,” Ridgway said. ” I do have another box of songs here that will probably come out later on that I put to the side for awhile because I thought, ‘These are starting to heal me; these songs feel like they’re healing me up.’ And sometimes that’s what a song can do if you’re writing it yourself.”

Review: Yvon’s Paris by Robert Stevens

Every time you walk into Hot Topic at the mall and marvel how far Goth has come in popular culture, take a moment to think about Jean Pierre Yves Petit — or Yvon, as he was known in Paris.

His Paris is no Impressionist burst of color. Instead, Yvon skulked around the city, capturing the blacks, whites and gorgeous grays through his preference for the less vibrant street moments of sunrise and sunset, when the shadows ruled, or on foggy days and during rain storms, and any other moment you can imagine Paris becoming the capital of romantic darkness.

Yvon, you see, created the Paris the modern world loves more than any other — the Paris where the gargoyles overlook life — and he did it not through galleries but through postcard sales.

This new collection of his work, “Yvon’s Paris,” captures the scope of his vision and the beauty of the world he was selling to others for the purpose of spreading it around. In some ways this was an insider’s view of Paris that was to overtake the world by way of souvenirs and tourism.

Perhaps Yvon’s photos of Paris reflected his general life experience, one of unpleasantness and distance. Polio deformed his right foot at age 4, and shortly after he took to the food markets of Paris, wreaking havoc despite his severe limp. He bought his first camera using money he had stolen from his father.

Many dysfunctional years followed, which saw Yvon become a sailor at 14, traveling to and living in Africa a couple times, before returning to Paris just around World War 1 and becoming a magazine photographer. It was in 1924 that he translated his photos into the postcard format and had his work spread around the world.

Whether capturing a barge or a bookseller on the boulevard, the Eiffel Tower or the area in front of Notre Dame, Yvon’s photos are populated by one constant — the small, often lonely figure. He might be watering flowers; he might be gazing into a canal or pulling a cart, but he is small against the architecture of Paris and most often a black figure against the gray.

Was this how Yvon felt in the city? That’s obviously hard to say, but it puts forth an image that speaks against the popular impression of Paris. It’s not City of Love in Yvon’s work — instead it’s a place of loneliness, of figures stalking and looming. It’s the Paris that actually attracts the most romantic of us, and it’s Yvon’s as well as our own.

Review: Norman Pettingill – Backwoods Humorist

Culled from the output of postcard self-publisher and Wisconsin native Norman Pettingill, this triumphant collection of outsider art offers an insider view of a world that most viewers of the work probably won’t enter.

Pettingill’s concern was with the insular existence of backwoods hunters, from their lodges to their excursions, pulling humor from the grotesque and bawdy elements in a style that mixes the works of cartoonists like Basil Wolverton and Harvey Kurtzman, and the sweeping tapestries of Hieronymous Bosch. Satire abounds, but no matter how ugly it gets, it’s never vicious — this weirdness is all part of the landscape of Pettingill’s life.

An artist by hobby as well as a trapper and hunter, Pettingill turned the latter into a business when, in 1946, he began printing and selling his own postcards. It’s a business that lasted him through the 1980s, when old age and health issues started to get the best of him. As a self-taught artist and businessman, Pettingill followed the primary rule of success — to capitalize on what you know — and this brought him not only financial success and souvenir store renown, but also a couple of art shows and a place in the permanent collection of the John Michael Koler Arts Center in Sheboygan.

Pettingill is at his most skillful with his sober, often beautiful, depictions of animal life — he created a largely untitled series of wonderful depictions of deer wandering, drinking and fighting — but it’s when humans enter the frame that Pettingill’s personality and attitude toward life really come out. Sometimes he chooses the mishaps of hunting and trapping as his focus — these are the venues for more obvious, slapstick drawings such as “Phooey,” which shows a fisherman trapped by his own tangled line while fish and frogs dance merrily on the water, and Pettingill seems bemused by the incompetence mixed with enthusiasm for the sport.

It’s his inside views of human abodes that offer the major attraction here. There’s something very dark about the way hunting lodges and tap rooms make their way onto his postcards — the patrons are darkly grotesque and chaos ensues in most places. In 1950s “Mustt’s Ronda’Vooo,” Pettingill depicts a barroom populated by the scariest backwoods hillbillies you’d ever fear encountering — there’s even a portrait of one of them with four eyes, but he’s nowhere near as creepy as the craggy old hags and droopy, dirty sasquatches that line up for drinks.

In scenes like “Moron Gultch” and “Daylite in the Swamp,” the hunters in various s states of undress, intoxication and debauchery go unleashed on their lodges. It makes you wonder what sort of society free of hang-ups existed back in the forests of Wisconsin in the 1940s — there’s nothing graphic in the images, but the insinuation of casual depravity would probably make a hippie blush two decades later. His postcards from the 1950s don’t get any tamer — and the 1956 masterpiece “Backwoods Homelife” brings new meaning to the Pettingill scenes when you consider that the army of half-naked figures are implied to be related.

The number of birthday-suited hunters Pettingill depicts throughout the book — including at least one nude man riding a fish and a few images implying that bears have an amorous interest in humans (including one with a bikini babe fishergirl) — don’t help with the undertone of less than wholesome observation.

Pettingill’s great masterwork, though, has to be 1957’s “Deer Hunting Meat,” which depicts an army of hunters falling over themselves, and even tripping, hitting and shooting one another, in order to lay claim to one lone dead deer. Replace that deer with an SUV, and you can see that Pettingill’s work gets to the heart of the matter — and you don’t have to be a mangled back woodsman to be part of the American truth he presented.

Review: The Unsinkable Walker Bean by Alan Renier

The field of pre-teen graphic novels finally gets its master work in “The Unsinkable Walker Bean.” It’s an adventure on the high seas involving magic and mayhem, as well as humor and humanity, with just the right mix of elegant European-style cartooning and raw American ingenuity in plotting.

Walker is a kid raised on the yarns of his grandfather and at odds with his father, a stuffy and greedy naval admiral who wants his father’s hidden fortune. Grandfather’s tales are filled with the mysteries of Atlantis and sea-monster sisters with humongous heads. Walker’s inner life, which he shares with his grandfather, is filled with wild inventions that grandfather believes will eventually push the boy into greatness.

As he lays dying, Grandfather hands Walker his journal and his secret — he’s been cursed by a sarcastic, supernatural skull — and begs Walker to finish the journey and return something that the sea-monster sisters demand. Walker does so and embarks on a cross sea adventure with pirates, witches, seas monsters and contraptions of Walker’s wildest designs.

Renier’s tale unfolds with a gentle, almost old-fashioned quality and a respect for the complicated humanity that winds through epic tales. The action is about as fun as can be, but it’s the interaction between Walker and his friends — the cabin boy Shiv and the witches’ feisty girl assistant Genoa — and their growing devotion after initial mistrust and the constant double crosses that really draw the reader in.

Of course, Renier’s art is at center of the book’s appeal. He alternates between a sober but cartoonish style that hearkens back to Herge and allows the story to unfold without overshadowing it, and a series of majestic two-page spreads that add an epic quality to the book.

Renier steps back and shows the whole picture of any one moment, capturing the scope of action among all the characters, and really succeeds in some solid and drama world-building.

Thankfully, this is just the first book in an oncoming series. At a time when authors are pulling in every obvious backdrop they can for the younger readers chapter books and graphic novels — elf societies, Greek gods and whatever else besides vampires you can think of — Renier deserves double credit for tantalizing his readers with an original mythology, and one well worth exploring.

Review: Forget Sorrow by Belle Yang

Escaping an ex-boyfriend who had started stalking her, author Belle Yang stayed in the safety of her parents’ home and turned that experience into one of discovery that she would apply to her own recovery from personal terror. As a graphic novel memoir, “Forget Sorrow” recounts that time during which she bonded with her father and uncovered the story of his family in China — that is, her own story.

Yang’s father, Baba, weaves tales that are part soap opera, part fable, as he recounts his life growing up on his grandfather’s home in Manchuria and the familial characters that populated it, most notably his father and three uncles. Their battles and double crosses in order to gain the grandfather’s favor take up the bulk of these stories, and the lessons learned stretch across the decades to Yang’s own life.

This story of four Chinese brothers plays out like the exact opposite of the more famous one involving five who team up against a problem. Here the brothers bicker over the grandfather’s favors and, in particular, control of his rural farm land, tainting the house with intrigue but setting up a delicate structure ready to be toppled as the communists begin to move into the country in the 1940s.

Presenting no united front, thanks to the brothers’ petty concerns, nor any plan in preparation against the dire communist future that hangs inevitably before them, “Forget Sorrow” becomes a meditation on the unexpected darkness of life and the notion that our time here is too short for the pettiness.

Yang’s story is also about the passage of time and the jaded quality with which people can approach tradition. Unable to accept that their ways and values are a human construct — and therefore require their own effort to perpetuate them — Baba’s family soon finds that a crisis like the communist takeover will usher out their way of life with not much effort. It’s only then that they can really appreciate what they had, but obviously too late.

One current through the book is the idea of meditation and enlightenment, asceticism and casting off the world. It’s a constant movement by several of the characters and a reason to offer lectures to other people. Through Yang’s personal scope of history and experience, though, the hunt for enlightenment becomes a double-edged sword, and doing nothing in times of trouble but seeking contemplation becomes its own form of ignoring problems.

Yang’s family history ends up bringing the world she relates up-to-date and allows her readers to see not only the broad strokes and tiny slices of history, but also a macroscopic view of the points where the knife has perhaps dulled, though even the furthest sections are still affected by history’s chops.