China: The Panda Adventure

What’s the attraction of panda bears to the children of the world? Like koalas, they’re real-life teddies that combine the fascination of wild animals with the cuddliness of the stuffed variety. Pandas are especially exotic in the western world, and herein lies a story of considerable intrigue. Even by the late 30s, China’s unique giant pandas were rare, and considered highly dangerous—at any rate, none were held in captivity, and very few were encountered in the wild. In fact, the skin and skull of a giant panda had been found in the 1860s, and it would take 60 years for explorers to find a living one. By the 1930s, three had been found and killed by scientific expeditions. New York explorer Bill Harkness set out in 1935 to be among the first to make contact with the mysterious animals, and bring a living specimen back to civilization. He made it as far as Tibet, where he briefly caught a glimpse of one before dying tragically of jungle fever. His wife, Ruth, decided to take up her husband’s quest, and in 1936 she arrived in Shanghai. China: The Panda Adventure tells Ruth’s story. It’s a great historical piece, set in an astonishing landscape and charged with the drama of adventure—in short, a perfect candidate for Imax treatment, and hot on the heels of Bears, their popular survey of the whole hair Bear family. Imax Theatre, (952) 431–4269

Wild Rumpus at the Jungle
Jungle Theater, June 1
This is your last chance, actually, to catch a highly popular series at the Jungle pairing the theater’s talented players and artists with great children’s stories. Well, your last chance for now. Linden Hills’ cornerstone Wild Rumpus has established itself as the Ruminator of children’s books, so it’s appropriate that they’re co-sponsoring and curating this “performance” of books such as Garrison Keillor’s Cat, You Better Come Home and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, by Neil Gaiman. It’s a series, held on Saturday afternoons, because the program is somewhat loosey-goosey. Different performers may pop in to introduce or read the stories, and the schedule is kid-friendly. A new group of books will be selected for the next run, sometime later in the summer. But if you want to catch the delightful Wendy Lehr as the primary reader, this is your date, and it’s a great way to introduce your kids to the sometimes scary interior of the playhouse. Jungle Theater, (612) 822-7063
ART
On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early 20th Century American Art
Weisman Art Museum, through August 4
From TV ads with roving cursor arrows to horror films about chat-room predators, our so-called entertainment elite is deeply fixated on the culture and symbolism of the Internet. One hundred years ago, it was the burgeoning vogue of vaudeville theater and moving pictures that blew the American zeitgeist wide open, and painters of the day were no less fascinated by its new-school guiles. In both cases, the acceleration of mass culture and exploding modes of entertainment provided working artists with a wealth of inspiration—visual and contextual—and it doesn’t take a student of meta-anything to appreciate the significance. Among the artifacts on display at this compelling Weisman exhibition (headed for other U.S. museums after this summer) is a Howard Thain painting of New York City’s Times Square circa 1925. Even then, electrified signage and beckoning searchlights signaled the arrival of a bigger, more spectacle-hungry viewing public. Could Thain have actually foreseen the coming of MTV’s TRL? Probably not (although Carson Daly does appear in certain translations of Nostradamus). But his work here, along with vintage posters, photographs, and paintings by the likes of Edward Hopper and Walt Kuhn, demonstrate a keen awareness that popular culture is as much a mirror as it is a screen. An accompanying series of free lectures and film events delve deeper into select topics. Weisman Museum, (612) 626-474

Shirin Neshat
Walker Art Center, June 14-September 8
Vignettes of Life
Walker Art Center, June 5-7
Summer augurs the arrival of the high season for movies of all varieties. Looking for art-house titles? Why not go to the biggest, baddest art house around? The Walker’s healthy film and video commitments come into full flower in June, and this year is no different. As if to both elucidate and erase the line between “time arts”(i.e. video and filmic images) and “moviemaking” (more traditional narrative cinema), our clever friends on Vineland Place are turning three galleries into six screening rooms, where the works of Shirin Neshat will be installed. This Iranian-born artist explores the tensions between her Islamic past and her American present on numerous simultaneous screenings and sound recordings. If this nonlinear, artsy approach to “moving pictures” bugs, stay tuned. The Walker’s film department is also launching a brief documentary series from three French filmmakers. “Vignettes of Life” is a nice slice of contemporary verite, three films each set in a microcosmic community—a Yiddish neighborhood in Paris, family farms in rural France, and schoolchildren on recess at a prep school. (Beware that, in this case, film is the more fleeting medium: “Vignettes’” three films will screen once each on June 5, 6, and 7). Both the exhibit and the series offer refreshing evidence that not every rule has yet been broken, and not every boundary has yet been pushed, when it comes to the cinematic arts. Walker Art Center, (612) 375-7622

BOOKS
What a Woman Must Do
By Faith Sullivan
Available now
A few years ago, when Minnesota author Faith Sullivan’s novel The Empress of One (for which she won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize) had just been released, a friend of ours mentioned that Sullivan had recently accepted an invitation to attend her diddly little neighborhood book group as a guest author. How cool is that? So Minnesotan. Anyway, our friend could not speak highly enough of Sullivan, how stunning it was to hear her read from her work, how approachable she was, how intelligent, articulate, and just plain friendly. All of this makes the thought of attending a reading of Sullivan’s latest work, What a Woman Must Do, that much more alluring. Set in the fictional town of Harvester, Minnesota in 1952, What a Woman Must Do traces the connections of three women: Bess, 17, Harriet, 39, and Kate, 59, all of whom have been affected by the car accident that killed Bess’s parents. The novel pulls readers through the twists of destiny—death, love, and dreams of the future—that threaten to come between the three women. Sullivan, who grew up in Minnesota towns herself, applies her deft talents as a writer with believable authenticity to the rhythms of small-town life, while she concurrently addresses the eternal themes of love, loyalty, and family. Sullivan reads at Ruminator Books in Minneapolis on June 3, (651) 699-0587

Readings
Don Scheese
Ruminator Books (St. Paul), June 6
Few people remember that beatnik legend Jack Kerouac spent part of his wayward youth perched literally in the clouds, employed by the federal government—he was a lookout for forest fires in the High Cascades. From high atop what he called Mt. Desolation, he could survey most of what is now known as Glacier National Park. We don’t doubt that this experience was no less enlightening than it’s ever been throughout history. (Moses, Jesus, and Buddha—to name just a few great spirits—went “up to the mountain” for a better view, both literally and spiritually.) Denizens of Northern Minnesota know, too, that there are dozens of fire towers scattered across our wilder sections. And with the advent of GPS systems, high-flying heat-seeking satellites, most fire towers have fallen into public hands. So much the better, since now you don’t have to be wearing a badge and a uniform to shimmy up many of these glorious perches. Don Scheese offers his own memoir,
Mountains of Memory, after more than a decade as a lookout. A thoughtful book that provokes us into action—pulling out the old-fashioned topo maps and scanning for our own vertiginous adventures. Ruminator Books in St. Paul, (651) 699-0587
Jules Feiffer
Barnes & Noble (Edina), June 12
Like all great artists and authors, Jules Feiffer was not a fully formed world-class creator until he’d composed a children’s book. Remember that E.B. White, his brilliant colleague and contemporary at The New Yorker, didn’t really gild his impeccable reputation until he’d composed Charlotte’s Web. This rite of passage separating the great from the legendary is now a truism. Everyone from Garrison Keillor to Maya Angelou has put pen to paper on behalf of the pre-school set. And while this is often an exercise in pretension and self-congratulation, Feiffer has been creating award-winning children’s books since 1993. His new book, By the Side of the Road, explores the cliché of the classic family road trip in which an irate dad asks the kids to behave or he’ll leave them on the shoulder. One of them takes Dad up on the threat, and spends the rest of his life right there where Dad left him, growing up by the side of the road. We sense this one’s bound for immortality like Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, or Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Barnes & Noble, Edina (952) 920-1060

Restaurants
Hell’s Kitchen
89 S. 10th Street, Minneapolis
We descended on Hell’s Kitchen on a Monday, the four of us, expecting the hellfire and brimstone and everlasting chaos of a kitchen under siege. Or, at least, we envisioned the antipode to the white tablecloth, fresh-flower breakfast place. Why do we expect Hell to be so over-populated? Perhaps Salvation Sundays, with brunch from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., attract a bigger, noisier crowd, confident the gospel music will perfume the multitude of sins right out of the air. This quiet Monday noon we could see right down to the paint-it-black-you-devil floor and the blood-red doors and the fiery licks around the edges. So we ate. We almost made a meal of great bread with salted butter—to hell with special diets—and sweet marmalade and jam and the freshest sort of peanut butter ever. Then we remembered we hadn’t yet become complete gluttons, so we continued with crab cakes and walleye and B.L.T.’s, ham and pears grilled with Swiss cheese, fries and fruit and the biggest, blackest, yes, blackberries you’ve ever seen. We could have made a meal of the side dishes and been no less sinful. So many forms of comfort food, so deceptively simple and tempting, we’ll undoubtedly return to sample more. If the scene is vaguely familiar, remember your last journey to Hell—your previous Night (there is a pungent Bloody Beer Mary to cure what ails you), or your secret tryst in the old Du Jour’s Casual Café. Same place, a couple of familiar faces (they always said that would happen down below), but an entirely new and rakish breakfast/lunch joint on the scene. Check out the art on the walls. It’s no sin to look. Hell’s Kitchen, (612) 332-4700

Key’s Cafe
767 Raymond Ave., St. Paul
Going out for breakfast on a rainy Saturday morning, lingering over those third and fourth cups of regular old coffee, chatting with the pretty young waitress about the smell of the rain in spring and the striking beauty of her just-dyed hair—what could be nicer? Key’s Cafe on Raymond Avenue in St. Paul (at the University Avenue intersection) feels like a lucky find, something you can use as filler in conversation later with casual friends or to impress potential dates (“Well, actually, there’s this fabulous little one-of-a-kind breakfast spot I know if you don’t mind a short drive…”). But, alas, it’s just one franchise of nine metro cafes that your potential date probably already knows about. Oh well. But you can have a terrific plate of French toast, crispy hashbrowns, a variety of specialty omelettes, and pretty much every other necessary element of a tried-and-true breakfast diner, including a distinctly Minnesotan egg creation called the Loon Omelet, replete with wild rice, mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, and provolone, under a cream sauce graced with onions, garlic, white wine, and mushrooms. Last time we went, we hung out for two full hours and no one batted an eye, even though the place was packed and we ate lightly. But maybe that’s because we dared to ask the waitress just what it was she had done to her hair to make it so spectacular. What we didn’t bother to ask was why the women’s bathroom included a toothbrush and toothpaste on the soap counter. After all, a little mystery is a good thing. Key’s Cafe (651) 646-5756

Babani’s Kurdish Restaurant
544 St. Peter Street, St. Paul
Tucked away in downtown St. Paul (but then again, what isn’t invariably tucked away down there?), Babani’s is rumored to be the only Kurdish restaurant in the United States. (Quick geography lesson: Kurdistan is a mountainous region occupying 74,000 square miles in southeast Turkey, northwest Iran, northeast Iraq, and northeast Syria—with a population of 25 million people!) Fleeing a Kurdish refugee camp in Turkey, owners Tanya Fuad and Rodwan Nakshabandi arrived in Minnesota and worked at separate jobs until the opportunity to open Babani’s arrived. Meat lovers can enjoy exquisite fare, such as the tawa, featuring chicken sauteed in lemon and spices, baked potato, green pepper, and onion. Vegans will delight in the variety of meatless dishes, including dolmas, biryani, and the Sheik Babani. Forgo your dinner beverage of choice and order the Kurdish lemonade, a sweet thirst-quenching concoction. Perfect, if the weather ever warms up again. Babani’s (651) 602-9964