It’s a happy coincidence that Theatre Unbound’s all-female version of The Tempest opens on the heels of the all-male “original practices” production of Measure for Measure by Shakespeare’s Globe Theater company, which is a guest of the Guthrie for this presentation. We’re waiting on the edges of our seats to see what these talented actresses do with Caliban, the deformed, bestial slave boy. The Tempest is a fantastical, supra-human play, richly layered with spirits, magic, young love, and, of course, spellbinding prose. 2301 E. Franklin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-721-1186; www.theatreunbound.com
Author: rakemag
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From St. Louis >> Bowling 101
In the first display at the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame in downtown St. Louis, a caveman mannequin with an oversized cranium and pronounced underbite grasps a huge stone. Underneath, a card explains: “THE BEGINNING OF BOWLING. Is this how bowling began, with a stone-age hunter tossing a rock at a formation of bones? No one is sure.”
That uncertainty has never stopped bowling historians from concocting imaginative theories for the apparently hardwired human need to bowl. In Bowling, author Carol Schunk offers one such unique hypothesis: “The Romans did much of their fighting in hilly areas, so one of their tactical maneuvers was to roll rocks down a pass to attract or bowl over their oncoming enemy. The soldiers practiced to develop skill in this tactic and before long began to ‘play’ this game for fun.”
Mark Vesley, who holds a Ph.D. in Roman life from the University of Minnesota, disagrees with this theory. “The story about bowling coming from Romans dropping rocks on Christians for sport is an antique urban legend,” Vesley says. “Sure, they’d roll or drop boulders on enemies during wartime … but similarity doesn’t prove derivation.”
Joe Falcaro counters the Hall of Fame’s version of the sport’s Fred Flintstone-style evolution with a bit of creationist theory (bowling as gift from God) in Bowling for All: “Some historians even ponder on the possibility that the boys in the Garden of Eden used to throw giant pebbles at a lineup of pointed stones.”
A stroll through the museum reveals additional evidence of bowling as a bounty of divine benevolence. A British holy man named Winfrid, it is claimed, exported the game to Germany while converting the Saxon tribes to Christianity around 700 A.D. Winfrid sanctified bowling by proclaiming that the kegel, or pin, was actually the heide, or devil. With each pin knocked over, a blow was said to be delivered against evil and another victory chalked up for Christ. The pagans struck back, however, by bludgeoning the poor priest as he confirmed a new batch of converts, which resulted in Winfrid’s canonization (as Saint Boniface) and his position as the de facto Patron Saint of Bowling.
The Grimm Brothers took time off from writing their fairytales to challenge Winfred’s status as the man who introduced bowling to the Germans. The Grimms claimed that early Teutonic tribes bowled in Deutschland long before the Brits. German keglers, or bowlers, in fact, would stake their livestock on the outcome of a single game. In an attempt to eradicate this sort of gambling the government in Frankfurt banned bowling in the 1440s. When, in 1468, angry keglers took to the streets in the world’s first populist bowling strike, the politicians relented and reopened the lanes.
The early obsession with bowling eventually gave the sport a bad reputation. Soon even Satan was being depicted as a bowler. While Christians believed they were knocking over the devil with each roll, medieval drawings showed Lucifer striking back by bowling a human skull to shatter Christ’s cross. The eye sockets and single nose hole provided a nice three-holed ball similar to modern designs.
In medieval times, a myth was circulated that if an innocent man was condemned to death, the sentencing judge was doomed to spend his afterlife bowling with the victims’ severed heads. Thus, a man of the cloth who did not follow Christ’s example would spend eternity bowling.
Just as Martin Luther attempted to address what he saw as the failings of the Christian church by nailing his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church, so did he preside over bowling’s reformation in the sixteenth century. Luther established the rules for the sport and declared that exactly nine pins should be used in a proper game. He also indulged himself with a private alley.
Sir Francis Drake, another early proponent of the game, was said to become hugely irritated when interrupted while bowling. In the summer of 1588, after sailing around the world, Drake was confronted by a frantic messenger announcing the impending arrival of Spain’s “Invincible Armada” intent on avenging Drake’s plundering of Spanish settlements in the New World. As the story goes, Drake calmed the anxious messenger with classic British sangfroid before continuing—and winning—his final frames. This undoubtedly inspired him to rout the conquistadors at the Battle of Gravelines.
In 1626, a Dutch governor named Peter Minuit bought a lush island at the mouth of the Hudson River from the local Indians for approximately twenty-four dollars’ worth of beads and cloth, and shortly thereafter set up a bowling green on the southern tip of the island, which at the time was known as New Amsterdam.
Envious of this Dutch paradise, King Charles II of England gave his brother James, the Duke of York, all of New Netherland, including America’s first bowling green. Faced with British warships, the Dutch colonists capitulated and surrendered their beloved bowling lawn. The victors promptly rewrote bowling history to give earlier explorer—and Englishman—Henry Hudson credit for introducing nine-pin skittle bowling to New York.
A large area of the Hall of Fame is dedicated to modern bowling media, but noticeably missing are any references to the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL), Camper Van Beethoven’s classic hit “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” the annual Punk Rock Bowling Tournament in Las Vegas, Bowling for Columbine, or the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski. Curator Jim Baltz steered me to the museum’s library—a storage locker with hundreds of bowling magazines—where visitors can research bowling history for forty dollars an hour (a rate that inexplicably doubles to eighty dollars if you spend more than eight hours). Instead, I opted for a photo of the bowling pin car in the basement and the opportunity to roll a few lines on either the renovated classic lanes, which still require human pin setters, or the museum’s ultramodern lanes, featuring the latest pin-setting technology.
The International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame may seem to overstate the importance of this humble game, but signs remind visitors that bowling is the largest participatory sport in the world. According to the American Bowling Congress, more Americans bowl than vote; an estimated ninety-one million Americans bowled in 1998 compared to the paltry seventy-three million who voted in congressional elections that year.—Eric Dregni
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Mind Over Matter, Body Under Design: Body Works by KeySook Geum
These designs are intended more for the mind than the body. Take Geum’s “web dress,” an ephemeral creation that weaves wire and air to represent the worldwide web, the hold technology has on our lives, and the rise of an interwoven global culture that is blurring the distinctions between countries. The Korean designer works in cloth, as well, and has swathed actual bodies in it for major theater productions, but her “body works” remind us that all clothing is really just a distraction, or a place to hide. Incorporating wire, silk, beads, stones, and feathers, the elegant gowns and coats in this exhibit aren’t exactly wearable, but then, we think the same thing of the saggy-butt jeans and Ts with rude messages (“Shut the F’ Up”) that we see on the street around here. 1985 Buford Ave., St. Paul; 612-624-7434; goldstein.che.umn.edu
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Renata Palubinskas: The March
At Palubinskas’ debut show in the Cities last year, we heard one wag comment, “If I went off my medicine for a few days, I could paint that.” But just because you hallucinate, it doesn’t make you a painter. Palubinskas is a painter. Trained as an art conservator in her native Lithuania, her technique is spectacular in its skill and detail. Her obsession with unblinking young girls married with Bosch-like images of skeletal death and parading rats is rendered all the more eerie by her fully developed technique. The macabre world she creates is a welcome change to all who’ve been too long sedated by predictable art. 3413 44th St. W., Minneapolis; 612-339-1094; www.theissgallery.com
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Villa America: American Moderns, 1900 – 1950
Sure, it wasn’t until the 1950s that New York finally wrested the “art capital of the world” title away from Paris. But it’s not as if Jackson Pollock et al didn’t have help from their predecessors, especially before the Depression. That’s when innovators like Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Gerald Murphy, and Morgan Russell laid the groundwork for that eventual transfer of power, not just by hanging out in New York, but also by consorting with artists throughout Europe. In fact, this exhibition, whose works come from the private collection of Myron Kunin, takes its name from Murphy’s 1924 painting and his home in southern France, where he hosted a number of fellow Yankees. The exhibit also includes works from the thirties and forties by relative homebodies like Paul Cadmus, Grant Wood, Reginald Marsh, Andrew Wyeth, Philip Guston, Romare Bearden, and Charles Sheeler, and a section of portraits, one of the strongest parts of the Kunin collection. 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org
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Luis Gonzalez Palma
The arresting work of this Guatemalan photographer recollects portraits of Native Americans that Edward S. Curtis captured during the twilight of their traditional tribal life. But Gonzalez Palma’s portraits of Mayan people in traditional dress only look historical. His keen eye for haunting expressions and arrangements, along with a distinctive Kodalith camera and gold-leaf printing technique, which he follows by embedding the piece in resin, give each of his photographs an ancient appearance. In this exhibit, the “Jerarquias de la Intimidad” (“Hierachies of Intimacy”) series is joined by a light-box installation titled “La Luz de la Mente” (“The Light of the Mind”), which is on view for the first time in the U.S. Featuring eight photographs of sculptures Palma created, which were based on the cloths draping Christ’s body in famous crucifixion paintings, a version of La Luz is also on view at the Latin American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, which ends this month. 908 46th St. W., Minneapolis; 612-822-1722; www.weinstein-gallery.com
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Visions of Nature: The World of Walter Anderson
Beginning in 1947 and continuing until his death in 1965, Walter Inglis Anderson made regular twelve-mile trips from the Mississippi coast to a long barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico. He paddled solo in a small skiff, bringing along a few survival necessities and art supplies. On Horn Island, he lived out in the open, furiously painting and drawing and resting a mind tormented by schizophrenia. At night, he flipped his boat over and crawled underneath it to sleep. At the end of a few weeks or months, he turned the boat back to the mainland and returned to his family, carrying a stack of wildly emotional renderings of the birds, animals, vegetation, and elements that made up life in his rough camp. These journeys may have saved Anderson’s life. They also, it turns out, may have saved the memory of a lost place; the cluster of barrier islands that includes Horn Island was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina. 10 Church St. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-624-7083; www.bellmuseum.org
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Maximo Laura
“Rug” is too humble a term for Maximo Laura’s works. If we encountered one of these woven beauties on the floor, we’d leap back and circle it as if it were electrified. Complex, colorful, and astonishingly detailed, they reward a lengthy consideration with surprises at every turn. Laura, a Peruvian, sets pre-Columbian iconography into modern arrangements of saturated colors and expressive shapes. Animals, illusory images, and even whole stories seem to have taken up residence within the alpaca fibers on his loom, resulting in creations that seem more organic than deliberate. These would be gorgeous paintings; the fact that they are weavings, with all of the forethought and mathematics this art requires, makes them phenomenal. Northrup King Building, 1500 Jackson St. N.E., Minneapolis; 651-430-1848; www.artandes.com
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Lynne Truss
We run in circles where people can get into rather heated discussions about prepositions and commas and such. Luckily, we also understand that these topics don’t exactly rock the coolness meter for most. That’s why Lynne Truss’s sassy grammar manual, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, caught our attention. It was fun! It was a million-plus seller! And not just copy editors were buying it! Apparently, Truss had so much fun fixing people’s language that she was moved to take on an even more ambitious project: improving their behavior. Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door finds Truss in a state of hilarious outrage over cell phones, litterbugs, and the countless forms of inconsiderateness that are acceptable in what passes for civil society these days.
Did you encounter a certain boor or witness a specific incident that inspired you to write your new book?
No, I’ve just been getting more sensitized in the past couple of years. I started noticing that people were behaving in public as if they were at home. I also started to feel nervous about speaking to strangers. And then I started to get very heated indeed about the way businesses are dumping all the work on their customers. My second reason for staying home and bolting the door (“Why am I the one doing this?”) is probably my most heartfelt.What do you Brits think of Americans’ manners?
I think most Brits are impressed by the courtesy they encounter in America. However, there is a stereotype of selfish Americans abroad, who expect to be served first, and so on. A loud voice is interpreted as rude in Britain, so many American tourists are regarded as rude purely on account of their volume.Eats, Shoots & Leaves inspired people to take an interest in grammar. Do you think Talk to the Hand will improve their manners?
It doesn’t have quite the same campaigning aims as Eats, Shoots & Leaves. I’m more interested in digging into the subject of rudeness, just to see where the trouble spots are. At the basis of the subject is simple morality, but there are layers of conditioning that are causing a lot of unnecessary trouble between people who have been brought up differently.What do you think would change things? Is there no going back?
There is never any going back. In any case, people have been feeling similar “It’s all going to rack and ruin” despair since the beginning of time. Evidently, Socrates complained about disrespect in the young two and a half thousand years ago.You explain the joke behind the title of Eats, Shoots & Leaves in that book. Do you know the origin of the expression “talk to the hand”?
The first knowledge I have of it is from the Jerry Springer Show.As rude as it is, there’s a certain nerviness to the expression that makes it almost fun to be a jerk. Do you think that’s contributing to general ill behavior–people are just having fun?
Nearly all of British comedy at the moment is based on people being shockingly rude to each other. It is funny, and it’s probably always been funny. We used to have other strains as well–such as wit–but now it’s predominantly about people being cut down to size. Advertising aimed at younger people is always based on selfishness. Like, a woman will tell her husband that she can hear a noise outside. When he goes out, she shuts the door, runs upstairs, and luxuriates in the freshly laundered sheets, which are too good to share. Lots of things are too good to share. I find all that quite nasty.Do you take cell phone calls in public?
Yes, and, like everybody, I instantly forget my surroundings. When I finish the call, I wonder briefly, “Did other people hear that?” and then I decide they probably didn’t. -
Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini gets up at four every morning to write, before he heads off to work as an internist in a private medical practice. During those wee hours, the good doctor works to resuscitate the lost world of pre-Taliban Afghanistan. Hosseini, a diplomat’s son, left his homeland when he was twelve, and grew up in Europe and the United States. His epic first novel, The Kite Runner (the first about Afghanistan to be written in English), tells the story of Amir, a wealthy boy who befriends the son of a servant. Amir’s privilege enables him to flee Afghanistan’s politically unstable landscape, but his conscience compels him to return years later, as an adult, and seek out his friend. 10500 Hillside Lane W., Minnetonka; 952-545-2424