O Superman, Where Art Thou?

American Psychogeography VI: Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and Laurie Anderson.
​(With a detour into Reagan and Iran.)

In the age of science we never lost our myths. They just shape shifted into new forms. Superman is one of the mightiest myths to have been born in the twentieth century and it came from the minds of two science fiction fanatics who had met in Cleveland, Ohio.

How to begin with this? In the same way we begin our days.

Superheroes lurk in the shadows of the American psyche, and in the American psyche the shadows of the superheroes are projected at large. In the language of Carl Jung, America has been under the possession of the Superman archetype. Like him, we become weak in the presence of radioactive minerals.

In 1938 Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced the world to Superman in Action Comics #1. Three years before in 1935, Siegel and Shuster had created the comic hero, Doctor Occult, a private investigator specializing in occult detection. Strange currents swirl in the hidden recesses of the collective mind. Doctor Occult appeared in various comic anthologies over the next three years, to put in time as a supernatural sleuth, but after Superman took off and took flight, he fell into a dark obscurity only to be revived in the 1980s.

​Doctor Occult had powers such as astral projection, telekinesis, hypnosis and the ability to make people see illusions. He carried with him the Mystic Symbol of the Seven, a powerful talisman that gave him further powers as an exorcist and protection from hostile powers.

Siegel and Shuster, lauded as the creators of Superman, a household name whose reputation as the Man of Steel sends supervillains to quake in their rubber boots, are less recognized as purveyors of secret mystical forces hidden away in the seldom read pages from the golden age of comics. What secret destiny of America might have awakened if Doctor Occult had ridden into ascendancy as the preeminent superhero to take hold of generations of comic book fans?

Siegel was born on October 17, 1914, in the great city of Cleveland, Ohio. His parents were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York in 1900 escaping the rising tide of antisemitism that would surge across the Russian Empire in a series of pogroms in the following years.

Siegel was a science fiction superfan. At age fifteen, in highschool, he is credited with creating one of the first scifi fanzine called Cosmic Stories. He had written some tales and sent them into Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories whose pages of pulp had filled him with marvel. It was early days yet in his career as a writer and the rejection slips inevitably followed. Undettered he just published the stories himself.

Joe Shuster had been born in Toronto to Jewish immigrants from Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The family barley had enough funds to get by and he worked as a newspaper boy before he’d even reached the age of ten when they moved from the northern shores of Lake Ontario, to the southern side of Lake Eerie.

At Glenville High School he met Siegel and the two hit it off. It also worked out that Shuster happened to be a burgeoning illustrator while Siegel was possessed with an affliction for stringing words together into stories.

“When Joe and I first met,” Siegel had said, “it was like the right chemicals coming together.”

The two started another fanzine together, as nerds in high school are wont to do. For people who are mistreated, judged, shy and bespectacled, part of a minority, science fiction has often given rise to a superiority complex in its fans as a form of psychological compensation. Their zine was titled Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization, and they were at the head of the class.

It was in the pages of this zine that the first version of superman appeared, and at first he was not a hero, but a villain. He was bald, he was telepathic, and he was bent on world domination. You can perhaps understand why someone might want to dominate the world when all you’ve know is a life of homelessness. Such was the case of character Bill Dunn who had been tricked by a scientist into being the test subject for a new drug. The drug gave him the powers of mind control and mind reading which Dunn used to his own ends, until the powers wore off as the drug left his system anyway, leaving him once again a homeless on the street. This story, “The Reign of the Superman” was not quite a success, but the title for the character got recycled later when they needed something really sensational to break into the tough comic strip market to which the pair aspired.

After numerous twists and turns as they tried to break into the comics industry, with Doctor Occult being just one of those twists, they managed to sell the rights to their Superman creation to Detective Comics Inc., the main branch of the various companies that eventually became DC, and one of the most well known superheroes in the entire pantheon of superheroes was born. As ever with contracts and royalties, they regretted the decision to sell their creation off so cheaply for just $130 (close to $3,000 when adjusted for inflation). Even so they still got to have a hand in it and reaped further rewards on the job as writer and illustrator for the popular series.

So what of superman himself? Superman is the ultimate immigrant, coming from another planet altogether, but his main agenda is just to fit in to American society. With the birthname Ka-El and hailing from Krypton far beyond our own solar system, he came to reside in the town of Smallville, Kansas. He was taken in by farmers. He was given the name Clark Kent. He was an alien who tried to assimilate.

In the 1940s when the Superman character migrated to radio serials he got tagged with a catchphrase. He had always had patriotic feelings about his adopted country, but now he was a standard bearer for “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”

In the aftermath of World War II actor George Reeves imprinted the phrase even further into the minds of adolescent baby boomers during his reign on the television show.

After World War II the last shreds of the British Empire was in tatters. America gladly took the reigns as world superpower. Clark Kent had come from elsewhere but he was a Midwest man with superpowers of his own, powers to set evil deeds to rights and to punish evil doers. Kent wrestled with his own strengths and weaknesses. As the American empire grew it developed its own superiority complex.

Over there, on the other side of the world, the evil communists of the USSR continued to plot and espionage games of cat and mouse were played on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The fear of the bomb hung over in the form of mushroom cloud nightmares and suburban bunker escape fantasies. By the 1980s the personal computer glowed with a screen of green letters and enter button whose click by malicious hackers could send intercontinental ballistic missiles out from silos hidden in the same Midwest Kansas farmlands as superman had been raised by his elderly human parents.

By 1978 Christopher Reeve was starring in a blockbuster film. Lex Luthor, a bald ordinary man with no superpowers but supremely evil in the worlds of business of technology, has masterminded a plot to divert military missiles into the San Andreas fault to trigger massive earthquakes and destruction.

It’s up to Superman to save the day. Good and evil. The savior who fights for freedom and sees the criminal served with justice. The superhero may have once lifted the American mind up into the heights of achievement as we stewed together in a century of self assimilation, but the superhero archetype quickly overextended itself. Now it was a dark mirror of Americas own capacity to always see an enemy over the shoulder, to always look to intervene on the international stage.
​
Superman II also starring Reeve’s would hit the silver screens and people lined up at the box office in 1980 to see him fight evil again. The following year Ronald Reagan would be elected president.

PROUDER, STRONGER, BETTER

It was 1981.

The bicentennial era was over. Carter had been deposed by Reagan. Some historians have come to think people working for Reagan and the GOP worked behind the scenes to prolong the Iran Hostage Crisis that had marred Carter’s term in order to make Reagan even more lovable by the American public.

Some call it the October Surprise theory. Others just call it the kind of shit that the government does behind the backs of its citizens.

The idea was that operatives from withing Reagan’s campaign made a secret deal with Iranian officials. If the Iranians would delay releasing the hostages until after the 1980 election, the Reagan campaign, betting on their admission into the White House, would give Iran some weapons in exchange.

Gary Sick, one of the original reporters on this idea noted that, “the Reagan administration was trying to make contact with Iran, and tell them that they should keep the hostages until after the election of Jimmy Carter, the election which Reagan was running against Jimmy Carter.”

It was morning in America, and with Carter defeated, America was back, baby. At least one version of America. Traditional values were in, hippies had become Yuppies, trading psychedelic weekends on LSD for the capitalistic furor of cocaine binges that helped fuel a cash oriented stock market ethos.

​The pulse in America was quickening as the United States turned its back on the back-to-the-land movement, the appropriate technology movement, and the general consensus around the idea that since fossil fuels are by their very nature a limited resource. The notion that it might be a good idea to start limiting the use of fossil fuels in a switch to a less energy intensive society was scrapped. The hollywood politicos, CEOs and their lackeys had wound themselves up on cocaine, satanic panic, and the notion that Americas place in history was destined by God to stand up as a bulwark against the evil of other countries such as the Iran, who only seemed to be evil when we weren’t trading weapons with them, and the hated specter of the USSR.

As Reagan cut government spending on mental health, effectively paralyzing Carter’s Mental Health Act of 1980, scores of schizoid Viet vets were released onto the streets where some would become crack addicts. It was the perfect stew for lead up to the Iran-Contra Affair that was another hallmark of the Reagan years.
​
O Superman, Where Art Thou in our time of need? It would take a high concept performance artist turned art pop start to find out.

O SUPERMAN

​For Laurie Anderson, the 1980s were just another day in America. As an artistic receiving antenna, she was one of those who was able to pick up on what was going on in the collective psychic underworld. She transformed it into a body of work whose subject matter is the broad spectrum of American life. Her feat is all the more impressive in that she managed to do leave a wide mark in the consciousness of her audience, while remaining within the experimental tradition of the United States. Her corpus has remained relatable even to those without advanced art degrees, and that is part of its power. Combining multimedia presentations, conceptual spoken word antics, rock and pop music with an acute visual sensibility has given her a general relatability, that other artists working in similar ways, such as Robert Ashley, didn’t quite achieve.

Perhaps part of her relatability is because of all the years spent steeped in the Midwest growing up.

Anderson was born in Wayne, Illinois, just on the outskirts of Chicago on June 5th, 1947 one of eight kids to Mary Louise and Arthur T. Anderson. Wayne was originally a town named Wayne Station, and was named after Mad Anthony Wayne. His legacy of ethnic cleansing and slavery lives on in the numerous places named after him, in all the monuments erected and dedicated to his genocidal war filled life. Her family later moved to Glen Ellyn, a suburb some twenty-four miles west of Chicago proper.

Anderson started playing violin at age five, and as she got older she played with the Chicago Youth Symphony when she wasn’t hanging out at the Art Institute of Chicago where she studied painting. Violin playing and the spirit of the art life formed a sturdy cornerstone for what flowed out of her afterwards.

When high school was over she went out to the west coast where she studied biology at Mills College. The Bay Area was a happening scene in those days, and it was while she was studying science that she realized she really wanted to focus on making art, a move that, strangely, would lead her back to “big science”. She crossed the country to New York where she went to Barnard College, studying art history, and then got a masters in sculpture from Columbia University by 1972.

Meanwhile in 1970 she had drawn the underground comix Balone Moccasins. The cover features a scene of the capitol building and other places in Washington D.C. under siege with flaming hurls of doo being lobbed at the building and a caption that reads “eat poo whitey.” The subtitle is “a magazine for the medieval mind.” It came out under the imprint of Half-Ass Press, run by one George DiCaprio, daddy of the actor Leo.

1972 was also the same year she did one of her early pieces of performance art. This one was called Automotive. It was a concert for car horns which she orchestrated at the Town Green in Rochester, Vermont. The sound must have been something else. Sometimes the sound of an angry traffic jam is what it takes to open up the aesthetic senses of the nation.

Anderson’s training in sculpture served her well. It led to the development of several new musical instruments and inventions. She performed Duets on Ice in 1974 in New York City. For this work she wore ice skates frozen into a block of ice. She sang and played cowboy songs on her violin while accompanied by a recording. The piece only ended when the blocks of ice melted. She toured with this piece in other cities along with some of her other repertoire.

Another piece was for the Whitney Museum in 1976 called “For Instants,” the title showing her love of word play that became very pronounced in her word-oriented routines probing the American vernacular. For this one she used an electric violin and had a film projected on her while she played.

The next year in 1977 she created one of her famous instruments, the Tape Bow Violin. For the bow, she replaced the traditional horsehair with magnetic, typically with a prerecorded phrase. In place of the normal bridge she included a tape head, the gear that makes audio tape give off its sound when the tape runs over it; in this instance, when she runs the bow across the tape head it produces the sound. She would use another iteration of this instrument in her concert film Home of the Brave where the voice of William S. Burroughs is able to be manipulated.
​
Being musically minded, she started putting percussive beats into her spoken word pieces as a kind of glue to hold the compositions together. Her musical single “It’s Not the Bullet That Kills You – It’s the Hole” from 1977 was a case in point and was one of the bridges that began shifting her career towards that of an art pop recording artist, though she remains forever a multimedia and multimodal talent.

The song features harmonica, bass, violin, and hand-clapping with humorous lyrics. It was a fun experiment working with the recorded medium and she decided to do more. Some were much more experimental, such as those featured on the Women in Electronic Music compilation released by New World Records. These songs “New York Social Life” and “Time to Go”
​
Recorded media is just another way of getting art out to the public, and she would reach the public in a big way with her 1981 UK hit “O Superman.” Sometimes an American artist is at first better received in lands far from home then on the land where they were born. Eight-minute songs aren’t usually in the top spots in the charts, but this one reached number two.

The song had come out originally in a limited pressing in 1980 on One Ten Records. As the song charted in the UK, helped along by lots of airplay on BBC Radio 1, lots of people were ordering that album. Anderson hit pay dirt as an artist when Warner Bros. Records came along and asked her to sign a seven-album recording contract. They re-released the single.

In the song she sings through a vocoder with a minimalist backdrop of music about planes that have been Made in America. “Neither snow nor rain nor gloom / of night shall stay these couriers from the swift / completion of their appointed rounds. / Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice. / And when justice is gone, there’s always force.”

The use of force has always been popular among empires. In the face of massive forces beyond individual control, the notion of being held in the arms of a mother seems natural. Only Anderson sings about a mom with automatic arms and electronic arms. “So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. / Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms. / In your electronic arms.”

Even now those electronic arms reach out to embrace. But are arms with hands at the end of them or the kind of arms that end in a warhead? It’s not the thermonuclear warhead that kills you, but the explosion.

UNITED STATES LIVE

The song became one of the centerpieces in a much longer work of performance art and music that she performed and recorded in 1983, the epic stage work United States Live. This became her first major magnum opus, a gesamtkunstwerk, using all the skills she had developed up to that point: her violin playing, her unique tape head violin instrument, her use of technology in the form of vocoders and speech filters to create different voice characters and personalities, her use of visual imagery and projections, all allowed Anderson to give a different take on American destiny.

It was a take that spanned two four-hour shows across two nights to tell the whole story. A story as epic as America. It was her way of putting an imaginative imprint on the nascent mind of the nation. The Reaganites of the Religious Right had their ethos, but it certainly wasn’t the only interpretation of the American spirit on offer.

​Featuring spoken word pieces, songs, song stories, and story songs, along with a live visual show, she presents topical pieces across four parts in that cover transportation and politics, money and technology, public life and private life. These four parts were further split into seventy-eight segments and the work was performed across two-nights at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Drawings, animation and text projections completed the spectacle.

The medium was the message and just as Anderson herself is a multimedia storyteller, she showed that America is so diverse, strange, weird, at once wonderful, terrifying and banal, through the skillful employment of multiple mediums simultaneously. There are many Americas and all of them can be happening at once.
​
The stories contained are non-linear just like American history itself. Yes, history happens in time, but our experience of it later can be disparate: one event effecting the perception of the present in one moment, another in another. Like the continent itself the history is also vast. She was comfortable with a kind of storytelling approach that allows a person to dip and out of various experiences, just as people now dip in and out of various digital platforms and mediated spectacle.

HOME OF THE BRAVE

The United States its people and its artists continued to inform her growing body of work. Her 1986 concert film and studio album/soundtrack Home of the Brave invaded peoples minds like a language virus, as communicated about communication breakdown, and the increasing ways technology mediates our experience of language. The film included an appearance from William S. Burroughs along with musical luminaries. Notions of patriotism are again question and interpolated through playful artistic concepts. Some songs from United States Live and previous recordings get recycled and given the film treatment. Her humor in upturning the norms of society is never totally cynical but remains humorous. This lighthearted playfulness present in her work is one of the keys to its success and longevity.

In 1999 she created Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, a kind of techno opera, again showcasing her talent as a multimedia artist. That she would tackle one of the great American novels shows not just her affinity for working with the core material of culture in the United States, but also a need to share its continued relevance as people struggle to find their ways in what can be a difficult but hopeful nation. Her works have always had some political edge. Her 2015 piece Habeas Corpus showedone of the harsh consequences of empire by featuring a live telepresence projection of Mohammed el Gharani. At age 14, he was one of the youngest detainees held at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp

​In 2024, she released Amelia, and album chronicling the ill fated flight of Amelia Earheart, another person whose legend now takes on archetypal dimensions in the American mind.

Like superman, Amelia was driven to fly, but she was brave, but she never came back to the home of the brave. Artists like Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and Laurie Anderson all cast their light on what it means make the United States a home.
.:. .:. .:.
I had the honor of being published in Romanticon with my essay “How to Be a Bard” that takes a look at Gary Snyder’s poem, “What You Should Know to Be a Poet” as if it were a curriculum for an aspiring bard in the Druid Revival tradition.

And if you missed the other parts of the non-linear series American Psychogeography, you can find them below:

Green Books and Great Migrations

The Sprawl
Roadrunning the M.ilitary I.ndustrial T.emplate
The New Explorations of a Geotechnician

Looking Backwards at Route 128
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