Author: rakemag

The recent flurry of interest in Bobby Z’s greatest studio work (see Straight Talk, page 21), shouldn’t let you forget his live show. Dylan’s late-nineties renaissance extended to the stage as well as the studio, and concerts over the past few years have approached the mark set by his incendiary 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue. (A sampling of that tour was released last year as Vol. 5 of the Bootleg Series discs; Vol. 6, his Halloween 1964 show, is due March 23). That said, pretty much any Dylan stage experience is worth the bucks, since few musicians reinvent his material as well or as often as the man himself.
Roy Wilkins; 175 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul; (651) 726-8240; www.xcelenergycenter.com

Since her father’s vitae includes playing bass for Sonny Boy Williamson and Ray Charles, no one would have blamed Cassandra Wilson if she’d gone to dental school and simply avoided the pressures and comparisons inherent in going into dad’s business (just ask Pete Rose, Jr. what the unhappy results can be). Luckily, Wilson picked up the cudgel and has become, since her 1985 debut, Songbook, arguably the finest jazz vocalist in the world. Persnickety critics have occasionally chastised her for picking inferior material, but anyone who can not only not fall on her face but also shine singing covers of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” deserves a medal with oak-leaf cluster. Her latest, Glamoured, came out last year to excellent reviews.
Rossi’s; 90 S. 9th St., Minneapolis; (612) 312-2828; www.bluestarjazz.com

Contrary to the spray-painted testimonials of East Greenwich Village graffiti artists, God is neither Mingus nor Bird, not even Coltrane. My vote goes to the Reverend Al Green, who for decades has explained it all to us in lyrics and music, crying out—whether in times of sensuous, heaven-sent good or heart-wrenching, heart-broken bad—“Lord, what have you done to us this time?” Admit it: How many have fallen in love to “Here I Am (Come and Take Me),” tried to patch it all up to the subliminal strains of “Let’s Stay Together,” or bit the pillow to “Call Me (Come Back Home)”? At least as many as cried at the end of Old Yeller.
Guthrie; 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis; (612) 377-2224; www.guthrietheater.org

What sartorial item is more exclusive than haute couture, more status-laden than the perennially wait-listed Hermès Kelly bag? Why, the plains Indian shirt, of course: an animal-hide garment festooned with all manner of beading, colorful symbols and battle scenes, leather, horse- or human-hair fringe, and porcupine-quill embroidery. As stereotypically “Native” as a tomahawk or teepee, plains shirts were, in fact, a rare prize, crafted individually for top warriors in tribes from northern Texas to southern Alberta. Moreover, fashion-forward Native Americans couldn’t simply covet a neighbor’s shirt, save up items for barter, and get on a wait list (as with the Kelly bag): They had to earn these garments. Each shirt, therefore, isn’t merely decorative, but heavily symbolic, conveying distinctive battle exploits and other brave deeds of its wearer (try getting Hermès to customize a bag commemorating your climb up the corporate ladder). Dozens of extraordinary 19th-century examples, along with some contemporary interpretations, are on display in an exhibit curated by a father-and-son team from the MIA and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian.
MIA; 2400 3rd Ave. S., Minneapolis; (612) 870-3131; www.artsmia.org

Not content merely to be an ambitious new downtown art gallery, One on One doubles as a bicycle shop, and once a little remodeling is done it’ll triple as a coffee bar. Its second-ever exhibit features a painter with a similar bent toward combining art and transportation, New-York-by-way-of-Iowa’s Jim Zellinger. His boldly colored acrylics are all variations on a simple theme: Semi-trailers, sans rigs, as the sole image in some anonymous Midwestern parking lot, which is rendered as a bright sea of background color. Without resorting to aggressive abstraction, Zellinger still manages to extract a recognizable and compelling emotion from these flat, wheeled boxes. They seem almost lonely, perhaps abandoned by their human drivers. But he’s has also carefully pointed each toward something beyond the frame, as if they’re eager to get out on the road, for escape or maybe just fun. Makes you wish C.W. McCall was around to start a convoy.
One on One; 117 Washington Ave. N., Minneapolis; (612) 371-9565; www.oneononebike.com

Located 1,200 miles off the coast of west Africa, St. Helena is mostly known for exporting dead French Emperors, i.e. Napoleon Bonaparte, whose remains went back to France in 1840 after his death nineteen years earlier. The island’s second-most-famous export is its coffee, which the diminutive warmonger reportedly adored—and if you’re willing to shell out eighty bucks a pound, so should you. A rare shipment recently arrived at Jim Cone’s Coffee and Tea Ltd., and is on sale at both the south Minneapolis shop and its outpost in Sears at the Mall of America. Coffee aficionados carry on like wine critics about the “fruits” and other exotic flavors that can be pressed from St. Helena’s magic beans. Apparently it’s got something to do the island’s Yemeni Arabica tree stock, which claims a provenance unbroken for more than 250 years. We dropped by for a cup, and have to admit it was pretty darn good. Some of the price undoubtedly goes toward the story behind the beans. But hey, it’s a good one.

As would be expected from a theater that shares a building with the Powderhorn neighborhood community center, the Pillsbury House Theatre can always be counted on for politically engaged and socially responsible performances. The area premiere of the great English surrealist Caryl Churchill’s Far Away is no exception. Timely and powerful, it is the story of a confused young girl in a world at war, struggling within the comfort and safety of home while others around her suffer in secrecy. With dreamlike dialogue, only four speaking parts, and a war that may seem more like Stanley Kubrick’s than George Bush’s, Far Away hits close to home in its fifty short minutes between start and finish.
Pillsbury House; 3501 Chicago Ave. S., Minneapolis; (612) 824-0708; www.puc-mn.org/theatre.html

As our Chooka boots slog into winter’s home stretch, it’s good to be reminded that this too—the bottomless mud puddles, the salt stains, the never-ending blur of flurries—will pass. Pangea World Theater and The Playwrights’ Center help lift our spirits as they resurrect Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld who was often associated with fertility, the Nile, and the golden, glorious sun. Meena Natarajan’s new adaptation of the myth—in which Osiris is killed by his brother and revived by his wife, Isis, the goddess of nature—combines music, movement, poetry, and striking visuals to illuminate Isis’ journey as she avenges her husband’s death and restores the cycle of the seasons. After three long months of cabin fever, we can certainly sympathize with extreme violence in the name of getting a little bit of spring around here.
Playwrights’ Center; 2301 E. Franklin Ave., Minneapolis; (612) 822-0015; www.pangeaworldtheater.org

Death. Justice. And very smart people in very strange times. Those are the favored topics of documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death). In his new film, The Fog of War, he finds all three in Robert McNamara, the Kennedy- and Johnson-era defense secretary whose career spanned the WWII-era U.S. firebombings of Japan, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam. Fog looks back at the octogenarian’s time at the White House and draws eleven “lessons,” as Fog’s subtitle calls them, about war, nuclear brinksmanship, and presidential power. It’s a fascinating film that’s all too relevant to today’s geopolitics.

THE RAKE: Was it hard to get McNamara to sit down with you?

ERROL MORRIS: Originally he wasn’t going to come at all, and then for an hour. There was this incremental agreement to go on….When he agreed to come up, I don’t think he understood what it meant. I’m interested in very long interviews. Usually, people think it’s going to be half an hour or an hour. Not twenty hours. I would have interviewed him more if I could have.

You invented a device called the Interrotron, which allows you and your interviewees to look at each other rather than the camera lens. How important is this to your movies?

The whole deal is that you’re making eye contact. There’s a transaction going back and forth. It’s a first-person deal rather than the third-person deal….The McNamara movie is a sort of exercise in subjectivity. It’s an unchallenged first-person account. You’re almost inside his head. And littered through that intensely subjective account—if you like, almost an interior monologue—are all of these pieces of evidence. Brute facts, phone calls, the memoranda from the Tokyo firebombing. So it’s both intensely objective on the one end and very subjective on the other.

Before making documentaries, you literally were a private detective. Those job skills obviously still come in handy.

Tons of movies chronicle investigations, you follow detectives and get a keen sense of what they’re doing, but it’s really pretend investigation. What The Thin Blue Line did, and what this movie does, is, you see a kind of residue of really intense investigation. McNamara was amazed; we came up with these 1945 memos that he wrote, suggesting that they lower the bombing altitudes of the B-29s in order to make the bombing more efficient. I don’t think anyone has seen that stuff since World War Two. But there it is on the screen.

And you also dug up recordings of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and McNamara discussing how to pull out of Vietnam—in 1963.

It’s telling you something at variance with the received view of McNamara, that he was responsible for escalating the war. That simple equation of bellicose McNamara plus vacillatory Johnson equals Vietnam. Versus the other equation of bellicose Johnson plus vacillatory McNamara equals Vietnam.
Because after Kennedy dies, Johnson and the Joint Chiefs want to escalate the fighting.

And it’s a very different story: What do you do as a presidential advisor when the president gives you a very clear indication that he wants to go to war? And it’s interesting because it’s more complex and in a way more disturbing. It’s not letting McNamara off the hook.

One of the eleven lessons is “rationality will not save us.” And of course, the question then is—

What will? I don’t know.

Are you optimistic about humanity’s future?

It’s an interesting question to ask me, of all people. Probably not. I like to think of myself as one of those naysayers. But I think that McNamara is right: There’s some kind of internationalism needed. To weaken the United Nations at this time is sheer idiocy. We need to find other ways to address issues than going to war. And we need to control nuclear arms, or we will indeed eventually just blow ourselves to smithereens. Because one of the McNamara lessons—and I think it’s actually the frightening lesson—is that it’s not a world of conspiracies, it’s a world where errors are made repeatedly. There’s confusion, self-deception. Lying. Mistakes. And on and on and on and on.

The Fog of War opens February 6 at the Uptown Theatre. 2906 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis, (612) 925-6006, www.landmarktheatres.com