TAME MAYHEM

Like manna, little cube-and-crossbones stickers started gumming up construction sites, the poles of street lights, and crumbling buildings facing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway last week. Follow the trail of stickers to its source, and it led to Kaiju Big Battel at Roseland Ballroom on Saturday night.

I stood in line for tickets with several flavors of chagrin in my mouth: as a young, reasonably attractive woman attending a ‘monster-mayhem’ show solo; as a reporter, stashing my notebook; and as a former punk show aficionado, a veteran of queues of even more freakish brethren. I stopped attending shows in college, when my feet began to ache from standing on concrete, and when I realized I was the oldest person in the crowd, a few big-bearded grandpas notwithstanding.

As their literature describes, Kaiju Big Battel is a “a tongue-in-cheek hybrid of American pro wrestling, Japanese monster-movie mayhem, and lowbrow pop-culture.” So much hyphenating; who knew what to expect? And yet, this turgid prose proved right on. Kaiju consists of guys in latex monster costumes wrangling amid little cardboard cityscapes, refereed by a mustachio’d fellow named Jingi, a dead ringer for Mario in the eponymous Brothers videogame. Fathers, lock up your daughters!

Inside Roseland, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players already had the slide projector humming. The Players’ website (www.slideshowplayers.com) eloquently states their concept: “We take people's vintage slides that we purchase at estate and yard sales and turn them into pop rock exposes.” I caught their last number, the signature “Opnad Contribution Survey, June 1977”—my notes are fuggy from spilt beer—a slideshow from McDonald’s corporate division explaining their aggressive promotional strategy for 1978. Pleading for television ad dollars along with the slides, Trachtenburg pater Jason dug deep at the Casio. His nine-year-old daughter Rachel thrashed the drums, and both sang: “Let's not have the same weight in 1978! LET'S-HAVE-MORE!”

After the Players, the crowd settled into that most universal of states at shows, aimlessness and impatience mixed. I chose a spot near the Danger Cage, where my compadres looked especially devout. One young man had a long goatee and wore a turquoise kimono; he had a handmade Kaiju poster that he periodically thrust in the air with a sweet grin, as if he was providing a service. His friend, a pudgy man in his thirties with square glasses, wore a red Asian-patterned shirt and a baseball hat with a three-dimensional eagle’s beak sprouting from his forehead. Nearby, two kids blew noisemakers at close range, tickling the other’s cheeks with the paper snouts that extended with each blast. A girl who resembled Olive Oyl pecked at her friend’s arm with an umbrella’s curved neck. A square-jawed man in his thirties—whose Youth Issues might as well have been stitched in fluorescent script on his polo shirt—banged his head robotically to the music. Otherwise, the crowd was clean-livered, even ecumenical.

Finally, the lights dimmed and the roar rose up like a tsunami. The monsters were released periodically from behind the curtain in a series of matches. I caught the wave of feeling briefly with the arrival of Los Plantanos, a pair of jolly green plaintains with little mustaches and a penchant for Coronas. Los Plantanos had mysteriously disappeared before the show, either kidnapped or drugged into acts of unseemly violence: causing banana blights, slapping little girls off their scooters. The news flashes filled screens overhead. Grainy kidnapping footage showed the soft fruits jabbed with a piece of offstage metal. Los Plantanos burst into the Danger Cage to save the emcee; he was suffering attack by a pair of doppelganger plantains in yellow, the letters CIA emblazoned on their backs.

Another bright moment came when the American Beetle entered for his tag-team match against Team Space Bug. A gaunt fellow in tight satin, he wore an American flag cape and boxers below his visible ribs. Eye of the Tiger surged through the speakers. He held up his end nicely until the quicksilver turn of Fortune’s Wheel, signaled by Flight of the Bumblebee as he raced around the ring helplessly. The faces ringing the cage were rapt, even well-behaved.

As the evening’s crescendo, Dr. Cube hit the ring. Here’s Dr. Cube's schtick: he performed unsuccessful cosmetic surgery on himself, donned a cubehead to cover the damage, turned evil, and now promulgates a cult of minions, mangled humans dressed like himself in surgical blues. Ah, the agita. Dr. Cube’s minions and Kaiju monsters alike attacked Silver Potato, one of the good guys, in the final match. The trouncing got worse with the addition of a seven-foot minion in scrubs, with a fake tree-limb arm—a mutation, I guess.

“This potato needs medical attention!” the emcee groaned.

“GO, PO-TA-TO! GO, PO-TA-TO!” droned the crowd.

“Show me your tits, Dr. Cube! Show me your cube-shaped tits!” said a boy in a paisley shirt. “I have my pants down,” another boy announced, helpfully. Goatee boy brandished his Kaiju poster like a hillside banner. My feet hurt.

Potato was a goner, carried out on a litter to the dolorous sighing of the crowd. Amid the booing, I caught the bleats of a few noisemakers, in memoriam.

—by Jude Stewart

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