Year: 2004

The person who has nothing—there’s one in all our lives. Perhaps they’re bereft of worldly possessions by divine will or karmic revelation, or maybe they’ve simply “downshifted” into intentional thinglessness. Either way, these folks can stump even the most discerning gift giver! Our “Aught for Naught” gift basket is the perfect answer. Also a good choice for that annoying aunt who’s forever carping about the “secularization of the holy day.”

Walking stick: Our collapsible “staff of life” is hand-carved in your choice of gopher wood, cypress, or olive

Stone-ground mustard plaster: Or “poultice.” It’s just fun to say!

Helmut Lang hairshirt: Hand-loomed using yak hair gathered by Mongolian craftswomen, tailored with Lang’s incomparable long, lean cut

Ecumenical holy water: Blessed by a full complement of religious authorities: rabbi, yogi, imam, priest, Hindu and Buddhist monks

Salt: Edible and tenderable, our fleur de sel is
collected on the shores of the Dead Sea by seven vestal virgins

Aerospace-grade titanium fish hooks: Teach a man to fish, and he eats… a lot of tartar sauce!

Flint, steel, and char cloth: Don’t wait for Prometheus to find you, grasshopper! Flint doubles as a razor,
if hairlessness is your path

Twice-baked amaranth crackers: Hearty and historically correct

All packed in our signature basket: woven in the authentic Egyptian dynastic tradition with hand-harvested reeds from the banks of the River Nile

Wim Wenders’ cult classic follows the slow unfolding of a damaged man as he literally comes in from the desert and learns to talk again, with the aid of his seven-year-old son. Artful and anti-Hollywood, the film, with its lush cinematography and a haunting soundtrack by slide guitarist Ry Cooder, makes the story stick in the craw for days after the lights come on.

To hell with exploitative kitsch-mongers and the mean folk who like to point out that he died on the toilet: We still have a soft spot for the King. We remember that he not only had a truly dreamy voice and an electrifying stage presence—he was also a real actor. At least he wanted to be. The man dreamed of being the next Marlon Brando, and longed for a serious script that would show off more than his sideburns. Instead, Elvis got stuck with the likes of Love Me Tender, a 1956 Western that finds him shaking his booty on the wild frontier. His first Hollywood movie, it set the standard for a string of goofy second-rate films to come, which have become classics—OK, perhaps kitsch classics—in their own right.

It’s a rather cruel indulgence to base a film on a childhood game that tends to revolve around abusing a shy classmate with glasses—but there’s no denying that often, that’s just the kind of thing moviegoers are ravenous for. Underdog owner of the Average Joe gym (Vince Vaughn) faces foreclosure unless he can raise fifty grand in three days. His solution is to hold a dodgeball tourney, offering a huge jackpot to the winners. To add to the tension, Vaughn is pitted against the slimy owner of the Globo Gym (a preening, Fu-Manchued Ben Stiller). Who will be the last man dodging? Cameos from William Shatner, Lance Armstrong, and David Hasselhoff add to the sublime dimwittedness. The DVD offers an alternate ending and bloopers footage, which is only slightly less funny than the final cut.

The plight of the unlucky Baudelaire orphans springs to big screen life in this fantastical adaptation of Lemony Snicket’s deliciously dark young adult novels. The Baudelaires, cloaked in dark garments and wearing appropriately long faces, run in a gothic world made of flying buttresses, black seas, and amethyst skies. The film boasts an all-star cast, with Jude Law as Lemony Snicket himself, the author hard at work, creating his harrowing tale even as we watch it unfold. Jim Carrey returns to his commedia roots as Count Olaf, the orphans’ evil thespian uncle, who keeps trying to steal their inheritance. After narrowly escaping the Count’s diabolical plan to knock them off in a train wreck, the orphans find respite with their jittery Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep). But the unfortunate Baudelaires can’t successfully elude their nasty uncle; he keeps popping up in disguise, hatching scheme after dirty scheme to get at their loot.

In 1996 I was a junior at the University of Minnesota when a friend invited me along on her family’s annual outing to see A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie Theater. At the time, I was taking Gender and Geopolitics, a class that had me deeply engrossed in the study of socioeconomic strata. Naturally, I thought their little family tradition tediously bourgeois.

At the age of twenty, I had never before participated in such a holiday ritual—not A Christmas Carol, not Black Nativity, not The Nutcracker, not the Lorie Line Christmas Show. My own family lived in a working-class exurb. We weren’t the kind to trek into the city for Dayton’s twelfth-floor holiday exhibit, let alone a play at the Guthrie Theater. Up to then, my theatergoing experience consisted of obligatory field trips and rinky-dink school plays. But beneath the skepticism with which I regarded my inaugural Guthrie visit, there was a longing to participate in a holiday tradition for privileged folks. I was curious about why my friend’s family, most notably her mother, and so many others like her, went to the same show year after year. And why did she demand full participation from every family member, and why did they comply (albeit each in his own way—the father, deferentially; my new friend, apathetically; her youngest sister, the resident theater geek, enthusiastically)?

The Christmas Carol production was altogether underwhelming. What struck me, however, both then and now, was the ritual preamble that led us to the theater lobby: The pre-show feast at my friend’s split-level suburban home, Little Drummer Boy on the car stereo as we exited I-94, walking up Vineland Place with the icy air cutting through my nylons.

Eight years on, my friend and her sister live on opposite coasts, and are therefore relieved of their Christmas Carol duties. I, on the other hand, have now seen the show several times, usually with friends raised under similarly orthodox circumstances. I have softened to this tradition and grown to appreciate the opportunity to don some gay apparel for a night out with loved ones. Each year’s production—not just A Christmas Carol but the pre-and post-show routines surrounding it, no matter which family I tag along with—is virtually a carbon copy of the one before; the only variable, really, is the increasing presence of corporate sponsorship.

A Christmas Carol, of course, is an institution. To some, it’s a smart business practice that nurtures the financial health of a community asset; to others, it’s a crass cash cow. The play earns about twenty percent of the Guthrie’s annual ticket revenue, so there’s plenty of demand, regardless of the heavy rotation. Other theaters have their signature holiday heavyweights, most as immutable as the Guthrie’s: There are Ballet Minnesota’s Nutcracker, Theatre Latté Da’s Christmas Carole Petersen, Illusion’s Christmas show with Miss Richfield, among many others.

Of all the holiday mainstays, Penumbra Theatre’s Black Nativity undergoes the most adventuresome transformation from year to year, skipping across venues and trading up performers. But in 2001, the company premiered a radically re-imagined, rather avant-garde version of Langston Hughes’ Christmas vision, infused with jazz rather than the usual gospel flavor. Black Nativity had been gaining popularity the previous few years, therefore earning an increasing share of Penumbra’s overall revenue. The company made a bold move that year by moving Black Nativity to the Pantages Theater, a far larger venue than the Fitzgerald, the show’s previous home. The hope, it would seem, was to beckon even more people to their show by planting it in the middle of the Hennepin Theater District, where hordes of fair-weather theatergoers already make annual pilgrimages.
Black Nativity nose-dived at the box-office that year, failing to meet revenue projections assigned to it by the perennially cash-strapped Penumbra Company. While folks at Penumbra acknowledge that 2001’s Black Nativity strayed precariously far from the show’s original spirit, they blame the shortfall on the venue, saying capacity at Pantages was greater than demand for tickets. Although the company resurrected its gospel version of Black Nativity the following year and has stuck close by it since, audiences seem to have trouble forgiving the Penumbra for tampering with their favorite show. Facing reduced ticket demand and a seemingly insurmountable deficit, Penumbra cancelled Black Nativity in 2003 and is putting the 2004 production on its quaint home stage, a venue with markedly less seating than those from previous years. If they’ve learned anything by the Guthrie’s example, Penumbra will cast Black Nativity in bronze, rebuilding it as a permanent, reliable standard for families to include among their holiday traditions.

The Christmas Carol experience I had as a young college student is hardly unique: It’s safe to say that most of the people flocking to this year’s staging didn’t see Guthrie productions of Death of a Salesman or Sex Habits of American Women. They’re more likely to be among those milling about the Hennepin Theater District for The Lion King and Phantom of the Opera. In other words, these are “entry-level” theatergoers, like me circa 1996, which is precisely why the Guthrie does not include A Christmas Carol in its subscription packages. Of course, this breed of theatergoer is probably more common than season subscribers, which makes the once-a-year holiday show a lucrative venture.

Financial dependence on holiday revenue is not unique to theater, of course; retailers and restaurants also earn hugely disproportionate slices of their revenue pies between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. ’Tis the season for personal budgets to go on hiatus. This time of year, millions of us are happy to lighten our wallets in exchange for mood-enhancing holiday novelties, be it $24.99 for a candy-cane-spangled turtleneck or $150 for tickets for the family to see The Nutcracker Suite. Complaints about materialism during the season of peace and goodwill to all mankind are now as much a holiday tradition as maxed-out credit cards, hangovers, and the pressure to give (and get) till it hurts. Underpinning all of this festive self-indulgence is a conservative desire to bathe ourselves in comfort and familiarity, to revel in family and friends and A Christmas Carol—in other words, the holidays are no time for the new, the challenging, or the experimental. We want familiar old transgressions and redemptions.

So maybe that explains why non-repertory theaters have been half-empty during the holidays in recent years. Not that smaller theater companies haven’t tried to appeal to our sentimentality with their own mirthful Christmas shows. Open Eye Figure Theatre, a small but renowned puppet and theater company, staged a joy-riding version of the nativity with The Holiday Pageant, which played to marginal success for three consecutive years before taking this season off. Other ambitious companies needing to pad their pockets produce modest versions of the classics. Actors Theater of Minnesota does its own Christmas Carol, for example, while Ballet of the Dolls and Minnesota Dance Theatre are noted for their interpretations of The Nutcracker.

This year, however, Ballet of the Dolls has decided to take Cinderella to the Christmas ball, pointing to another competitive strategy for a saturated holiday market: the staging of a tried-and-true classic from the company repertoire (yes, more shows that lots of us have already seen). Among other iconoclastic companies, the Jungle Theater has established its own tradition with Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood, a show that has gone gangbusters on its stage during four previous runs (despite seeming too textual for the average holiday theatergoer’s palette). Theatre de la Jeune Lune, too, is known for slating reprises; this year it offers Molière’s The Miser, a production that won robust ticket sales (and critical enthusiasm) wh
en it played in Boston earlier this year.

Grinch and Scrooge aside, nobody laments this seasonal redundancy like theater critics. To spare its writers, the local newsweekly has a policy of not covering productions it has previously reviewed (which detrimentally affects companies like Open Eye Figure Theatre, which can’t afford advertising and depend upon publicity and word-of-mouth). Critics at the two daily papers, accustomed to spending their time on new work, awake each December like Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day. Each year they endeavor to dig deep for something “fresh” to say about A Christmas Carol and Black Nativity, reducing them to trivialities such as recounting each show’s already well-known legacy, or noting the gracefulness with which cast members are aging.

Competition among the Guthrie, Penumbra, Ballet Minnesota, and Theatre Latté Da—all of whom cling to December ticket revenue—has only grown fiercer with the advent of touring and off-Broadway Christmas productions. Armed with New York City glitz and colossal advertising budgets, shows like Scrooge—The Musical (starring yesteryear’s TV icon Richard Chamberlain, which just wrapped up a run at the Orpheum Theatre) arrive annually to plunder entry-level theater audiences. (This year, the Twin Cities has escaped the mother of all these productions: The Radio City Christmas Spectacular starring the Rockettes, although the show continues to maraud all over the rest of the country.)

Minnesotans and millions of other non-New Yorkers devour these shows in part because they’re imported, and thereby play upon our cultural inferiority complex. It’s hard not to fall for the bigger-is-better hype that attends most traveling Broadway shows—and it is also true that most of our homegrown companies lack the financial wherewithal to match Broadway’s Busbee Berkeley aesthetic. Like the New York Yankees, Broadway shows offer the biggest spectacle and the best talent that money can buy. Devoted patrons of local companies might find this glut of outsiders and opportunism tacky, but on the other hand, it could be that this exploitation of holiday sentimentality and tradition is simply meeting demand with supply.

Come December, theatergoers are in no mood for thought-provoking stories or political discourse (especially this year). Who, besides a jaded critic, really wants to confront dilemmas, or ponder poetic texts, or be challenged with avant-garde stagings? And we most certainly do not want sex, not right now (though nudie-theater is a big sell the rest of the year—the Jungle, the Guthrie, and the newly defunct Eye of the Storm, for example, have all used nudity with great success in recent years). For now, we will tolerate moderate conflict as long as it has a warm, fuzzy resolution. We also want dancing. And carols. We want mean-uncle reform. We want the biggest present under the tree to be ours, and we want to know what’s inside.
A Christmas Carol endures because it reconnects us with a time when life (and Christmas) seemed as simple as milk and cookies. The holidays put a strain on all of us, but we’re still longing for those carefree Christmases of our youth. We want to wake up fresh and eager and innocent at five a.m. on Christmas morning. What did Santa get me? Another pair of flannel pajamas? How many melting moments can I shove into my mouth when mom’s not looking?

Christmas is truly our most childish holiday, but I suspect we all want in on the magic. So we bake lots of cookies and buy lots of presents, just like our parents did. And if we grew up attending A Christmas Carol every year, we go again. (Those who loathe this cyclical dumbing-down of theater can always spend December at the cinema, where a host of artful movies get released to vie for Oscar nominations.) Like the ornaments we resurrect each year to trim the tree, A Christmas Carol looks as it did thirty years ago—making it more reliable than even a Broadway show. So long as we can keep watching it through young eyes, it will always be passably fun.

So who can blame me and the rest of the theatergoing public for not wanting to spoil our happy reminiscences with the likes of Anton Chekhov and Bertolt Brecht? There’ll be plenty of time during the doldrums of January and February for challenging and risky work to counter the wet-rag discourse pervading our increasingly capitalistic theaters. After the Nutcrackers are packed away and Dickens’ Christmas ghosts are laid to rest for another year, I will look forward to Penumbra’s Slippery When Wet and the Guthrie’s Oedipus the King, and to the next offerings from the likes of Frank Theatre and Ten Thousand Things. But for now, I figure, why not buy into the December brain freeze?

Currently, Howard Hughes is best remembered for being a reclusive freak incapacitated by obsessive-compulsive disorder. Martin Scorsese is out to change that with this biopic that focuses on Hughes as a pioneering renaissance man, integral to the evolution of electronics, aviation, and Las Vegas casinos. Not to mention his role as an eccentric Hollywood film producer and a major player with the hottest leading ladies of his time. Coming off the heels of the crap-tastic Gangs of New York, Scorsese once again teams up with Leonardo DiCaprio to bring Howie’s pre-1946 story to the screen. If Martin should miss the mark again, fear not—there’s a better source for the real story: Read the insanely compelling Howard Hughes: The Untold Story by Peter Harry Brown and call it a day.

In the beginning, there was the self-help book. With its stirring message of movin’-on-up empowerment and its ten directives for highly effective living, the Bible is the cornerstone on which today’s human-potential industry is founded. Yet the products from self-help authors never garner the same respect as the book that started it all. No other class of contemporary writers grapples as nakedly or as forcefully with life’s deepest, most enduring questions—How can I make others like me? How can I make money? How can I get laid?—but to what ends? Newspaper book reviewers would sooner appraise Danielle Steel’s annual Christmas letter than Tony Robbins’ latest volume of psychological jumping jacks. Citadels of higher learning are even more indifferent: Courses at both UC Berkeley and Harvard University have celebrated the drive-by iambs of rapper Tupac Shakur, but where are the seminars devoted to self-help giant Zig Ziglar, who, in between advising CEOs and government officials, has been helping car salesmen and real-estate agents maximize their productivity for almost four decades now?

Success soothes the cold slap of indifference, of course. Every year, the publishing industry produces more than 3,500 self-help titles, and every year the sickly, the fat, the lonely, and the indebted turn a handful of these books into bustling cottage industries. According to publishing industry research firm Simba Information, self-help books took in $650 million in 2003. Similarly, Tom Butler-Bowdon, a self-help sommelier who has penned a handy guide to the genre, 50 Self-Help Classics, estimates that over the last hundred years, upwards of half a billion copies of self-help books have garlanded our wretched planet. On the one hand, it makes you question their efficacy. On the other, imagine how miserable the war-torn, disease-ridden twentieth century would have been without the salves of Dale Carnegie, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, and John Gray.

As successful as self-help has been in print, however, it took television to fully capitalize on its potential. Doubt, pain, joy, faith, embarrassment, hopelessness, triumph—the buffet of supersized emotions generated when people attempt to radically transform themselves is endless, and shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Extreme Makeover, and The Swan lay out a feast for emotional voyeurs. Suddenly, self-help isn’t just utilitarian anymore; it’s entertainment, too.

So why don’t more self-help publishers play up the vicarious appeal of their various titles? Indeed, as the industry evolves, it’s getting more entertaining all the time. With thousands of titles glutting the market, it gets harder and harder to come up with a fresh angle, so self-help authors, who are by nature overachievers anyway, work extra hard to develop winning ideas. Sometimes fate intervenes, creating unprecedented scenarios ready to be strip-mined. For a genuinely interesting account of capitalism’s adjustment to a Code Orange world, see the most perversely upbeat title of the fall publishing season, Dan Carrison’s Business Under Fire: How Israeli Companies are Succeeding in the Face of Terror—And What We Can Learn From Them. (Sample question: “After a terrorist attack, do you call your customers, to do a little PR?”)

More common than a new angle, however, is a new target audience. In today’s one-size-fits-me world, the generalist approach of self-help classics like How To Win Friends and Influence People and The Power of Positive Thinking is countered by titles designed for increasingly specific audiences. And while you may not be an erotically challenged Bible-thumper or a would-be hip-hop Lothario yourself, what better way to learn about the aspirations, ideals, and fears of such creatures than by reading the self-help literature that’s been tailored especially for them?

Before reading Real Questions, Real Answers About Sex: The Complete Guide to Intimacy as God Intended, for example, I was under the impression that Christians already know far more about sex than they actually want to. After all, Hollywood and various other engines of our depraved pop culture are poisoning us all with a permanent smog of hardcore obscenity—according to faith-based cultural exterminators like the American Family Association and Morality in Media.

Yet Real Questions, Real Answers suggests that there are still many Christians with only the most remedial knowledge of carnal hydraulics. And apparently they’re aching to know more. Can a penis break? Must I vacuum to earn sex? How can we live with Grandpa’s exhibitionism? These are just a few of the queries that married Christian sexperts Dr. Louis and Melissa McBurney field in their frank look at the ins and outs of consecrated crotch action. Alas, being a Christian sexpert is sort of like being a three-fingered pianist: Against a long list of forbidden fruit in love’s secret garden (porn, penis rings, cybersex, stranger lust, anal sex, bondage gear, homosexuality), the McBurneys valiantly insist that a wedding ring is the hottest sex toy of all. It’s not a very convincing argument, but they give it a good try.

Unlike God, who has reservations about vibrators, all-powerful Fox News deity Bill O’Reilly enthusiastically endorses them. This, at least, is the claim of Andrea Mackris, the former Fox News producer who says that O’Reilly frantically self-helped himself during degrading, nonconsensual phone calls he made to her last summer. With Mackris leveling her charges just weeks after the publication of O’Reilly’s latest foray into advice-mongering, The O’Reilly Factor for Kids: A Survival Guide for America’s Families, opportunistic critics have jumped all over the story: What kind of role model, they demand, is a man who commits extramarital phone rape?

The truth, however, is that The O’Reilly Factor for Kids could have used a heavy dose of the surreal imagination that O’Reilly allegedly displayed while subjecting Mackris to imaginary tales of Caribbean shower sex starring her, him, a loofah, and, in a positively Dr. Seussian touch, a falafel. Minus such whimsical lapses, The O’Reilly Factor for Kids doesn’t have much going for it.

Theoretically, this book should have been a spectacular mismatch between author and audience. But instead of bitch-slapping trembling tots into cowed submission, as he does with the guests on his TV show, O’Reilly plays it like a butch Mr. Rogers, gently instructing his charges to avoid cigarettes and to be nice to their parents. The aggressively uninspired tone is somewhat amusing, especially since O’Reilly had a co-author. (It didn’t really take two human beings to craft the sentence “Parties are the dessert of life, not the main course,” did it?) And in an effort to show he’s down with the shorties, O’Reilly occasionally interjects instant-message shorthand into his narrative. But after a few perfunctory IMHO’s and TTYL’s, you can tell his heart’s not really in it. Cyber-banter’s the communication style of a younger generation; O’Reilly no doubt prefers the phone.

With the exception of Deepak Chopra, contemporary self-help tends to be dominated by extremely white men like O’Reilly, John Gray, Tony Robbins, and Richard Carlson. Thus, it’s refreshing to see the emergence of Tariq “K-Flex” Nasheed, author of The Art of Mackin’. Originally published in 2000 by a small press in Chicago, Mackin’ has reportedly sold more than 100,000 copies over the last four years. Now, Riverhead Books, the publisher of best-selling financial guru Suze Orman and best-selling guru guru the Dalai Lama, is bringing out a new edition of Nasheed’s book.

Going a step further than the spiritually minded Lama and the money-oriented Orman, Nasheed proclaims his ability to get “the paper, the power, and the pussy.” In the pages of The Art of Mackin’, though, it’s the pursuit of the third “P” that claims most of his attention. With a combination of Machiavellian dispassion and
hip-hop posturing that often reads like unintentional satire—just a few steps away from Tim Meadows’ old Saturday Night Live character, the Ladies’ Man—Nasheed lays out his rules for using “pimp game as a form of manipulation (not deceit) in order to get what [you] want from women.”
With its emphasis on honesty, logic, and self-discipline, The Art of Mackin’ is a weirdly decent book, and yet also a depressing one. Based on Nasheed’s characterizations, macks aren’t misogynistic so much as misanthropic, fundamentally cynical about human nature, and obsessed with looking out for number one. For a book devoted to sexual attainment, there’s virtually no sense of pleasure in The Art of Mackin’, and certainly no romance. In Nasheed’s worldview, women aren’t people one actually connects with on any sort of human level, even temporarily. And they’re not even sex objects to hedonistically enjoy. Instead, they’re merely stereotypes to analyze, codes to crack.

Still, if macks seem as unsympathetic and humorless as sharks, don’t judge them too quickly. They may display an almost preternatural self-assurance, but as The Art of Mackin’ reveals, they’re just as susceptible to bouts of low self-esteem as any of us. In such instances, Nasheed advises, the key is to look on the bright side of things. “Start giving positive affirmations to yourself such as, ‘I have a nice smile. I’m a fun brother to be around. I’m smart. My game is tight. I have a nice speaking voice,’ etc.” For self-help voyeurs, it’s money shots like this that make the genre so rewarding: Even when you just go looking for entertainment, you end up learning something new!

Get to know the people who named their beloved son Gay Focker. The director and stars behind Meet the Parents, which achieved a certain cult status, return with a tale about the in-laws, demonstrating on film that concept familiar to any couple: Your parents are just as weird as mine. The hyper-chill Fockers are played by a tightly permed Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman. Their son’s marriage forces their world to collide with that of the waspy Byrnes (Robert DeNiro and Blythe Danner, performing with stick-up-posterior perfection). And as Gaylord “Greg” Focker, Ben Stiller reprises the role that has made his career: The fumbling, angry man who just can’t seem to get anything right.