Book review: ‘Paying for It’ by Chester Brown

October 14, 2011 Leave a Comment

In June of 1996, cartoonist Chester Brown’s girlfriend Sook-Yin — who would be his last girlfriend — admitted she had fallen in love with another man. She wanted to see how things would play out with this drummer and talked it out with Brown, who encouraged her to give it a shot. He continues to live with her and consider things like romantic love and committed relationships. He develops a solid case for being anti hearts and flowers.“… There were only three reasons why I wanted to have girlfriends,” he tells a platonic friend in the beginning of his book Paying for It. “One: because it’s socially expected — guys who don’t have girlfriends are considered to be losers. Two: I liked the ego boost of having a woman who wants to have that sort of exclusive relationship with me. And three: sex.”

When his friend suggests that he engage in one-night stands, he tells her: “I don’t have the social skills necessary to pick up women for casual sex.”

This is undoubtedly true.

Brown’s graphic memoir is about his transition into becoming an unflinching john who decides in 1999 that his human need for love is satiated by family and friends and that his human need for sex can be satiated by soliciting the prostitutes or escorts he sees advertised online and in publications. His story includes the women he meets with and his philosophical debates with his friends over the morality of his lifestyle and the legitimacy the profession and whether it should be legalized or regulated.

He meets dozens of women and each is disguised in the pages with fake names and no identifying characteristics. He learns that he dislikes fake breasts, worries that some of the women aren’t legitimately 18 years old and that sometimes he has to request a condom before they perform oral sex. He also has conversations about American history and the series of life events that landed the escort face first in his lap. Some he sees consistently, including one who is his favorite until the sex suddenly begins to feel empty and he moves on. With some he discusses his work as a cartoonist and he starts using his real name when he makes appointments.

Plenty of the spare panels feature a stick-ishly limbed Brown joined missionary style to an anonymous woman. Others feature him naked and flaccid, having pleasant post-coital conversations. His intent is obviously not to titillate, but to provide a journalistic series of first-hand experiences.

Brown is hyper self-aware, at times acting like his own analyst. When Sook-Yin finally asks him to move out of their shared space so that she can live with her boyfriend, Brown sits around, a stickish figure in tighty whities acknowledging that he feels depressed. Then he realizes that he has just had a brief glimmer of happiness, so he backtracks to the root of the upswing: Where had his thoughts strayed that brought on that feeling? Ah. An image of sitting up in his own bed in his own home reading. And with that he has worked through his sadness and exorcised it. Plus: Now he can invite the prostitutes into his own home.

Brown is a little prickly. A friend in the afterward describes him as “robotic.” He knows himself and understands human emotions — although he doesn’t really subscribe to them. Jealousy, he tells a friend who questions how he continues to live with Sook-Yin, is a learned behavior. He simply doesn’t feel it. There are plenty of character traits that are anti-social, including his admittance that a 28-year-old woman who greets him at the door is older than what he was looking for. He also sneak attacks friends by starting debates about prostitution, specifically issues he has clearly given much thought to. They don’t stand a chance against his fine-tuned arguments. On the other hand, much of what he is saying makes sense. Relationships are not necessarily the cure-all for a person looking for happiness. And what is wrong with a scenario in which a person wants to have sex and another person consents to sell it to him/her — with the inclusion of personal guidelines like no kissing or oral sex. The last faction of the book includes further arguments in favor of legalizing prostitution and notes that build on things that appear in the panels. This part gets to be a little much, but is consistent with Brown’s very clinical style of presenting the most 100 percent thorough argument he can give.

This review was published on Minnesota Reads on August 28, 2011.

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Daily: Joe Mauer sighting

August 21, 2011 Leave a Comment

By Christa Lawler
Duluth News Tribune

 Joe Mauer’s putt stopped inches from the hole on No. 18 at Northland Country Club. The Minnesota Twins star took a gimme.
“Someone should tend the flag for him,” a woman remarked from the veranda.
Mauer, a four-time American League all-star and 2009 AL
Most Valuable Player, has spent part of Major League Baseball’s All-Star break in Duluth. The Minnesota native, who grew up in St. Paul, said Tuesday it’s his first trip to the area.
Mauer made his comments Tuesday evening in an impromptu media moment as he finished a round with a woman he would identify only as his girlfriend. Buzz around town suggested the woman was a schoolmate of Mauer’s at Cretin-Derham Hall in St. Paul and also had attended the University of Minnesota Duluth, but Mauer would not confirm that.
He also did not discuss his performance on the greens.
“I didn’t try to keep score,” Mauer said. “I’m just trying to relax. Trying to lay low. I guess that didn’t work out too well.”
The local Twitter contingent posted Mauer sightings starting with Burrito Union, where he had stopped for lunch (he had two chicken tacos, according to the staff). He was allegedly spotted at a handful of locations: Portland Malt Shoppe, Sir Benedict’s, Hawk’s Ridge.
Word spread quickly that Mauer was at Northland Country Club. About a dozen teenage boys, the course’s staff members, ejected trespassers from the parking lot and along the course. They had kicked out about 20 people, mostly boys and a few girls, they said. But that didn’t mean they weren’t a little giddy about catching a glimpse of the athlete.
Bag boy Zach McKinnon worked up a little ditty about it, which got equal parts laughs and groans from his friends:
“Here at Northland, it’s not amateur hour, it’s Mauer hour.”
“We’re just going to act a little normal and get some autographs hopefully,” McKinnon added.
Michael O’Connor, whose father Joe O’Connor is the pro at the private course, admitted it probably isn’t the most fair thing in the world, but he got to shake Mauer’s hand.
“He’s a Minnesota boy,” Michael O’Connor said. “Humble, great guy. He was wearing his golf glove when we shook hands.”
By the time Mauer got to No. 17, pockets of gawkers had gathered. Women from around the state playing in the Northland Women’s Invitational hung out on the veranda with cameras aimed in Mauer’s direction.
“We came off on the 18th hole and he was teeing off,” said Robin Stewart, a golfer from the Twin Cities area. “It was good. I heard some guys from the pro shop saying Oh, that was a beautiful fade.’”
Paige Bromen was on the driving range with Mauer, who was getting a lot of attention.
“I just let him do his thing,” she said. “I was working out my own kinks.”
After No. 18, Mauer’s girlfriend drove off with the cart. He walked up the grass toward media and fans wearing a light blue and white mesh baseball cap, sunglasses, a white collared shirt, khaki shorts and Nike shoes.
“I wasn’t expecting this,” he said of the crowd and cameras.
Mauer said he doesn’t golf much and when he does it’s in Florida. He said he liked the different elevations of Northland Country Club. He took some photographs on the course with his Nikon.
He greeted fans, signed autographs and posed for photographs.
“I’m shaking,” said Amy Loftsuen.
“We were just eating dinner,” she said making air quotes around the words “eating dinner.” This was no coincidence: She and her friend Alix Hyduke had heard Mauer was at the club.
Kyle Chmielecki, a caddy, just happened to be wearing his Twins cap and got it signed.
“I’m never washing my hand again because Joe Mauer shook it,” he said.


This story ran in the July 13, 2011 edition of the Duluth News Tribune.

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Music review: Trace Adkins concert

August 21, 2011 Leave a Comment

By Christa Lawler
Duluth News Tribune

Trace Adkins doesn’t write his own songs. He doesn’t move much on stage. He had a guitar that he didn’t hold much, and when he did he just fiddled.
But the country singer has a amassed a collection of hit songs – keg-glass and heck-raising tunes and nostalgia soundtracks – that fans in sleeveless shirts, cowboy hats and calf-high boots want to whoop to. He also has a body like a roadhouse bouncer and a voice so deep it sounds like a record being played a setting too slow.
The star who busted into the scene in the mid-1990s played a
90-minute show for about 3,200 fans on about the best summer night one could ask for at Bayfront Festival Park.
Adkins opened the show with “Whoop a Man’s Ass,” standing center stage in tight black jeans, a tight blue shirt and a black cowboy hat with a long ponytail hanging down his back. While he sang, videos for his songs – some that
appeared on the likes of CMT, some that seemed special to the tour – played on a screen behind him. His band was pushed to the back and sides of the stage.
On “Marry for Money” and “Chrome,” he showed off his growl, hitting bassoon-level depths.
“You’re Gonna Miss This” drew the most amateur video, with tons of cell phones trained on the singer as he sang the slow carpe diem ballad.
He sang “Just Fishin’,” the first single from the album “Proud to be Here,” which comes out on Tuesday. He pointed at the screen and told the audience that his young daughter stars in the heart-tugger about a daddy and his little girl.
Adkins hit his peak toward the end of the show with a cover from the song “How Long,” a hit from the 1970s by Ace. He took his hat off, let his hair down, and rather than stoic guy manning the door seemed taken with the lyrics, his arms raised, pitching forward and back.
. He stayed in that mood for “One in a Million,” a song made popular by Lou Rawls.
In an interview last week, Adkins attributed the longevity of his career to surrounding himself by people who really know what they are doing.
He’s also got good instincts. Adkins closed the show with the C&W response to “Baby Got Back.”
“Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” was introduced as a love song, included strobe lights and had the audience on their feet and singing the chorus.
He sang “Dirty White Boy” for his encore, which didn’t quite match the fervor of “Badonkadonk.”
Relative newbie Glen Templeton opened, a Nashville singer who has made inroads with his ability to channel Conway Twitty. Twitty’s relatives approached Templeton about playing the country legend in a traveling musical a few years ago. Templeton included a mini montage in his hourlong set, taking his vocals a little lower and ramping up his growl for bits of “Slow Hand” and “Don’t Take it Away.”
Templeton, a Cobain-blond in mirrored sunglasses, played Southern rock songs from his debut studio album “GT.” He mixed in an eclectic handful of covers, including “Interstate Love Song,” which worked, “Every Rose Has its Thorn,” which worked better, and Sublime’s “Santaria,” which was clunky and sounded more like a favored song for shower karaoke.

This review ran in the July 30, 2011 edition of the Duluth News Tribune.

 

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Music review: Willie Nelson concert

August 21, 2011 Leave a Comment

By Christa Lawler
Duluth News Tribune

After Willie Nelson had surgery for carpal tunnel a few years ago, his doctor told him to go home and shut up, the gray-braided country music icon told his audience Saturday night at Bayfront Festival Park.
“So I wrote this song,” he said, leading into “Superman” – a song about trying to do more than he can and learning that he ain’t Clark Kent’s alter ego.
The old man didn’t make much of a case for himself. Nelson ripped through about 30 songs – one bleeding immediately into another with rarely any chatter – during a 90-minute set that ended with him calling out “Thank y’all” and leaving at the back of the stage.

   OK, so maybe Superman would have had an encore. How about Superman-ish? After all, on Friday night the 78-year-old was on the stage at We Fest near Detroit Lakes, Minn., and he’s got five more shows this week.
Nelson took the stage unceremoniously. All of a sudden he was just there, a short figure dressed in a black cowboy hat, black shirt and black pants with a red, white and blue guitar strap. His signature hair braided to just below his collarbone, shorter than in years past. Recordings of his songs had been playing in the park before the show started, and kicked in again afterward.
He stayed true to the Willie-isms that fans have come to expect with his shows: Opening with “Whiskey River,” a Texas flag as his backdrop, tossing red bandanas into the crowd and trying on the cowboy hats that were tossed on stage. He pointed at the audience and he pointed at the sky and occasionally broke out into a big grin.
Nelson took plenty of solos on his guitar, ripping away at it like there was something hidden inside.
He filled the middle of the set with a string of hits: “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” “On the Road Again” and “Always on My Mind.”
Nelson didn’t seem to have a target demographic among the estimated 7,000 people who were at the show. There were baby boomers on up and Gen X on down.
There were glowing hula hoops and children dancing. There were barefoot women in long skirts spinning in the grass and plenty of bandanas knotted around heads. Some fans sat on blankets or chairs while others pushed against white barriers in a pack.
Nelson closed the show with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “I Saw the Light,” which his band continued to play long after he was likely tucked into his tour bus.
Minneapolis band 4onthefloor opened in the early evening, playing about an hourlong set of bluesy music defined by four bass drums.
They were followed by hometown-bred Trampled by Turtles, who finally played a show where no one had to be turned away at the door. The speedgrass band’s past two concerts here have sold out.
Fans at stage left were distracted midway through the hourlong set when a decidedly Willie-looking tour bus, airbrushed with a cowboy theme, rolled into the parking lot behind the stage.
After closing with  fan-favorite “Wait so Long,” Trampled by Turtles answered the call for an encore with “Codeine.”


This review ran in the August 11, 2011 edition of the Duluth News Tribune.

 

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Feature: Gabe Mayfield, local actor

August 21, 2011 Leave a Comment

By Christa Lawler
Duluth News Tribune

Gabe Mayfield knows what it takes to get into the head of a blood-thirsty alien plant bent on world domination. It takes studying cartoons and listening to Motown. It requires Southern slang and a touch of James Brown.
The local actor plays the voice of the vicious plant Audrey II for the fourth time in his 11-year acting career in a production of “Little Shop of Horrors” that opens at 7:30 p.m. today at the Play Ground.
The musical by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman is the story of a nerdy orphan named Seymour who works in a forgotten plant shop in a rundown neighborhood. He’s got a crush on a woman named Audrey and he’s got a plant named Audrey II that thrives on human blood, which helps it grow larger and attracts attention to the shop.
Then Audrey II’s thirst gets too huge to handle.
Mayfield’s first theater role was Audrey II in a 2000 production at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. He was tapped by longtime drama professor and director John Munsell for the part.
The young actor drew comparisons to Levi Stubbs, a baritone from the Four Tops, who was the voice of the plant in the 1980s film adaptation.
And some audience members thought Munsell was pulling a scam.
“Someone actually accused me of using the soundtrack to the Broadway musical just for Gabe’s songs because it was so obviously just a great voice,” Munsell said.
Mayfield landed the role again in 2005 in a production at the Duluth Playhouse directed by Linda Bruning. A News Tribune reviewer said the actor deserved kudos for “his soulful interpretation.”
When Munsell was asked to
direct “Little Shop of Horrors”
for the Black Hills Playhouse in South Dakota last summer, he told theater staff to cancel the search for Audrey II.
“I said, Don’t bother to cast anybody,’” Munsell said. He brought in Mayfield to reprise the role.
The show at the Play Ground was initiated by a group of friends, stage regulars who hand-picked fellow actors and then brought in Michelle Juntunen to direct her first musical. Mayfield has added plenty of ideas on execution, knowing the musical completely.
“He came into the first read-through and didn’t even have a script,” she said.
Mayfield has pushed the show in a darker horror direction, less campy. He said he tries to keep his character classic and true to the film version, adding a little Ray Charles to the mix, including a Southern slang accent. He has listened to the Temptations, James Brown and the exaggerated cartoon-style of Mother Brain from “Captain Nintendo.”
“I’m working on making the lines fit and sound more real than before,” he said. “I try to add levels to the dialogue.”
After this show, Mayfield plans to sit out a few rounds of local theater. Last season included parts in the Playhouse’s “Chicago,” Lyric Opera of the North’s production of “Amahl and the Night Visitors” and Renegade Theater Company’s “Parade.”
But he’s not necessarily done with “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Mayfield said he would like to direct it professionally and he would like to play Audrey II in a remake of the film. He would also like to play the part of the dentist. This is, after all, his favorite show.
“It’s fun,” he said. “It’s like all musicals wrapped up into one. You’ve got everything. The best part is that it takes music from the Motown era, they use some rock ‘n’ and roll and things like that. It’s mainly the music I love the most.”
Meanwhile, Munsell might be the maker of the plant, but he said he doesn’t know if he wants to see this version of Audrey II.
“I don’t know that I want anything but the memory of the last time I saw him,” he said. “It was absolutely perfect.”

This story ran in the August 11, 2011 edition of the Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune.

 

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