Ten things that occurred to me while watching The Pizza Underground's original Black Cat show:
1. This is McCauley Caulkin's manifesto centering on the loneliness of being a celebrity and surrounded by a world that knows how to use you but not how to value and understand you. It shows Caulkin once again able to draw notes from artists who are similarly confined by the definition and revisionism of others.
2. Caulkin has self-possession, poise and high spirits, and they are contained within a world that gives him no way to usefully express them. So he frolics and indulges himself on stage, within a cocoon of vaudevillian absurdity.
3. No, the parody of the Velvet Underground is not informative and detailed about the actual politics and spirit of the period. That is because we are entirely within Caulkin's world, which shuts out all external reality. It is a self-governing musical island, like Kane's Xanadu, that shuts out politics, reality, poverty, society.
4. Matt Colburn representationally conforms to the role of a sexually passive sad sack who would rather commiserate than take an active role musically. Pheobe Kreutz has the voice of an angel.
5. All of Caulkin's post-millennial projects, and this one most of all, uses memory to redefine the lives of established touchstone figureheads such as The Velvet Underground. This is a direct throwback to the early works of French film direct Alain Resnais such as Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon amour.
6. The Nirvana parody reminded me of the scene in von Sternberg's "The Scarlett Empress" where Catherine arrives at the court of the Czar and the royal physician immediately crawls under her skirt to check her royal plumbing. Every detail is examined, vivisected, and put on display.
7. Caulkin has been criticized in some circles for his use of a contemporary pop overlay -- hit songs, incongruous dialogue, jarring intrusions of the Now upon the Then. But no one ever lives as Then; it is always Now. Many covers of decades old songs seem somehow aware that they are living in the past. The Pizza Underground seem to think they are twenty-somethings living in the present, which of course they are -- and the contemporary pop references invite the audience to share their present with ours.
8. Everyone in the audience knows The Velvet Underground broke up and I fear we anticipate the Pizza Underground's breakup with an unwholesome curiosity. Caulkin brilliantly sidesteps a breakup, and avoids bloated mob scenes by distributing pizza, sound and a cacophony of incongruity. Hired, essentially, to play a parody, the band are good troupers and faithful to their role. It is impossible to avoid thoughts of Pink Floyd.
9. Every criticism I have read of this band would alter is fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of a They Might Be Giants children's concert.
10. It is not necessary to know anything about The Velvet Underground to enjoy this band. Some of what we think we know is mistaken. But, paradoxically, the more you know about them, the more you may learn, because Caulkin's oblique and anachronistic point of view shifts the balance away from realism and into an act of empathy for a band swept up by a culture that leave them without personal choices. Before he was a king of rock and roll, before he was a pawn, Lou Reed was a 19-year-old boy who left his home, stripped metaphysically bare, and was examined by powerful men like Warhol like so much horseflesh. It is astonishing with what indifference to his feelings the glitterati of the 60s used him for its pleasure, and in the end of the era, disposes of its guilt.
