In 1900, ALFRED JARRY (1873-1907) published what remains the only convincing plan ever devised for the construction of a time machine. So it’s stupid to pretend that the pioneering French sci-fi author/playwright was not himself a visitor from a future in which religion, politics, violence, and other Ubu-esque social ills have been vanquished thanks to a widespread, passionate faith in absurdism; and ’pataphysics, “the science of imaginary solutions,” which takes for granted the truth of contradictions and exceptions, has triumphed over the vulgar positivism under which we suffer today. (We can also infer that the bicycle is the primary means of urban transportation, and bicycling costumes are worn everywhere; and that people are shorter — Jarry was five feet tall.) Those whom Jarry has influenced — e.g., Apollinaire, Picasso, Ionesco, Duchamp, Philip K. Dick, Boris Vian, the Situationists, Oulipo, Baudrillard, Charlie Kaufman — ought not to be regarded as artists, but activists determined to realize the noncoercive-utopian vision of their martyred hero. Yes, martyred! Why did Jarry insist upon speaking in a robotic voice, and die at the (Christ-like) age of 34? The ’pataphysician Geezer Butler informs us: “He was turned to steel/In the great magnetic field/When he traveled time/For the future of mankind.”

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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Peter Sellers.

READ MORE about men and women born on the cusp between the Anarcho-Symbolist (1864-73) and Psychonaut (1874-83) generations. Of course, Jarry was actually born in the far future.

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Throughout his prolific career WERNER HERZOG (born 1942) has sought the extremes — of man, nature, and the lengths to which we will go to find meaning, wonder, or the fabled far edges of the earth. His motley crew of outsiders, ranging from Bruno S. to Timothy Treadwell, quest and rage against nature’s mad indifference. But Herzog’s greatest collaborations were with Klaus Kinski, whose freewheeling Method was not only a worthy match for the jungle’s “obscenity” of abundance, but for Herzog; their conflicts are gleefully detailed in the not entirely truthful My Best Fiend (1999). In his mid-career masterpieces Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Herzog deployed Kinski to terra incognita, to wrestle whatever dragons he might find, or become. But despite the impossibilities inherent in or imposed upon the quest (in the real story upon which Fitzcarraldo is based, the boat was dismantled and the pieces portaged in small bundles; in the film’s most notorious scene, the entire boat was dragged through the jungle), Herzog often succeeded in grasping his grail: the indelibly passionate image. By mapping the negative spaces of extremity, Herzog has tried to limn what it means to be human, what it means to be wild — and what it might mean to be free.

READ Peggy Nelson on the following Herzog films: Grizzly Man (2005) | Encounters at the End of the World (2007) | Cave of Forgotten Dreams (premiering September 2010 at the Toronto Film Festival)

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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Freddie Mercury.

READ MORE about members of the Anti-Anti-Utopian generation (1934-43).

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The children’s books written and illustrated by VIRGINIA LEE BURTON (1909-68), whose father was an MIT engineer and mother an artist (who abandoned her children to foster care), are as fancifully yet precisely engineered as a cuckoo clock. She won the 1942 Caldecott Medal for The Little House, in which the sharp angles of industrial civilization creep close to, then engulf the anthropomorphized, gently rounded title character. Her best-known book is Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939); Choo Choo (1937), Katy and the Big Snow (1943), and Maybelle the Cable Car (1952) also feature an anthropomorphized piece of industrial equipment — Katy is a snowplow — whose existence is threatened by larger, newer, brutal and sinister avatars of technological progress. (Was Burton steampunk? She was DIY, anyway: in 1938 she founded the Folly Cove [Gloucester, Mass.] Designers, a textile collective whose whimsical wallpaper, tablecloths, etc., are gorgeous, and highly collectible.) My favorite Burton story is the un-quaint, non-partisan yarn Calico the Wonder Horse, or the Saga of Stewy Stinker (1941), in which not a single machine (unless a stagecoach counts) appears. Reading it to my children, like my father used to read it to me, I’ve decided that Burton’s stories are themselves technologies — ones whose joints have been concealed by organic designs — which seem less crafted than grown.

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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Fred MacMurray.

READ MORE about members of the Partisan generation (1904-13).

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Nothing illustrates the sweet triumph of a comeback story more than the return of Pee-wee Herman, the red-bowtied alter ego of PAUL REUBENS (Paul Rubenfeld, born 1952), who is selling out shows from coast to coast almost two decades after he was consigned to the celebrity graveyard for making love with his own hand. Reubens’ fall and comeback were fated: skip back past the children’s TV show Pee-wee’s Playhouse (with whimsical sets created by Gary Panter) and you’ll find the original, theatrical version that rocked the Roxy in the early 1980s. That Pee-wee was a little more man than child, erred on the side of naughty (e.g., by convincing a woman to take off her dress on the pretext that no one can see her do it) and tweaked sexual and gender boundaries with his fearless, unapologetic love of everything that a six-year-old heart might desire. The character’s film debut in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (which introduced Tim Burton 25 years ago) further juxtaposed Pee-wee’s insouciance with an increasingly conservative American public whose discomfort only exposed them to Reubens’ mockery. Middlebrows may attempt to nullify Reubens’ art by claiming that it “shows what it’s like to be a child” — but the truth is that Pee-wee’s childlike behavior reveals the fault lines and unexpressed terrors of adult life.

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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Jimmy Finlayson.

READ MORE about members of the Boomer generation (1944-53).

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His eye was so beautiful that NICOLAS ROEG (born 1928) would’ve been a great cinematographer in any age, but only the Seventies would accommodate the baggy ambiguities of his genius as a director. Which is curious because his forebears are Sixties art house lions like Godard, Antonioni, and especially Resnais, who shared his interest in film’s unique dislocations of time, space, and psyche. It’s common to talk around an artist by commenting on the depth of his vision, but it’s truer of Roeg to speak of the width of his vision, which favors human figures isolated against the horizon. Nobody trawls their camera so low to the ground as Roeg, giving us the bug’s eye view of human disconnection. All those estranged lover-couples at the center of his narratives — Sutherland and Christie in Don’t Look Now, Agutter and David Gulpilil in Walkabout, Bowie and Clark in The Man Who Fell to Earth — unable to breach the envelopes of their skin no matter how urgent, awkward, or thwarted their couplings. Always tragic in the end. But Roeg’s tragic vision yields before the genius of his eye. We don’t leave his films sorrowful, but rapt, scene after scene unspooling again behind our eyes.

ALSO BORN THIS DATE: Léon Theremin.

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Each day, HiLobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person’s birthday.

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WIM WENDERS (born 1945) was only 16 when Oberhausen, his [and Paul the Octopus’] hometown, hosted its 9th annual festival for short art films, producing what became known as the Oberhausen Manifesto of the Junger Deutscher Film movement. Five years later, Wenders was part of the inaugural class at HFF, the West German Republic’s University for Film and Television in Munich. Three years after that, his Summer in the City was one of the first films made by a director born after the end of World War II. From the beginning, Wenders’s films have been marked by many talented collaborators with distinctive backgrounds and styles, including cinematographers Robbie Muller and Henri Alekan, co-writers Sam Shepard and Peter Handke, musician Ry Cooder, and fellow filmmakers Nicholas Ray, Francis Ford Coppola, Jim Jarmusch, Michaelangelo Antonioni, nearly always as part of an international co-production. Is it any wonder that his output has been uneven? Every cinephile I know is either obsessed with a single Wenders film, or has no use for him. For me, it’s Paris, Texas (1984). Movies like Rain Man and Forrest Gump cribbed whole scenes, nearly turning Harry Dean Stanton’s mute, amnesiac desert wanderer into a cliché, but they’ve never subtracted a fraction of the film’s power. Paris, Texas is the town where Travis was conceived, where he bought a parcel of useless land, and punchline to a cruel joke told by Travis’s father at the expense of his mother. The film conjures one spirit after another, only seen in photographs, film reels, and finally a telephone conversation through a glass wall. Every memory and event re-proves the simultaneous impossibility and inevitability of love, loss, and paternity.

ALSO BORN THIS DATE: René Goscinny.

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Each day, HiLobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person’s birthday.

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If ever there was an exquisite marriage between crime and art, PHILIPPE PETIT (born 1949)’s wire walk between the towers of the World Trade Center was it. In 1974, Petit walked from tower to tower some eight to ten times, depending on who is doing the telling. Although he has traversed a number of famous buildings during the span (sorry) of his career, including Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, the World Trade Center was his greatest challenge. Petit’s high-wire act was a distant cousin to graffiti art, but it was more lyrical to look at and more daring, both for its physical danger and its bold execution — under cover of sun rather than moon. It brings to mind Vito Acconci’s Seed Bed, or Chris Burden’s Shoot, other examples of ephemeral ’70s performance art. The coming together of the forbidden and the impossible into a simple gesture; standing, lying down on the wire, lifting a foot just so without dying; it makes my heart skip a beat, which I suppose is what I look for in art, some recognition of my mortality. The fact that the WTC was itself fleeting in its existence, and the horrible memory of how it fell, has lent the images of this particular wire walk a whole second layer of context and meaning. “Seemingly, I’m crazy — a suicidal maniac. But you have to enter my world,” Petit has said. I’m in. He had me at crazy.

ALSO BORN THIS DATE: Alfred Hitchcock.

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Each day, HiLobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person’s birthday.

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The city of Bakersfield is a middling speck on a dusty stretch of California’s Highway 99, but the Bakersfield Sound is a vast kingdom — and its resplendent and genial king is BUCK OWENS (Avis Edgar Owens Jr., 1929-2006). The Owens many of us know best is the pickin’ and grinnin’ co-host of Hee Haw, a TV show that started as a cornpone Laugh-In and wound up lasting twenty years in syndication. But Hee Haw should not overshadow Owens’ true legacy. Along with Bob Wills (Texas Swing) and Owen Bradley (the Nashville Sound), he was one of the architects of the country sound — and he’s arguably had the most lasting influence. Starting as a session guitarist at Capitol, Owens fused the upbeat tempos of Texas shuffles with rockabilly and Mexican polka beats, and strung it together on the gorgeous stinging tones of the Fender Telecaster. I’m willing to hear arguments for Merle Haggard’s Strangers and the Flying Burrito Brothers, but the evidence of their live albums indicates that Owens’ Buckaroos— an all-star amalgam featuring Buck’s right-hand man Don Rich on sparkletone Telecaster and harmony, Tom Brumley on steel, and Doyle Holly, a rhythmic master on bass with a rich baritone — were the shit-hot country band of the entire Sixties. Until 1974, that is, when Rich died in a motorcycle accident right there on Highway 99. Buck reeled off twenty-one No. 1 hits on the country charts, every one of them a marvel of craft and showing off a sense of humor that Haggard could never touch.

ALSO BORN THIS DATE: Erwin Schrödinger.

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Each day, HiLobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person’s birthday.

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HULK HOGAN (born Terry Bollea, 1953) started as a “heel” (wrestling parlance for bad guy), made a famous turn as a “babyface” (hero) in the 1980s that caused thousands of 13-year-old boys to “Hulk out,” then returned in the ’90s re-heeled. Perhaps there was always a dullness beneath Hogan’s surface — a void that gave rise to a sinking suspicion, even among us 13-year-olds, that all this sturm und drang wasn’t signifying much. And his four “demandments” (“Train, Say Your Prayers, Eat Your Vitamins, Believe in Yourself”), not to mention his recent forays into reality TV, are more middle- than lowbrow. Yet Hogan’s giant blondness held a magnificent pantheon in orbit: Jimmy “Superfly” Snooka, George “The Animal” Steele, The Iron Sheik, King Kong Bundy, The Junkyard Dog, and, of course, his nemeses Rowdy Roddy Piper and André the Giant. Without Hogan’s monstrous, monolithic dullness occupying the middle, they wouldn’t have been free to wave Iranian flags, eat turnbuckles, and fly above the ring.

ALSO BORN THIS DATE: STEVE WOZNIAK.

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Each day, HiLobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person’s birthday.

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RONNIE SPECTOR (born Veronica Bennett, 1943), her sister Estelle, and their cousin Nedra Tally were a naturally occurring girlgroup: aggressive, fashionable, racially ambiguous, reared in musical homes in the multiracial Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. Phil Spector must have felt the heavenly nimbus of destiny descend upon him when he first heard The Ronettes sing. “So young,” Ronnie quavered on an indifferent pre-Philles release. “Can’t marry no one”; but her voice didn’t sound young at all. It throbbed with friction and experience, and it was majestic. Spector had found in Bennett a singer who could break through the Xanadu of instrumentation he would build around her in his Gold Star Studios echo chamber. He married her, too — a tale for another day — but first he produced a string of pop masterpieces: “Be My Baby,” “Baby I Love You,” “Walking in the Rain,” and on and on, each one a little storm building inexorably, orgiastically to the fade. They were near-perfect records that would have deflated without Ronnie’s lead vocals, and they’ve lived on. The boygroup records that came a decade later emulated her jagged phrasing, defiance, and raw, earnest emotion.

ALSO BORN THIS DATE: Norma Shearer.

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Each day, HiLobrow.com pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person’s birthday.

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