Four new podcasts were released today at The Bat Segundo Show. And since we’re on the subject of Segundo, what follows is a short excerpt from my conversation with Philadelphia-based artist Charles Burns, who I chatted with during a recent visit through New York.
You might know Burns’s work from his advertisements or his illustrations for The Believer. But he’s best known as the writer and illustrator of the graphic novel, Black Hole, a compilation of his twelve-volume comic book. Burns worked on this over the course of ten years. And one of its remarkable qualities is the way that it remains remarkably consistent in its tone, despite the fact that Burns saw his two daughters grow up as he patiently put his work together. Black Hole depicts the story of a sexually transmitted disease that afflicts various teenagers in the Pacific Northwest. The work is very much a Rorschach test for the reader. One might infer a parable about AIDS or, if you wanted to get really reductive, innocence lost. Or it can be simply enjoyed as a dark tale of American adolescence gone awry.
Since Burns has conducted many interviews for his magnum opus, the challenge was to come up with a few conversational angles that he hadn’t encountered. But the interview frequently drifted into abstract personal memories when I asked him about a specific facet of Black Hole, demonstrating perhaps that artistic ambiguities aren’t always so easily pinpointed.
Correspondent: You’ve probably seen Vanessa Raney’s really lengthy critical essay of Black Hole, where she analyzes your panels quite in-depth. And I actually wanted to ask you about a comparison she made. She pointed out that Keith, Chris, and Eliza actually represent the same relationship structure in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. And I wanted to ask you about this. Was Sartre ever on the mind in concocting this narrative? How did the relationship structure begin?
Burns: Boy, that’s a good question. I don’t know that I’ve read the essay that you’re referring to. But there have been some questions asked along those lines before. It really wasn’t an influence or that wasn’t in my mind when I was creating the story. I guess I was trying to create these characters. Two very different types of women. The main character is just coming to terms with the differences between them and his attraction to them. His initial attraction to Chris, a girl that he admires from his biology class, is this very kind of clean-cut — what he thinks is kind of clean-cut. The kind of woman that he’s putting on a pedestal. She’s perfect. But he doesn’t really know anything about her at all in reality, other than just that she seems amazing.
And then he meets a very different kind of woman, who’s very much earthy. Much more sexual. And he finds himself attracted to her, much to his dismay. So the story’s really his coming to terms with his reaction, I guess, to these different women.
Correspondent: But no Jean-Paul Sartre.
Burns: No.
Correspondent: Any literary…
Burns: I would love to be able to say that there’s a good comparison there. But, no, that wasn’t the case.
Correspondent: Okay. I also wanted to ask you about some of the anatomical close-ups throughout Black Hole. They remind me very much — in addition to the pustules and the various biological impediments that many of the characters have — it reminds me very much of the sort of World War II venereal disease films.
Burns: (laughs)
Correspondent: I was wondering. What kind of visual references did you use for these particular decisions? Or was it just more of an intuitive choice?
Burns: It was probably more of an intuitive choice. I mean, there’s those things that I grew up that are out there. I think there’s references in the movie to sitting in the biology health class and looking at — learning about sexuality that way. There’s was always this kind of very strange antiseptic situation. I remember one time in biology class, there was — I guess, what do you call it? — a TA. A student teacher. And there was some film on — I don’t know, reproduction. And she showed the first half of it. And then she abruptly turned the film off. And, of course, everybody in the class said, “Oh, keep running it! We want to see it again! We want to see the rest of it.” And she would say, “No, no, no, no.” And finally she turned it back on. And there was this very graphic portion of the movie, where we were seeing an IUD inserted into a vaginal — (laughs)
Correspondent: Yeah.
Burns: And everybody just immediately got very, very quiet and very, very uncomfortable. Because here’s this — suddenly after seeing these very typical movies about “Your Growing Body,” suddenly we were seeing these very graphic representations. It was an odd moment.
Correspondent: Is it something about that period between, say, 1945 and 1975? Was that very much on the mind — in terms of getting this particular look? Or this particular emphasis on close-ups and warts and the like?
Burns: I don’t know. I guess that’s more of a personal thing. I guess that’s just how my brain works or thinks. Those were the kinds of images that were coming up. Again, it has to do with all the things that you’re subjected to and that you come across from that time period. But nothing as thought out as that, no.
Correspondent: So really it’s more of a personal intuitive experience that you’re drawing upon here? I know…
Burns: That would be a better description.
Correspondent: Yeah, because this leads me into another question. I know that the yearbook photos, or rather the photos on the inside cover, were taken from your own yearbooks.
Burns: Yeah.
Correspondent: And this leads me to ask you about how much of what is in Black Hole is taken from your personal experience, and where do you imagine certain details. I mean, certainly, the disease which plagues all these various people is imagined in some sense. But I’m wondering, in terms of the more personal observations, were these taken more from anecdotes? Were these imagined? On what level did you feel the need to draw upon real life and your own instinct for reimagining behavioral scenarios?
Burns: I mean, my situation growing up was a much more benign situation than what I’m depicting. I mean, there were internal struggles that I was going through, that I think everybody goes through during adolescence, that seemed extremely dramatic and extremely heartrending, difficult times. And I guess I was trying to depict that. What those feelings were. The kind of internal struggle that I was going through.
There are certainly situations in the story that are drawn directly from my life. I never met a half-naked girl with a tail.
Correspondent: (laughs)
Burns: I would have loved to.
Correspondent: Wouldn’t we all really?
Burns: That never happened. My existence was much more sedate and pedestrian, I suppose. But again, these sorts of things were brewing in my mind. My sense of not fitting in. My sense of this kind of internal horror that I was feeling in a lot of situations. Whether they were anywhere near…
Correspondent: Well, in terms of personal experience vs. what you observed, I mean, it seems to me that personal experience is more the motivating impetus for what you put into Black Hole more than anything else. If what I’m understanding you to say is correct. Were you more of an observer or were you one of those types of people?
Burns: I was one of those types of people in varying degrees. Someone was asking me the other day, “Were you a punk?” I was there in all those concerts participating, but I never shaved my head or carved a swastika on my forehead. But yeah, I was there. I guess that’s what I wanted to do too — in the book, talk or just have a realistic look at the times I was growing in. There’s moments in there, even though they’re very sedate, that are very horrific to me. To be sitting in a room for four hours listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon get played over and over, and sitting around with a bunch of guys for hours and hours, is horrific to me.
[The full interview will appear in a future installment of The Bat Segundo Show.]
To the person who developed the madly addictive Dwarf Complete, thank you for taking two hours and twenty-six minutes away from my life.
The reports promised snow but prevaricated. My mind marinated. You get that feeling when you are conned into picking away at a slice of red velvet cake because it’s there and you have only poor penmanship instead of an able fork. Never mind culinary sullies. The owl’s snooty hoots belied a ballistic solipsism suggesting the sword was mightier than any midnight rambler. And we were rendered into spittle and drivel hoping that flurry would scurry and leave us with some natural marching power.
Do not attempt this at home. This is an experiment to be carried out in the field.
The mind’s confines are best addressed with cardboard forms of demarcation. One expects lobes to spill but finds an ungracious appreciation for cerebral aerobics. To expand with substance, or to impute that other substances were snorted, is to fall prey to the owl’s howling mantras.
And yet the owl’s maxims mean much to many. An internal stare avoided for fear of the external. The febrile zeal to fit in when best adjudicated by entropy. The enameled mammals flensed their telegenic teeth because this mattered more than a whore. First person prima donnas not comprehending their spending and, worse yet, failing to feel the beats of their hidden hearts in a playground for the rich and a salvo for the stitch. Small wonder that my soul resembled an over-tossed baseball.
Thus, I retreated into gibberish, what they felt was folderol. My sentences became longer and the owl still did not understand them. The owl merely responded to big billboards and bright lights. The owl offered me a script.
“HOO HOO! Say these HOO HOO! words and HOO HOO! you will HOO HOO! be a HOO HOO! success.”
“He was on first,” I replied.
“HOO HOO! Stop that HOO HOO! they’re beginning HOO HOO! to turn away.”
Idle talk amidst the unfulfilled flakes. Damp matches struck sulfur and the owl’s paper package transmuted into a capable conflagration. No one was more surprised than me. There was, after all, the slush.
The owl offered another script. I took it, but the words were the same.
The first time I saw a quadruple jump performed live, I was barely a mile from the house I grew up in. It was December 1995. The Nepean Sportsplex, constructed in 1972, featured rickety rafters, off-kilter air-conditioning and smaller-than-regulation size skating rinks. This was a place designed more for vicious hockey hits than quadruple jumps, but two-time defending world champion Elvis Stojko was in town to compete in the Eastern Nationals, a three-day long competition for skaters determined to qualify for the National Championship. He didn’t have to be there; his decorated status meant he could go straight to Nationals and skip the Sportsplex altogether. But he’d withdrawn from the previous nationals because of an ankle injury suffered during competition practice, fought through the pain to defend his world title, and wanted to show Canada he was fully recovered, sustaining what was an otherwise injury-free career. He was still capable of landing the quad.
The quad looks difficult on a television screen because it reflects the miniscule probability of perfect execution. Figure skaters are taught before they enter primary school to use the sliver-thin length of the skate edge for gliding, spinning and lifting themselves off the ice and landing on one foot. Later comes the most important part of a successful jump: pulling the body into a small center of gravity and rotating one, two, three times at a rate akin to the idling engine speed of a car before landing. The quadruple jump requires a perfect storm of horizontal and vertical displacement, takeoff and landing velocity and angular momentum (the force required to spin so quickly in the air) so that all four revolutions are finished before the skater lands. Stojko had mastered the jump as a teenager, and landed it when it mattered at the 1994 Olympics for a silver medal. He landed it even more convincingly two months later in Chiba, Japan to help him win his first world title.
Any doubts about Stojko’s fitness and quad mastery dissipated in practice. Where before I required a working television to count the setup’s 1-2-3, with the edge change and toe pick deep into the ice just before Stojko pulled his body together for four tightly wound revolutions, leaving me a half second to wonder if he would, in fact, land the jump cleanly on one foot, now I could do so in person. He whipped out quad after quad, sometimes in combination, during the practice sessions. The fans, far fewer than the numbers attending Nationals and later the World Championships in Edmonton, responded with the fervor and noise of a crowd twice its size. Stojko was relaxed, jocular, keeping up a perpetual professional equally adept with wide-eyed kids, sycophantic adults, and me — a teenager trying hard to be too cool for school and failing.
I don’t remember if Stojko landed a quad during either of his programs, but I suspect he did. He would also land many, many more over the years that followed until he finally retired from competitive skating in 2006. But the regional meet in my local backyard signaled a turning point, a time when the quadruple jump moved beyond a risky novelty move into an expectation, even a requirement, for a male figure skater. Women now try quads, though only one, Japan’s Miki Ando, succeeded in 2002. The toe loop and salchow are in the books; the lutz just missed. But with the quadruple jump turning twenty this March, I lament the absence of risk. Or something more. The absence of wonder I felt during the quad’s first decade and a half. Adding more revolutions won’t bring it back.
The quad’s anniversary is arbitrary. Robert Waggenhoffer is but a footnote in American skating history: a young man rumored to have landed quads in practice as early as 1979. “Jumpin’ Joe” Sabovcik, the 1984 Olympic bronze medalist, might have been the first quad hopper had he not brushed his foot on at the European Championships two years later. The year before the Calgary Olympics the papers wondered if “the Battle of the Brians” would not only play out for the gold medal but for the chance to be the first quad king (Orser never bothered in competition; Boitano tried it twice in 1988 and failed.) So Kurt Browning’s attempt at the 1988 World Championships catapulted him into the record books, but years later I’m struck by the tiny margin of error all the way from takeoff to landing. Browning’s timing at the beginning seems a beat or two off; the position is slightly tilted in the air; and the three-turn on the landing is good enough for the books but just imperfect to ensure his seventh place standing. The World Championships and star-making performances would only come later.
The early 1990s brought a few more stragglers to the quad table. Petr Barna. Alexei Urmanov. And then along came Elvis, whose muscular, stocky build allowed him to power through the 1-2-3 of preparation to land them consistently. He’d land them in combination, first with a double toe loop, then with a triple. My favorite was the one at the 1997 Worlds in Lausanne, when Stojko needed to land every possible jump in his arsenal to hold off Todd Eldredge, Ilia Kulik and Alexei Yagudin. His competitors’ miscues helped, but so did the quad-triple, a combination so brilliantly executed there could be no question he would land each portion perfectly.
Kulik would have a similar flawless program, quad and all, the following year to claim Olympic gold in his first try. Yagudin’s 2002 Olympic gold long program also had a glorious quadruple toe. Where Elvis’s quads were muscular, Kulik’s, and later Yagudin’s, seemed to float, aim higher instead of further along the ice rink. I can watch routines by each of these men so many years after the fact and still feel their jumps, and especially their quads, shot through with a mixture of fear and hubris. Fear because the audience was never quite sure if they would be landed; hubris because deep down, we knew they would – and even if we were wrong once, we wouldn’t be wrong the next time.
It’s no accident I stopped following figure skating around the time the quad became commonplace. Michael Weiss’s endless blathering about landing the quadruple lutz only seemed to highlight how weak his overall ability was. Timothy Goebel may have landed three quads in one program, but that came after many, many misses, cheats and ugly looking rotations and landings. But perhaps the fault lies with 2006 Olympic champion Evgeni Plushenko. He landed so many (well over 100), sometimes in combination, sometimes not, making the jump look so easy that it had the net effect of a triple. But none of those quads had a sense of joy; they pulled inward instead of reaching out.
Plushenko’s quad mastery also signaled an end to the era of technical upward mobility. For years, the mantra in skating has been more: more revolutions, more height, more distance, more difficulty. But human bodies are only capable of rotating so many times like dizzy spinning counter tops, of bending the laws of physics enough to land one-footed on a tiny gliding blade. Twenty years of quadruple jumps points to an uncertain future that mirrors that of figure skating as a whole. Fewer people are watching the slim pickings of skater personalities, and the prospects for the 2010 Olympics seem paltry. Instead of making me look forward to the current and next generations of jumpers, wondering if they will turn flips, lutzes and axels into quadruples and beyond, today’s quads inspire a backwards approach. Now I scour YouTube for clips, searching for shards of a time when the jump was special.
When there was still some joy in quadville.