Welcome to the Zone

Welcome to the Zone is a stylistic departure for Chelsea after his previous book, the naturalistic and hilariously neurotic romantic memoir, David Chelsea In Love. This time Chelsea, also a performance artist and actor in New York City, has written an over-the-top, absurdist satire of life in the fringe avant-garde, performance art, band-of-the-week, East Village demimonde (he makes an appearance as ``David Chutney''). And while the work will delight anyone who can decipher the various downtown personalities and events he parodies, it may be a bit insiderish for non-New Yorkers. Yet in spots it's very funny. Chelsea recreates downtown New York as an urban twilight zone, a blasted bohemian wasteland populated by struggling ``artists'' like Tasha Tigerbaum, a really bad nude performance rapper; the Acoustic Punishers, a surreal performance-art band planning to riot at the big homeless benefit concert; and Meta, a comically doomed German dancer who ends up quite literally in the soup, much like a recent and notorious East Village murder victim. There are also deceitful relationships, robot sex, opportunistic club emcees and cannibalistic space aliens. To accomodate this farce, he's adopted an amusing, pseudo-representational style, emphasizing comic exaggeration and abbreviated tonal modeling, to mostly good comedic effect. (Feb.)