Wow it’s a roller coaster. Very intense and we will be in the thick of it over the next two weeks of February’s installment of eclipse season. Then another even more intense pounding in AUGUST where especially AGENT ORANGE, my new pseudonym for you know who will get absolutely pummeled, killed or impeached.
We are in what’s called the DENIAL STATE.
Denial State by Napoleon Brousseau 1998 Angell Gallery Toronto
This painting was very prophetic, as all great art and literature are. Pre 9/11. My husband is the artist.
That’s what TRUMP, BANNON and all their nasty cronies are doing. Especially if they are young and don’t give a shit about history. If you choose to ignore history, you are doomed. We will keep telling the truth until its made right. Until there is honesty and credit given where it is due.
TELL THE TRUTH, INSIST ON WHAT YOU KNOW TO BE TRUE.
This eclipse is asking that we all ROAR our heart’s truths.
Let me know how this big shift in our values and the denial state of affairs is affecting you.
Please share widely all writing is copyright of Tara Greene.
Pee Wee’s Playhouse for the uninitiated after a ten-year wait is now available on BLU RAY from SHOUT! Factory
PEE WEE was and always will be a mind-blowing fun romp of an ambiguous anarchic totally artsy children’s Saturday morning show that was wholly original. Something visually creative is juxtaposed with something else and everything is moving. It perfectly captures that age’s art movement in the late 80’s. If you want to be a big kid and HEH HEH like Pee- Wee you’ve gotta steep yourself in the Playhouse.
Some famous Pee Wee-isms- “I know you are but what am i?”
Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) and Miss Yvonne (Lynne Marie Stewart) on “Playhouse.”CreditShout! Factory
Some performers invent personas so boldly stylized that they refuse to break character, at least in public. Mae West was one. As were Harpo Marx and W. C. Fields. Stephen Colbert broke character only recently; but Pee-wee Herman -PAUL REUBENS held on for years.
Like Mr. Colbert, Mr. Reubens used a regular television show as a vehicle for his invented personality: a manic, nerdy man-child in a too-small gray suit, red bow tie and lipstick. “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” (broadcast for five seasons, starting in fall 1986, in the Saturday-morning cartoon ghetto) was a fully realized private universe. It was also, as demonstrated by the complete 45-episode series and one Christmas special out on Blu-ray from Shout! Factory, a series of strongly conceptualized pieces. As packed as each episode is with outlandish props, linguistic pranks — many based on each week’s meant-to-be-screamed “secret word” — and running gags, PLAYHOUSE is far too rich to binge-watch.
One of many Pee-weevian paradoxes was the instant popularity of Mr. Reubens’s hermetic spectacle, which made its debut, on CBS, the same month that Blue Velvet David Lynch’s darker but not dissimilar exercise in personal fetishes and weird Americana, opened in movie theaters to an equally passionate response. “Playhouse,” which originally cost a sizable $325,000 per episode and was shot at first in a cramped SoHo loft, took viewers to a candy-colored world of sexual ambiguity and a realm of total anthropomorphism.
Photo
Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne),MORPHEUS left, and Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”CreditShout! Factory
Every object was potentially alive: the window, the chair, the floor. The creatures who called the Playhouse home included miniature dinosaurs, sentient machines and a refrigerator of foodstuffs that enjoyed an ongoing fiesta. The mise-en-scène was wildly cluttered, and the show offered a veritable taxonomy of animation styles, combining puppetry, clay animation and video effects, while excerpting Depression-era cartoons on the living TV monitor, Magic Screen.
As Pee- Wee was an adult who acted like a child, so the “Playhouse” aesthetic blended high and low tech, the avant-garde and the vulgar. Art world precursors and analogues include Betty Boop, Red Grooms, the underground animator Sally Cruikshank, the midnight movie Forbidden Zone, East Village performance art, neo-Pop painters like Kenny Scharf, and Raw magazine (an early publisher of the cartoonist GARY PANTER, who was one of the show’s three original production designers).
The Playhouse was further distinguished by its racial diversity and frisky gender bending. Jambi the blue-faced genie (John Paragon) and the elaborately be-wigged Miss Yvonne (Lynne Marie Stewart), “the most beautiful woman in Puppet Land,” each in their way evoked drag performers. Dixie the cabdriver (Johann Carlo) and Reba the mail lady (a pre-law & Order S. Epatha Merkerson) were notably assertive women, while Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne) and the various hunky beach boys who drifted in and out of the Playhouse were bashful and flirtatious.
Occasionally suggesting a demented version of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” “Playhouse” had a remarkable capacity to be both progressive and regressive, sweet and risqué. No great stretch of the imagination is required to picture a revival of CABARET starring “Playhouse” denizens with a chortling Pee-wee himself as master of ceremonies. (A well-received version of the Playhouse did in fact come to Broadway in 2010.)
Not surprisingly, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” quickly attracted the attention of academics interested in what was not yet known as “queer theory” or “gender studies.”
“Perhaps what is most unsettling about Pee-wee is the way he straddles the line between sexual knowledge and ignorance, as if he were somehow pre- and post-pubescent at the same time,” Ian Balfour wrote in one of three scholarly articles on “Playhouse” published in the special “Male Trouble” May 1988 issue of Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory. Perhaps it was this ambiguity that caused a career-stifling public outcry during the summer of 1991 when, with the show in permanent reruns, Mr. Reubens was busted for indecent exposure in an X-rated movie theater. Pee-wee was post-pubescent after all!
Evidently, Mr. Reubens grew tired of “Playhouse,” and the Shout! box is unavoidably front-loaded. Mr. Panter moved on after the first season; the original King of Cartoons and his herald, Dixie, soon departed as well. Many of the most memorable bits of business occurred in the show’s second season, including Pee-wee’s giant underpants, the pajama party during which he marries a bowl of fruit salad and the appearance of the friendless alien Zyzzybalubah.
The cast thinned a bit during the final three seasons. Jambi and the King of Cartoons receded while the more conventional performers Miss Yvonne and Cowboy Curtis became increasingly central. (Truly, having played a teenage Army grunt, a villainous Ike Turner and the guru Morpheus, as well as this Jheri-curled buckaroo, Mr. Fishburne is among the most versatile actors of his generation.) Still, the show remained remarkably consistent.
First telecast on Nov. 3, 1990, “Camping Out”is a great episode, featuring a real-time bathroom break, a cameo by Sandra Bernhard, a seeming glimpse of Big Bird in the fridge, and excerpts from two classic animations, Oskar Fischinger’s “Alegretto.” and Ub Iwerks’s “The Pincushionman” (a.k.a.”Balloon Land”). It is also the show in which Pee-wee throws caution to the wind: His camping trip with Cowboy Curtis is largely a single-entendre discussion of “wieners” and “buns.”
Shown two weeks later, the final episode, “Playhouse for Sale,” is even more self-reflexive. The secret word is “word.” Magic Screen functions as the host, while, confounded by the obtuseness of either Globey the globe or Pterri the pterodactyl, the ever-sunny Miss Yvonne nearly breaks character herself: “I think I’ve taken one too many trips to Puppet Land!”
My husband Napoleon worked on building the props for the first season in New York in 1986. He built CHAIRY and the Fridge and the animated food props.http://www.napob.com/#!press—pdfs
Almost the Saturn Return of Pee Wee’s first broadcast September 13 1986. Saturn was at 4 degrees of Sagittarius. The North and South Nodes were almost virtually reversed. Jupiter is now exactly trining where Uranus was then at 18 degrees of Sagittarius.
A digital art pioneer, {see links below} in SIMULATORS II, Brousseau presents a self-portrait featuring over 80 layers of imagery, including the artist’s “power tools”, objects of great personal significance. Viewers may learn more about each object through an augmented reality app that provides access to text, web links and videos. This state-of-the-art technology is balanced by the densely textured neo-expressionism of the image.
After downloading the app, you can scan the life size print with your smart phone or tablet.
On screen a video explaining icons on your device and directing the user to various content, audio, video, a blog, mobile site and social media buttons.
The artist will be constantly expanding the narrative information of the work over the month and year by elaborating the back story on his blog http://www. napoblive.com with videos and related art works.
ACCESS AND INTERACT WITH THIS ART PIECE FROM YOUR COMPUTER or CEL PHONE IPAD ETC.
The life size C print is quite impressive to see but if you can’t make it by the gallery you can access this information, anywhere the “Life Tools Power Object” image appears, even on your computer screen.
NAPOLEON BROUSSEAU is an artist who defies definition. An INternational artist and Renaissance man whose art career and works span decades of always being on the cutting edge of multi media eco art collectives, erotic charcoal drawings, super 8 films, sculptures, digital art, cel phone ecolaboration fundraising art, Art Directing at AREA in New York, building props for the Pee Wee Herman show, installation art for Yoko Ono, or Frederico Fellini and more…
PLEASE SHARE WIDELY to all ART AFFECTIONADO’S ART DEALERS and lovers of the beautiful and edgy
The artists will take private COMMISSIONS for self portraits. contact him at napoleonbrousseau@gmail.com
Try it: your comments and observations are appreciated.
so you get to “Collect” your favourite artists work. They are entered into a jury by popularity and the prize is your work shown in Times Square. sounds like fun!
GO and press “COLLECT ME” for Napoelon BROUSSEAU’S WORK, and I’ll tell you why, its not just that this is a brilliant art work. His work is not about vanity. You get to collaborate and co-create with this art . By using your cell phone you get to grow a virtual seedling into a very very artistic tree; there’s a Meat tree, an Ancestor Tree, etc. with his art piece http://www.seedcollective.net shown above. You get to download the image of the tree you created. But the best part, the icing on the cake, or tree in this case, is that your interraction is funded by various company’s to plant real trees.
Napoleon already envisioned the Times square showing years ago, hence the photoshopped pic.
So a vote for Napeoleon’s dream coming true ni Times square is a vote for you making your own dreams come true.
Do you have a vision board or a dream board? What goes around comes around.
How the heck do artists’ think of these things?
More about Napoleon.Yes that’s his real name, { very common French Canadian name from Quebec } Napoleon’s seed collective is an art installation that plants trees. Yes and it has done so in China, Australia, New Orleans, Baltimore, Vermont, Toronto Canada and at the 2010 winter Olympics in Vancouver. and is headed to London and Paris in the near future.
The seedcollective was Napoleon’s brainchild sprouting from a seed of a former New Media project from 2001. Napoleon and his colleagues created the first cel phone driven art interface ever in the world, at the Canadian Film Center in Toronto at the Bell New Media Lab, that prototype, called SWAMP was shown at Siggraph in Los Angeles in 2001. In 2005 the seedcollective was premiered at the SCOPE Art fair in New York.
Seventh Generation, the long-standing eco company from Vermont, backed Napoleon to help fund Replant New Orleans in 2006 using the seedcollective as the vehicle. Seedcollective was a web enabled cel phone interactive interface at the time, also a world’s first. Hundreds of trees were planted in New Orleans as a result of users interactions with seed.
Seedcollective.net is currently being shown since January – April 22 Earth Day at the McMichael Art Gallery, in Kleinburg, Ontario, outside of Toronto. The McMichael is the home of the Group of Seven Canadian art collection,which recently toured London England, seee review here
check it out. Vote for Napoleon and the seedcollective its a fabulous art piece and so that he can see his dream come true and help some trees grow for EARTH DAY.
Tara Greene,Tarot Reader, Astrology Psychic 