Bat-tle Roy...lverine?

In the anarchic spirit of true artistry, I intend with this entry to break the mould of Odin's Aviary by discussing a topic seemingly unrelated to

The Third Life

(TM), though I'm likewise sure that I'll find a way to tie it in somehow. That topic is as follows:

Just who

would

win in a fight between Wolverine and Batman?

Now, everybody: Calm down. Calm right the hell on down. (Some of you may think I'm using an ironic tone at this moment, but nothing could be further from the truth; I have friends that will be offended that there is even a question about this match up--and for both sides, too.) We're going to look at this rationally, and I'm going to be as unbiased as possible. To that end, I must admit to those of you who don't yet know me (though I'm on the cover of this week's

The Record

. . . WATCH OUT!) that I am about as biased for Batman--in all things--as I could possibly be. Bearing that in mind, let's us begin our fair and balanced exploration of the question.

Batman would win.

Okay, I'm sorry. For

reals

now:

Batman would kick shorty's hairy butt.

No, no, really. Really. It's a tough call. (It

is

, Mark.) They're both the more popular bad boys of their respective universes--which is no doubt part of what inspired Amalgam to bring them together in their character,

Dark Claw

. One could make a quick argument that Wolverine's enhancements make him the sure winner, but frankly, Batman has dealt with supernatural (

et

al

) powers before, and has a reputation for being the smarter fighter in any situation. But I get ahead of myself. Let's take a look at our fighters in some limited detail.

(Isn't it great to, every once in a while, be shameless in one's geek self? "

Geeking

out" is the popular term, but it can refer to any incidence in which someone unabashedly reveals their enthusiasm for anything. Why should it be such a social sin to relish anything in this world? Because not everyone will care? So what? You don't have to listen/read.)

Dealing with a brief outline of the conditions: Batman is a hero from the DC Comics universe, Wolverine from the Marvel. For the purposes of this discussion, we will be approaching the characters as being at the peak of their natural condition; that is to say,

Wolvie

with his standard set of attributes in the X-Men arc, Batman in his late-twenties/early-thirties...none of this sapped

adamantium

or Return of the Dark Knight stuff. (Non-

fanboys

: Anyone over

geeked

yet?) And they shall be comic characters, not movie characters. So

sayeth

I. And they shall be drawn according to their origins, with some allowance for increased anatomical awareness in artists of the latter half of the 20

th

century. So

Wolvie

is short, and Batman is not hulking. Finally, they're both to some degree anarchic good guys, with Wolverine taking the anarchy cake: He will kill; Bats will not.

Let's get it on!

Wolverine is a mutant who has been experimented upon (fact-check me here gang; I am not a Marvel dude). He has regenerative powers of shocking rapidity, but for the purposes of this discussion we're gonna go with the popular comic choice of him needing some time (one or two nights) to heal from something severe, like a dozen machine guns. He also has three foot-long claws that extend at will from his fists, which are made from

adamantium

, a purportedly indestructible metal. In fact, his entire skeleton is coated with a layer of the stuff, adding to his indestructibility and making him heavy as all hell. Now, the healing is a mutant power, and the

adamantium

is the result of a government experiment. The claws were long assumed to be part of the government's work, but a twist in the nineties suggested they were there before all that, made, at their core, of bone. Sadly, as a result of powerful amnesia,

Wolvie

barely knows a thing about his origins. Given his healing ability, it's possible he is really very old, but he maintains a loner attitude and an underdeveloped emotional capacity. He is trained in martial arts with a Japanese flavor, and prefers direct action to intricacy or planning.

Batman is just a dude--no superpowers. He has, however, spent every waking moment since he was six years old (or so) dedicating his life to studies both physical and mental that will help him fight crime in the urban sprawl of Gotham City, so often the argument is held that his single-minded determination is his "superpower." These studies include gymnastics, mixed martial arts, all sciences and technologies (with an emphasis on computers and

mechanistic devices

), detection, criminology and behavioral psychology. His mind and body are honed into excellence, and he's backed up in all of this by a huge estate and corporation left to him by his deceased parents. His

modus

operandi

is to research and investigate the hell out of everything ahead of time and be prepared, like an inky black boyscout. Owing to his background, he is incapable of accepting loss, either of people or in achievement.

Now (and I owe Friend Mark a nod for this): chances are it would all go down in Gotham. It's not hard to imagine these two egos clashing, but given that Wolverine generally wishes to best bad guys, it would take his stomping on Batman's grounds to make Bats take issue with him or his methods. So Gotham it is. And methods it is. Specifically,

Wolvie

would most likely only come to such a big city if he had to, presumably in pursuit of answers about his past or to hunt a baddie, and he wouldn't

announce

himself to the authorities. Now, it's hard to say what DC characters would feel about mutants. Batman would have no love lost over their DC equivalent--

metahumans

--but he's teamed with super types before, and some much fruitier than

Wolvie

. He is something of a control freak, though, and

Wolvie

would probably pretty quickly foul up some careful lead Bats was following. Bats would sneak up on him,

Wolvie

would smell him coming, Bats would warn,

Wolvie

would yawn him off, Bats would disappear suddenly and without a trace (because you can't smell them

going

). It's only on their next encounter they'd fight, probably with Bats tracking

Wolvie

, but

Wolvie

aware of it, and so he provokes him by threatening to shred a house of drug traffickers instead of arrest them.

And it's on.

My preference is to judge the winner by character examination. You can spend all day debating the merits of strategy, relative invulnerability and motorcycles versus

sports cars

, but at the end of the day, we're talking about events in a storytelling medium. If it isn't a good story, in this context, then it just isn't feasible (much less

desirable

). So we'll talk here about claws and cowls, but hopefully in how they serve an outcome, not their viability strictly as weapons.

(Brief irrelevant observation here: Why in the hell does Wolverine wear a mask? Bruce Wayne has to hide his identity to function in both worlds, but Logan has never shown any sign of needing to mask

himself

. Hell, he's on a continual quest for his identity! That's not the kind of guy who would dig getting his disguise on. Yeah, yeah; I know when he was created it was fashionable and they were trying to make him look more like his namesake. But come on.)

The fight would be all about control and, from this perspective, with Batman as the aggressor (trying to achieve control) and Wolverine as the defender (trying to escape control). This doesn't, however, mean that Bats gets to start the fight.

Wolvie

would probably startle him by drawing him in and then attacking suddenly. Bats would want to keep the high ground afforded him by his aerial equipment, but would just have to keep swinging lower to suppress

Wolvie

until it degraded into a street-level (or rooftop) brawl.

Surprises

would abound. Bats would have all kinds of interesting ways of evening the odds (in the eighties it would have

been a

neural suppressor to prevent the claws from engaging; in the sixties a giant bat-magnet), and

Wolvie

would shock Bats with moves so ugly they're almost absurd. Essentially, they're both incredibly experienced, intelligent fighters, once they get past the emotions. Along those lines, Bats would be doing everything he could to make Logan lose it whilst he maintained control of himself and the environment, and

Wolvie

would be doing whatever he could think of to cause Bats to falter from his grim determination.

Which is why, ultimately, Batman would win.

In every fight, Bats has some part of himself standing outside of the engagement, being the deductive reasoner, that part of him that he found years before, ready to carry him on past his parents' deaths. It's this part of him that inevitably carries the Rocky-

esque

twists of his fights: Just when he seems most lost, we discover that Bats was merely doing what he had to to manipulate the situation into his ultimate plan. He is ultimately objective, which is what makes him a hero, rather than a revenge-

obsessed

sociopath with a

Narcissus

complex.

Which is why, ultimately, Batman can't win.

In every fight, Wolverine's spirit is

indomitable

. It has to be--it's all he really has. Wolverine is actually a supremely vulnerable character. When he started out, this was manifested only by his impulsiveness and relative lack of strength compared to the other X-Men, rendering him more often as comic relief than as his current status of anti-hero. As writers developed his story, however, the vulnerability came out of this incredible amnesia and a conflict between who he seems to be and who he wants to be. For all his indestructible qualities, inside he's destroyed, and it's only his fighting spirit that he can rely on.

What we have here is a conflict between essential natures, and a stricture of conventional

comicbook

plots. The characters and their stories are serial, and keeping a balance between continuity and ingenuity is what marketing those comics is all about. That's part of what makes

comicbook

characters such contemporary icons: like the gods and heroes of myth, they are defined by specific characteristics that remain essentially the same. So we can have several Robins, and Batman can get his will broken by Bane, but only if it eventually returns him to his essential character with renewed vigor. This is great for hero worship and power fantasies. This sucks for narrative, because what's really interesting about a story is how people change as a result of it.

So I propose that the fight would end with Bats getting control of the

Wolvie

, and having his say about his jurisdiction and

Wolvie's

methods.

Wolvie

might even find his arguments compelling enough to stop threatening him for a moment. But

Wolvie

will not change his ways, and Bats will be forced to

expel

him from Gotham, like an animal released into the wild. Another little tussle, in which

Wolvie

gets a claw swipe at the utility belt, to no apparent harm, and Bats will have him ready for transport. The much-battered Batman will escort a bound Logan across whatever harbor borders Gotham, and Logan will light a

stoagie

, turn wryly back and say over his shoulder as all his bruises fade, "Been a while since I've had a beating, but I've had worse. Bit of advice: Remember that I owe you one, bub." And with that cryptic line, Wolverine leaves the scene.

In a brief coda, Bats goes back to the scene of their first meeting to scavenge clues that may not have been obliterated by

Wolvie

. In departing there, he uses his fly line to span an alleyway, to discover

mid-flight

that it is nicked. The line snaps, sending him crashing to a fire escape. "I suppose now we're even..." he says as he rather gingerly descends the escape.

Thoughts? Comments? Complete disagreement?

New Hampshire Log: Days Three–Five—Where We Think We Are


Forgive the lapse. It has been three days of intensive work, with continual switches, changes, reversals—just sort of a seemingly endless exploration. My frustration with the openness of it all came to a head last night, when, after running through the second act and finding it lacking any drive or purpose, we were given an assignment to compile seven moments of the government solving a problem of media exposure throughout the play. I don’t know; maybe I was just tired after a long day, but I couldn’t pull it together to be open and fulfill the request. Fortunately my fellow actors (particularly Joe Varca) had a better attitude at that moment. It was all I could do to stay silent.

The things I kept wanting to say: It’s not about the media, it’s about the family’s descent into hopelessness; giving us another assignment doesn’t provide a solution to the structure of the story; adding bits won’t streamline the play. I got some of it said in the discussion after portraying our media moments, and Laurie has been very concerned about my reaction to the changes they’ve made to the play since last night. And, indeed, the changes they made streamlined the play into more of a story about the family. The choice to do so cut my scenes by half. I would be lying if I said that didn’t disappoint me, but when I can think about it clearly it’s a small price to pay for a more concise story, and I still count myself lucky not to have been cut from the play entirely.

Lots and lots has gone on since Day Two, but it’s hard to chart it all chronologically. You can imagine—with the gap in my writing—that we’ve been awfully busy. In some ways, it has felt like a prolonged tech day, at least in the sense that there has been a lot of time spent just being available for that unpredictable moment when one might be needed. This is in particular due to the “movement theatre” aspects of the show, which are characterized by transitions between scenes in which multiple characters enter to express some part of the situation at that point in the play. (For these moments, the director[s] have adopted a term I learned working with Cirque Boom. Charivari [shar-ee-var-ee]. In circus, it’s a term that describes the sequences typically at the beginning and end when all the acts come out at once and show a little of their stuff. The term comes from a village tradition [can’t remember where exactly, but it lives on in Creole settings] of surrounding the residence of a newly married couple to shout and bang pots and pans.) This kind of constant but uncertain availability we call “hurry up and wait.”

The pity of this is that it can feel like a waste of time, but the fact is that Laurie as creator/director, Christina as on-call playwright, Joe and Jen as all-around-technicians/designers and Kelly as actor/producer are working ‘round the clock and very, very hard. Not that the actors aren’t, but we do have periods when we can zone out for a bit (horrible practice for an actor, but sometimes it’s the only way to rest). As for me, well…. I’ve never been this muscle-bound in my life. I don’t mean that as a boast about my size; I could probably get up to 300 push-ups daily and still just give the effect of a rather slender baseball player. I mean it literally. Trying to get just moderately bigger (plus all the prolonged moments of standing at attention as we work through some sequence or other of the play) has me feeling about as flexible as a frozen flank steak.

It is having some outward effect. My fellow cast-mates are very encouraging in this; especially Kelly, bless her heart. They compliment my body with sincerity and joking cat calls. This has led to an interesting situation, in which the publicity guy we’ve hired called to complain that the pictures they had sent him for advance publicity aren’t “sexy” enough. So parts of day five were spent sweating my buzz-cut off in a separate cabin, trying to take a “sexy” photo that encapsulated the play a bit. I can’t say as I was thrilled with the results, especially toward the end of the day, when all the exhaustion of working in 90-degree weather was showing in my face. (Rather than, “Hi, you’re fascinating and I kind of want to see you naked,” my face says, “Howdy; I smell like guano and can only think about a cold beer.” I have to let it go, though. That’s just not my job, plain and simple.

The last day also started for me with filming our recreation of Matt’s capture video in Faith’s cellar. In a desert boonie cap I sat on a broken wicker chair, bare bulbs illuminating the concrete wall behind me and Alex Charington to my right, face obscured and hands grasping a reproduction M16. We tried all different versions, people kept making noise above us, and through it all I tried to maintain in my imagination the actual circumstances of Matt’s capture, and remind myself how he behaves in the actual video. It was awful and difficult. It can’t begin to compare to what he actually experienced.

It hasn’t been all tormented scenarios and constant script revision. There has been swimming at the lake, jogs through the woods and camaraderie. One of my favorite things about rehearsing here, oddly enough, is the half-court basketball set up behind the barn. I absolutely suck at b-ball, but just dribbling and shooting by myself has been a great way to loosen up on breaks (not to mention the way it keeps me away from the temptation of the group of smokers in front of the barn). Last night we even—in spite of universal exhaustion—gathered around a lakeside fire to relax and chat for a bit over s’mores and wine. This led to a mass skinny-dip in the lake, from which I abstained. Call me crazy (crazy!) but the day of rather objectifying photography took the wild hair right out of me.

Part of the cause for this celebration was that as a result of our Wednesday night crisis (and a sleepless night for the production team) we now have a play that may clock in at under 90 minutes, with what we are calling an “ending” and everything. I’m very pleased with this, of course. It means we’re better prepared to show what we have so far to the locals on Friday night. I don’t, however, particularly like the ending. I’m suspending actual judgment until I can see the whole thing together (which may not be until a week from now, once we’re rehearsing in New York), but it seems to me too technical, and lacking in the catharsis I know this story engenders in all of us. Now, one could argue that because the story itself is so unresolved, that such is how the play should responsibly end. To me, however, part of what we have to offer in creating theatre is the magic of a pure emotional release. We have all been moved to tears by this story of a missing soldier, and have to communicate that as well as the facts to our audiences.

Soon I’ll be back to subways and divorces. It will be good to reconnect with my life at home, but I always miss the sunsets and maddening, uplifting, beautiful work.

Serving One's Country

Worry not. I am not about to chime in on the political a la

Friend Nat

(although if naughty words were permissible there, Nat would already be employed by The Nation). Rather I write to update the confused and huddled masses (Readership of Odin's Aviary now in the double digits! What what!) on the status of that collaborative project celebrating its second birthday some time soon. That one that I occasionally travel to Vermont/New Hampshire for, and what deals in large part with the war/conflict/mess-o'-potamia in Iraq. That

Project

, if you get my meaning, mentored by Moises Kaufman and occasionally exhibited in workshops around the Isle of Manhattan.

Why am I being so coy about the name? Because, dear friends, we have a new working title. Yay! I am so pleased. Telling people about

The Torture Project

had gotten old long ago. It reminded me of the conversations I have with strangers when I'm wearing my stilts. "How's the weather up there?" "You really drank your milk, didn't you?" Except it was usually something like "And is the project torture?" (Answer: No. Except when I have to hold the Shabaq position for five minutes.) Plus, the name just wasn't appropriate after about the first year of development. We got stuck on the word as a guide instead of a label. So the

TP

's new moniker...?

As Far As We Know

I like it. It sums up a lot about the show as far as we've developed it, and is less obscure than a previous consideration for a title:

DUSTWUN - Duty Status: Whereabouts Unknown

. But that's not all, folks! To add to the total anonymity of the project, the producing company has also changed its name.

Joint Stock Theatre Alliance

is dead; long live--

UnCommon Cause

I also like this name, but I'm uncertain as to why they changed this aspect. It may have been because the project itself is taking a dramatic new turn. It may also be that there is, in fact, already a

Joint Stock

theatre company out there. The only thing I miss from the old name is the word "alliance." Good word. UnCommon word, if you will, and it pretty accurately describes what the producing directors aspire to in their working style.

So what, besides nomenclature, has changed? Well, it remains to be seen. What has definitively happened is that our directors have received an almost unheard-of amount of input from the real hometown of Keith "Matt" Maupin. Last Saturday we met for about four hours, just to cover a fraction of the photographs and interviews they returned with. It was exciting and humbling, and made me wish I could have been along for the ride. There's promises that the entire company will make a trip out there soon, but that seems a pretty grand undertaking to me, and may take time. In the meantime, the next step is a series of biweekly (Wait...wait.... That means twice a week, not every two weeks, right? I'm almost positive...) rehearsals through June to explore new avenues in the--frankly--new show. Our first assignment being to take the transcriptions of interviews with assigned people from the community and present a short piece illustrating that person (or those people).

And I've been chosen to do two of Matt's commanding officers. This was the assignment I hoped for, though I have no idea what I will do with it creatively yet. I've spent so much time trying to imagine a military head-space that I'm eager to have actual examples. Also, these guys know Mat. They just do. It's insane to imagine. One anecdote sticks out from the Saturday session. They said Matt would carry around a rubber ball (I wasn't clear if it was like a bouncy-ball, or racket ball, or what) to play with to combat the urge to smoke. I don't know if I'll ultimately be playing the soldier character in our story--there's some concern that I look too old--but I carry a liberty dollar coin with me to combat smoking/nail biting, and it meant something to me that there's at least one, small commonality between I and my character's real-life counterpart.

There's something else, too. Patriotism. I fret sometimes over the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, but there's no use denying that I feel like a patriot--at least in the sense that I believe in my country in ways it doesn't always live up to. Now, if someone had asked me at age nineteen to serve my country by going to war, I probably would have turned them down. I fear bodily harm when it comes to flying metal, and would have felt ill-equipped for the challenges. Nevertheless, I believe hard in this idea called America. I grew up in the Boy Scouts, for f%$k's sakes. This is something I'm eager to explore in my work on

As Far As We Know.

What is it that takes people a step farther into patriotism, to the extent that they feel justified in killing and dying for it?

Of course, fanaticism and fear are powerful imitators of just about any conviction, and that can lead to really irrational decisions. (For example:

Break me a freaking give.

) People need belief as much as they need food and water. I just hope, personally, that belief is something that saves lives without taking them.