Hasta La Gadget!

After the apocalypse, riding a Simpsons episode into the future.

Photos by Kevin Berne

Humans have passed hours sitting around campfires and swapping stories as long as they have known how to make fires and grunt. OK, I can’t prove that but I challenge anyone to disprove it. So what could possibly be special about a fireside bull session driven by efforts to recall people and events that might have some meaning to everyone in earshot?

In Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, that sort of al fresco gathering, deep in a Northern California forest, is special. For seven strangers, survivors of a catastrophe that shattered the world they knew, it opens doors to the future by revealing aspects of the past: fragments of shared knowledge and experience.

Their common thread — which they follow to bizarre and hilarious ends — is The Simpsons. Memories of recalled episodes provide not only grist for conversation but also direction and meaning to uprooted lives. Considering the place of TV in contemporary America and the fact that Matt Groening’s animated satire is still going strong in its 26th year, finding a better touchstone would be difficult.

A sellout in its New York premiere in 2013, Washburn’s dark comedy is receiving rollicking treatment from American Conservatory Theater in the Geary. The production was mounted jointly by ACT and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where it will move in late March.

Ryan Williams French (left) and Jim Lichtscheidl, Charity Jones and Anna Ishida rehearse a well-known episode from The Simpsons.

Although the setting is apocalyptic, Mr. Burns offers only a scant and tentative glimpse at the disaster that brought the group together. It involved, among other things, a nuclear meltdown that destroyed the nation’s electric grid, and presumably similar grids all across the world. There was no going back.

What matters for these survivors is the need to preserve and hand down something of their shared history, connecting generation to generation. They can do it only through the spoken word, a medium that is not anchored in stone or printed volumes. It evolves.

The show’s three acts span 82 years, long enough for shards of remembered tales to grow a life of their own, adding and transforming elements while retaining enough of their source to remain recognizable. I don’t know whether any Simpsons episode ever lifted tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado but it surfaces hilariously here, as do slivers of commercials for chablis and Diet Coke, among others.

In the fireside give-and-take, memories are fuzzy and script lines may be shaky, but the response is ecstatic when someone hits on the actual words and their source. The past, after all, must be carried forward with accuracy.

By Act Two, seven years later, the group has become one of many troupes of storytellers competing for audiences, and lines have assumed a life of their own as commodities to be bought and sold, usable only by their owners.

Andrea Wollenberg narrates a staging of The Simpsons’ ‘Cape Feare.’

Seventy-five years later, in ACT Three, storytelling has become a polished theatrical art, displayed here by familiar characters in a narrative that blends whimsy with homicidal melodrama. It’s The Simpsons, re-created darkly.

Washburn’s inventive antics are delivered with vigor and tonal variety by a no-star cast of eight: Nick Gabriel, Anna Ishida, Kelsey Venter, Ryan Williams French, Charity Jones, Jim Lichtscheidl, Tracey A. Leigh and Andrea Wollenberg. Wollenberg doubles as an offstage instrumentalist and impressive on-stage singer, and David Möschler provides expert instrumental support. Michael Friedman composed the wide-ranging score and Washburn added the lyrics. Mark Rucker directed.

The three acts (staged with one intermission) take place in very different venues — a dense forest, a graffiti-spattered industrial building and a brightly cartoonish houseboat — all beautifully realized by Ralph Funicello. Alex Jaeger did the costumes, in styles that range from contemporary streetwear to gaudy apparel and wigs straight out of The Simpsons.

Being reasonably familiar with the TV series will certainly let a viewer pick up nuances that went over my head, and I’m sure over many others, but you don’t have to be a Simpsons addict to appreciate the delights of Mr. Burns. It sizzles.

Mr. Burns, a post-electric play runs through March 15 at American Conservatory Theater’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco.Tickets are $20-$120, from 415-749-2228 or www.act-sf.org.

I knew it was coming.

I’d steeled myself for grim news when I read earlier in the week that he’d been admitted to a hospital due to chest pains, but that didn’t make it any less of a gut punch to actually see the headline that Leonard Nimoy, 83, was gone.

This one hurts for a variety of reasons. The older you get, the more aware you become of the immutable passage of time. Your own mortality starts feeling more starkly pronounced, as does that of the people close to you, and the people you admire. Certainly Nimoy falls into that latter camp. While he amassed a raft of impressive accomplishments during his many years in and out of the film industry, it’s of course for his pointy-eared alter ego as the original Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock, such an indelible part of so many of our lives, that he’ll rightly be remembered, in death just as he was in life.

With Spock, the dispassionate, half-human, half-Vulcan officer who manned the science station on the U.S.S. Enterprise, Nimoy found the kind of character performers both clamor for and disdain (often at the same time). He assured himself a place of permanence in the pop culture conversation while also chaining himself to that role forever and always. And while he attempted to branch out in other directions following Trek‘s cancellation in 1969 (including a two-season stint as “The Great Paris” on TV’s Mission: Impossible), it wasn’t long before Spock came calling once again, and Nimoy answered.

While reticent at first (he even wrote an autobiography in the early ’70s with the pointed title I Am Not Spock), the actor did reprise his role for the Trek animated show, and eventually returned with the rest of the crew for 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which in turn launched a string of five movie sequels over the next twelve years (three of which Nimoy himself was intimately involved with shaping). By the end of that run, which included a guest shot on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Nimoy had long since come to be viewed by many (including the late Trek creator Gene Roddenberry himself), as “the conscience of Star Trek.” And indeed he was.

By all accounts a gregarious and self-effacing guy, Nimoy nonetheless took his role, his work, and his fans seriously, and he was beloved right back as a result. Despite some early headaches in the post-TV, pre-movie Trek era thanks to typecasting, it’s plain to see that the franchise gave Nimoy far more than it ever took from him. (His second bio, from the mid-’90s, seemed to reflect his own acknowledgment of this fact, bearing the amended title I Am Spock.) Indeed, from the ’60s right up to his death, he never stopped working, including a particularly memorable (to me) voiceover, and directing the hit comedy Three Men and a Baby in 1987.

More than that, he was also the perfect point man to help pass the torch of the original Trek crew to its new iteration via his key role in 2009’s J.J. Abrams-helmed Star Trek reboot, which gave us this memorable moment between the two Spocks. By itself that would have been fitting enough goodbye, but they found a way to include him in 2013’s sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness as well. At the time, I thought Nimoy’s cameo there was reflective of lazy writing more than anything else. But looking at it now, I view it as a little gift from the filmmakers to us. One final chance to spend some too-fleeting moments with an actor and character we loved so much.

For the perfect perspective on his passing, here’s Leonard Nimoy’s final tweet, from five days ago. LLAP indeed, Mr. Nimoy. Thanks for giving us so many perfect moments for our memories.

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP

— Leonard Nimoy (@TheRealNimoy) February 23, 2015

I never see beauty. It is foreign to me and if even I could glimpse it, it would only be in recognition of a struggle gone cold, soon to be discarded as I move on. No satisfaction taken: a corpse kicked to the curb. It’s about not knowing how to live, thats what painting is, what is performance, and coming with it, a whole lot of heartbreak.

– Wesley Kimler

Wesley Kimler’s Chicago studio

Wesley Kimler, one of the last tough-guy painters, likes his studio chaotic. It’s a kind of parallel universe, which suits Kimler fine, since he acknowledges that he has “an inability to live in the real world.” Painting furiously, with some of his six exotic birds screeching as he works, Kimler is prone to 48 hours binges and also to re-working “finished” works. Kimler’s most recent paintings have themes about war, and he also sees the creative process as a form of destruction. Still, he is clear about why he does what he does: “I make beautiful things for other people.”

I recently interviewed Wesley Kimler and asked him to tell me a few stories, and share some of his opinions about art and artists.

Wesley Kimler: Photo by Amina Dollah Kimler

John Seed Interviews Wesley Kimler

JS: So, tell me about this tough childhood of yours…

WK: I left home at 14: I was on the run.

I was looking to get out of a bad situation at home and I just had to get away from where I was. As far as what I was looking for, I suppose I lacked intent — it was kind of like being shot from gun — I had run away so many times that when I finally got caught and went in front of a judge he said:

“Either you get into some kind of military boarding school or we are going to put you in one of our schools.”

My hero at the time was the character Paul Newman played in Cool Hand Luke, so, I said “Yes sir, judge,” went home, found 22 dollars, got on a Greyhound bus and never went back. I grew up in the south of Market area of San Francisco, which at the time was a sizable area of downtown. It was a derelict district full of large dilapidated SRO hotels. I lived in them all at one point or another. I was a street kid.

Wesley Kimler: Photo by Amina Dollah Kimler

JS: How did you get through all this?

WK: One of the things that saved me and taught me how to survive is that I ended up being arrested with a small amount of pot, and even though I was underage I lied my way through two months of incarceration in San Francisco city and the county jail. My alias was “John Russell,” from another Paul Newman film: Hombre.

Hey Hoooombre: you have put a hole in me!

I had to grow up pretty suddenly to survive that: afterwards the streets were a piece of cake. I was the prince of my domain, which consisted of all of south of Market between Third and Sixth Street. I remember stepping over the drunken winos, and being used to everything smelling of stale booze and vomit from one dusty hotel room to another as I could scrounge up the means. Of course, I was secure in knowing if I couldn’t find some money on any given day, there was always Saint Anthony’s Kitchen over in The Tenderloin district for stale donuts and watery beans.

Untitled

JS: So this all left you toughened up, and ready to move to Afghanistan, right?

WK: Well… yes! By the time I was 20 years old I was living in Afghanistan keeping apartments there in Kabul, Herat and Kandahar: I was working for an importer. I gotta say, it did get pretty out of control wild at times.

Afghanistan back then was like an eleventh century version of the Wild West. Living there was my real education — my university you might say — and graduating meant you didn’t get yourself killed. I was still 20 (maybe 21) years old when I had to take a gun away from a man and kidnap him. I dragged his ass across Afghanistan and held him for ransom until he and his family coughed up the money they had stolen from the man I worked for. Just that one story is a would make a nice feature article someday for the Huffington Post…

The whole episode culminated on the dusty streets of Heart, Afghanistan, with me taking on this guy and his family and then the both of us being carted off to the Herat prison — where fortunately the Turkish sergeant liked how kind of tough and hell or high-water I was — and took up my cause. Abdul Awaz went to jail and I went free: a good thing as at that point they still had balls and chains for the prisoners.

Afghan Kite

JS: Wesley, I’m betting that a single article would barely scratch the surface. Give me one more good story and then we’ll talk about art.

WK: I have always carried with me the images of my last afternoon in Afghanistan, as they reverberate and resonate through my life to this day. I was leaving with mixed emotions: I so loved the place and I had been there a long time. Anyways, I was traveling in the back of a lorry with 20-25 Pathans (Afghans) going through the gun turreted no-man’s land lunar landscape of the Khyber Pass. It’s a tribal area and you can only travel through their during the day.

Well, there was one Americanized lost soul of an Afghan who had been to a university here and of course he decided to adopt me as his ally/fellow sophisticate, in this truckload of illiterates. On and on he went about his backwards fellow countrymen: he was of course dressed in a suit, so proud of his university education. He didn’t seem to get that I was dressed like everyone else in the truck that perhaps my sympathies were not 100% with him.

Anyways, we pulled up at the edge of a muddy gulch where a chai shop had been dug back into a cliff and I sat there and watched this man, child in his arms, black turban double rows of bullets crossing his chest, rifles slung on his back and then turned to his father — his reverse image wearing a white turban — and we spoke. I told them both how much I loved their country and how I had learned so much how much I didn’t want to leave. Anyways, the old man got up, motioned to me C’mon and the three of us went in the back where there was a large hookah sitting there.

The black turbanned dude put some hashish in the pipe and his father admonished him: Don’t be so cheap! Put a bigger chunk! Next, a hot coal was placed over the now larger chunk of hashish and we commenced smoking. It was strong, very strong, and I started coughing. At which point the Americanized Afghan burst into the room yelling: ‘Mister, mister! don’t do that ! It will make you crazy!

In response, the old man pointed to the door and replied:

“Burro baha’i! (Go by god!) This young man is more of an Afghan than you will ever be.”

That remains, to this day the greatest compliment, I’ve ever received. It was the moment when I first considered the inherent dichotomy of the self-realized individual as opposed to the university driven generic.

Works on paper in progress

JS: As a university driven generic I need to think about that Wesley, but you tell a great story. Now tell me what happened next when you got back to the states.

WK: I started painting upon my returning from Afghanistan. I moved to Austin Texas where my formal studies began at Laguna Gloria School of Art. I painted with the little old ladies who were busy painting grandson Johnny or a niece and nephew’s portrait. The little old ladies were for the most part badasses. I painted portraits, seascapes and still lifes. And yes, even then the comments were always along the lines of “There is something different about your work Wesley. You are going to go do something larger than this place.”

Funny enough when I went to a regular art school (MCAD) everyone was like WHERE did you learn to paint like that? With the little old ladies is where…

Untitled (Seascape)

JS: How did you get your nickname: “The Shark”?

WK: You bring up my old alter ego ‘The Shark,’ which I employed while being the leader/mascot /driving force behind Shark Forum blogsite here in Chicago. Shark Forum served multiple purposes: first it was a weapon I used to attack institutional hackademic art world apparatchiks that run rough roughshod over the Chicago scene emanating from the art education system. Primarily at this point in time, SAIC. The Shark, swam in a cesspool of institutionalized corruption pushing academic conformity/ mediocrity.

War, Kite Flyers: for Shannon, 2015, 9 x18 feet, alkyd resin on canvas

JS: So you have some pretty stinging things to say about the Chicago art scene…

WK: Of course Chicago can surely be seen as metaphor for the toweringly stupid art world of the moment. Its such a sea of shit awash in massive piles of stupid money: where to begin taking on this dystopia?

Wesley Kimler: Photo by Amina Dollah Kimler

JS: What about New York?

WK: Look at The Forever Now exhibition now on view at MOMA in New York: not a good painter in sight. Much has been written about how bad it is. As Christian Viveros-Faune noted, it should be called Forever Sucks But then everyone is using the pejorative term Walter Robinson coined — Zombie Formalism — which is great.

In NYC we are looking at massive decline and a whole power structure in place: holding the reins, clinging to power. As far as critics go, I like Jerry Saltz quite a lot. He is a good man and in ways the equivalent H.L. Mencken of today’s art world. That doesn’t mean he knows anything about painting. I am convinced actually, he wouldn’t know a good painting if it came up and bit him on the ass. The problem is that he’s not alone!

Operation: Foragers (Admiral Raymond Spruance), 2015
12 x9 feet, alkyd resin on canvas

JS: Who are your artist heroes?

WK: As a kid I would wander through the old Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and scratch my head at those strange David Park paintings. Even after a few years of art school I was far more interested in the Bay Area Funk scene — Roy De Forrest with his psychedelic dogs — and then I changed and started seeing the way I see even now. I love early Joan Brown and her work became very important to me: also Diebenkorn, early Paul Wonner and Frank Lobdell. But first and foremost is David Park.

I like a wide range of painting going back in history: what serious painter doesn’t? Titian was good…

I think we can ixnay the lower strata of Impressionism and revisit Gerome and Messionier: some revisionism might be in order there. Malcolm Morley I have always liked the whole London school: particularly Kossoff. My friend Don Suggs is a brilliant painter as is another pal Ashley Bickerton.

Mark Dutcher and I have become fast friends: he is a wonderful painter who is just now unfolding. Ed Moses is a dear friend and hero of mine for sure both as a painter and as a man. And of course Joan Mitchell and de Kooning are important to me, but so is Lee Bontecou.

The Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard is doing interesting work.

Studio View

JS: What would you say is the situation of painting right now?

WK: There is all kinds of art and all kinds of painting. No matter your preference, there are good versions and bad versions. The trouble is that in this age of visual illiteracy, the people in power are clueless as to the difference.

I’ll admit it. Deep down, this week’s headlines left me questioning whether I know something’s racist or not. Or, how can I tell if someone’s insane? Even saints are in question. This week’s headlines focused on the American Sniper trial, Solange Knowles’ hair and Mother Teresa’s intentions.

Do intentions or the results of one’s actions matter to what’s considered racist, insane or just? I’m going to explore this with you. First some reflections from my own life.

Last year I was on a cruise with friends and the guy sitting two rows up on the ferry boat to the island had a woman’s hose wrapped around his stellar dreadlocks. At first, I couldn’t tell what was wrapping his hair. But when I sat behind him, there was no doubt. It was the little white diamond ubiquitous in all women’s undergarments. I elbowed my companions to surreptitiously look.

“It’s a woman’s panty hose.” I tapped my bestie’s arm and snickered. Overhearing me, my husband turned sharply and in Tosh.O humor asked me, “Is it racist?”

I was embarrassed. Just like Seinfeld’s comedic line, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” when referring to homosexual behavior, “Is it racist,” has become the new tagline to uncomfortable words ushered between people.

But, was it racist? Or was I pointing out interesting fashion to my cruise ship gal pal?

I’ve been reflecting on this moment in my life as I watch the heat surround Fashion Police. Everyone is voicing their very strong opinions on whether or not Giuliana Rancic’s comment, “She looks like she smells like patchouli oil… or weed” is racist or not.

First of all. Racist card aside, talking about women’s hair is always a downward spiral. Is it not? It’s like talking about women’s age. Just don’t. Mama always taught you that’s not polite.

This whole conversation comes during the week after the Academy Awards issued Oscars to deserving artists last Sunday. Many of us feel deeply connected to the process because we’ve fallen in love with the movies and the people bringing them to us. As a human race, we’ve always loved our entertainers and through the centuries people in the public eye help us make sense of our lives.

One such artist, Patricia Arquette, made an impassioned plea for wage equality after winning best supporting actress. Later she was slammed for not including other minorities. The bravery of these public people help the rest of us make sense about our own human experience.

I treasure this intersection of public and private stories in our society. It’s why I chose to become a publicist. The stories we share both privately and publicly form the world we live in. Words do matter. Words do make something racist or not. Insane or not. Just or not.

Words make us human.

Another movie in the Oscar limelight is American Sniper and while it reportedly ‘misfired’ at the Oscars, it’s a fan-favorite partly because we’re all glued to our news feeds wondering if the man who killed our beloved hero, Chris Kyle, was actually insane or not. A jury chose this week to convict of murder, publicly saying Kyle’s killer, Eddie Ray Routh, knew right from wrong. The troubled ex-Marine was sentenced to life.

Think about how many times in your life you or a friend of yours casually uttered, “That’s insane.” Was it really insane? Or were they just words?

My aha moment this week is about how my words shape my world. I am reflecting on my words. A lot. I know I am committed to a healthy world, free from as much insanity as possible. A world where racism is abolished. A world where saintly deeds are received in gratitude regardless of the person’s intentions. What fueled Mother Teresa was love. Did her religious motives negate that?

Giuliana Rancic’s apologies are filled with messaging around “intentions” versus “results” clarifying that while her intentions were never meant to be racist, people heard it that way. That’s the biggest aha of the week, my friends. Your words create a world in the people listening to you. What world are you creating? Is it racist? Is it insane? Is it just? My dad, may he rest in peace, always said, “Michelle, think before you speak.” Now, he was just praying that I had some common sense thinking behind my words. Dad, I’m upping the ante. Before speaking, I want to consider the world I’m creating as my audience listens. Maybe you will too now.

Aha! How do you create your art of aha? Tell me here.

Astronomers have known about these objects for decades, but in the depths of cosmic time, it’s hard to understand how they can grow so quickly — or maybe not!

Thanks to the painstaking research conducted by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope in the 1990s, the consensus is that virtually all large galaxies have at their centers massive black holes that formed over the course of billions of years. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has one of these massive beasts, whose mass is about 3 million times that of the Sun. The monster black hole at the center of the giant galaxy NGC 4889 has a mass that’s estimated to be 20 billion times that of the Sun. And this galaxy is right in our cosmic neighborhood, only about 300 million light-years from the Sun!

NGC 4889 (Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey)

Let me give you a better perspective on what a black hole looks like. The radius of a simple black hole (nonrotating) is about 2.8 kilometers for every solar mass it contains. This defines the radius of its event horizon. Once inside the event horizon, you are dead meat in a matter of a millisecond. You cannot escape the intense gravity, and even worse, spacetime itself is in perpetual collapse, so there are no stable orbits. Your only destiny is to get snuffed out by the singularity. But because of the gravitational tides, you will be stretched out into an atomic tube of spaghetti long before you get this close. The gravity is lethal at a distance of 1,000 kilometers!

If the supermassive black hole in NGC 4889 were located where the Sun is, its event horizon would be 56 billion kilometers away — far beyond the orbit of Pluto! The gravity tides are so weak you would not even feel that you had crossed over the event horizon until it was too late. Then your destiny would still be to collide with the singularity after a few hours of uncontrollable travel.

We know that black holes constantly gain more mass as they absorb surrounding gas, dust, planets, and even stars. The Milky Way’s black hole just tried to feast on a cloud of gas in 2013.

Computer simulation of the 2013 event (Credit: ESO/MPE/Marc Schartmann)

This event produced hardly a blip in the light and radiation emitted from this region of space. But when a black hole eats a wayward star, you get a huge supply of radiation that transforms the object into a quasar. In fact, for a rotating black hole, the energy you get is about 1/2 mc² where m is the mass of the infalling matter. The radiation is so powerful that these quasar events can be seen clear across the span of the visible universe, billions of light-years away! Quasars require the consumption of about one entire solar mass of material every year to be as brilliant as they are.

Now here’s the problem. You can only shove matter into a black hole as quickly as you can get it past the surface area of the event horizon. That means that small Sun-sized black holes with very small surface areas (about 8 square miles) take a long time to consume the mass of a shreaded star. But the vastly larger supermassive black holes can easily consume an entire star every year or more.

But there is a second problem. Most accretion occurs in a rotating disk that has to form because the angular momentum of the incoming star has to be conserved. This leads to a slow accretion process. A much faster accretion process happens in “spherical accretion,” where the infalling gas enters along a direct “radial” direction with no angular momentum. But if the inflow is too dense, the radiation generated by the heated gas pushes back on the infalling material and slows it down. This is called the Eddington rate, and it seems to be the maximum rate at which even a supermassive black hole can eat. For the supermassive black holes in quasars, this works out to about a few solar masses per year.

What does this have to do with the recently identified supermassive black hole called SDSS J0100+2802? Well, based on its distance, we can estimate that the object we see today was created about 700 million years after the Big Bang, and some 400 million years after the expanding cosmic gas became cold enough to form small objects. The mass of this black hole is nearly 13 billion times the mass of the Sun. That means that over the course of 400 million years, it had to consume about 30 times the mass of the Sun every year. This is way above the Eddington limit. So how could such a massive black hole have formed?

Luckily, nearby, we have examples of how this might work. A faster growth rate can happen by black-hole cannibalism. When two supermassive black holes collide, they form a new black hole with their original combined mass. We see signs of this starting to happen in such galaxies as SDSS J120136.02+300305.5, in which the collision between two galaxies has left behind a 10-million-solar-mass black hole and a 1-million-solar-mass black hole, now spiraling into each other and separated by less than a light-year.

This artist’s impression shows a binary supermassive black hole system in the galaxy SDSS J120136.02+300305.5 (Credit: ESA / C. Carreau)

We know that in the early history of the universe, there were a lot of mass mergers going on. Most produced bursts of star formation, and we see these objects as multiple knots of brilliant UV light. So this may be the way that supermassive black holes like SDSS J0100+2802 grew to be such massive objects in only a few hundred million years.

Still, it is very impressive that not only can we detect these kinds of events occurring so close to the Big Bang but we can still find explanations from our local corner of the universe that seem to apply to such a remote time and space.