Author: rakemag

Jon Krakauer’s stock in trade is human behavior in the most extreme of conditions, as seen in his harrowing bestseller Into Thin Air, a firsthand account of disaster on Mount Everest. His latest book takes readers into a world that will seem as remote and forbidding, and all the more alien for existing on American soil: the schismatic, highly isolated groups of Mormon fundamentalists scattered across North America, groups Krakauer likens to the Taliban—and which, it should be noted, have been condemned by the mainstream church. His entry point into the subject is a grisly 1984 double murder committed by two brothers who claimed that God commanded them to kill their sister-in-law and baby niece. By way of finding a root cause, Krakauer also looks back on the tumultuous history of Mormonism—the fastest-growing religion in the country—and finds strains of violence and zealotry that, he argues, are still all too prevalent. Controversial? Oh, you bet. With this audacious work of nonfiction, Krakauer’s climbed down the Himalayan mountains and straight up an active Utah volcano.

If Chuck Palahniuk seems fixated on violence and abandonment, he has good reason—his grandparents died in a murder-suicide, and his father was killed a few years ago by a jealous ex-husband. So the level of attention paid to confusion, loss, and anger in his books is totally understandable. There’s no denying the raw emotional turmoil—and Diary positively boils with it, more even than his infamous Fight Club. It begins with characteristic nihilism: Still reeling from her husband’s suicide attempt and subsequent coma, Misty discovers that he has also been abusing his job as a home remodeler by walling up rooms and leaving rude messages hidden inside. Crazed with grief, she begins painting obsessively—but even that act of frenzied creativity has secret roots in something very deep and nasty. As much as we admire Palahniuk’s craft, we can’t say we enjoyed Diary so much as read it with a growing sense of dread and disgust—which seems to be Palahniuk’s intention in the first place.

Falling in love a second time is a trip through treacherous waters—you might be able to remember where the river’s most dangerous rocks are from the first time around, but that’s no guarantee you won’t hit them again. For the title character of Tim Farrington’s The Monk Downstairs, it’s only more complex for being on the rebound from God. Mike, based on ex-monk Farrington himself, is a shy, disillusioned refugee from the cloistered world who takes an apartment and a burger-flipping job after losing his faith. His landlady, Rebecca, is a lonely single mother made wary by divorce. The two share an immediate attraction, but the flowers of romance bloom slowly when both partners have been scratched by other thorns. Farrington handles this hesitant courtship with skill, spinning a tale of grownup romance and redemption that’s pleasantly reminiscent of The Accidental Tourist. Ruminator Books, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, http://www.ruminator.com

Even for an astrophysicist, Lucienne lives in a world overfilled with black holes. The heroine of N.M. Kelby’s second novel, Theater of the Stars, has just had the biggest success of her career, finding one of the mysterious, light-eating spatial anomalies. But the rest of her life is a case study in entropy. Her marriage is falling apart and, worse, her mother Helene has just tried to kill herself, threatening to take important secrets to her grave. Things like who Lucienne’s father is, and what happened during the three-year gap between Helene’s escape from Nazi-occupied Paris and her reappearance at Los Alamos, where she helped build the atomic bomb. Which is the sort of enigma that would tantalize just about anybody, really. Kelby’s meditation on war, grief, and family love is sometimes improbably plotted but poignant, and a worthy followup to the well-reviewed In the Company of Angels.

Some authors have an impressive body of work; Michael Sims has an impressive work on the body. His Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form is both informative and entertainingly digressive. Taking stock of his subject literally from head to toe, Sims offers a remarkably thorough catalog of our body parts, and what our attitude toward them says about us. It’s armed to the teeth with anecdotes—something Sims perfected in his previous Darwin’s Orchestra, a 366-day almanac of science oddities. Like that book, Adam’s Navel is perhaps best read in short bursts rather than a single sitting, but given that restriction it’s a compelling read, more than just lip service. Sims seizes his subject in both hands and really says a mouthful. One thing, though—why no footnotes?

Why should March 17 be the only time the local Irish cut loose, especially in Paddy-friendly St. Paul? Hence this annual weekend of green partying. A significant percentage of the local Irish music scene will be out in force to help keep it reel, joined by headliners Leahy—nine fiddle-crazy Ontario siblings—and the Pogues-y combo of Flogging Molly, out of L.A. by way of Dublin. If you’ve got wee leprechauns in tow, there’s plenty of kids’ activities—like parades at 5:30 both days, and border-collie sheepherding demonstrations that might give parents with a flock of children new thoughts on dog ownership. And, of course, don’t forget the all-day sessions of miniature golf—how’s that Irish? Well, now, me lad, ’tis the most Irish form of golf—after all, you play the entire game on the green. Harriet Island, downtown St. Paul, (952) 474-741, http://www.irishfair.com

St. Paul’s largest park plays host to this annual celebration of obon, the Buddhist festival honoring the dead, which winds up at dusk with the traditional, solemnly beautiful floating-candle ceremony. But nobody will take it amiss if you just want to hang out in the park, watch Japanese kites, and sample the cuisine. Kites promote cross-cultural understanding, too. You’ll want to make time for Theater Mu’s visually intense taiko drum corps, and to take a walk through the park’s Japanese garden—which will probably be too busy that day to be truly meditative, but beautiful nonetheless. Como Park, Lexington Parkway and Horton Avenue, St. Paul.

Hollywood has a mixed record on adapting alternative comics. Terry Zwigoff’s two offerings—the documentary Crumb and the Daniel Clowes-written Ghost World—were critical achievements. Alan Moore’s From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen received mixed reviews and box-office returns. American Splendor chronicles the story of nebbishy Harvey Pekar, a Cleveland file clerk who captured his tortured existence in comic books drawn by various artists including R. Crumb, Drew Friedman, and Doug Allen. Paul Giamatti, character actor du jour (take that, Luis Guzman!), plays the beleaguered Pekar. An animated Pekar, as well as the real Pekar, are also featured. It’s fun to write ÒPekar.Ó American Splendor won the 2003 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, and might be the best comic-book adaptation on the screen this summer. Uptown Theatre, 2906 Hennepin Ave. S., (612) 925-6006, http://www.landmarktheatres.com

Easily the most prolific and notorious member of the New German Cinema movement of the late 60s and 70s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the central figure of his generation of directors, although his death by cocaine overdose in 1982 has obscured his legacy in favor of contemporaries like Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. He lived fast and filmed fast, making his movies at breakneck speed like an avant-garde Roger Corman, all notable for a frank social realism and shocking (especially at the time) emphasis on gay and racial themes. But he also found seemingly unlikely inspiration in the florid Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk (himself a German expatriate), who gave him a narrative language to make his bitter outlook palatable to a wider audience. Oak Street’s retrospective gathers eight films covering the last decade of his career, including the controversial lesbian drama The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and his ÒAdenauer TrilogyÓ of The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, and Veronika Voss, three progressively crueler metaphors for recent German political history. Oak Street, 309 Oak St. S.E., (612) 331-3134, http://www.oakstreetcinema.org

We’ll go out on a limb here and say that this is the best Italian thriller about a sexually obsessive, mafia-connected gay dwarf taxidermist you’ll see all year. It’s a gender-reversed, Gothic melodrama that both affirms and reformulates the genre’s standard tropes of deformed, salacious villain and virginal, tempted innocent—succeeding thanks to star Ernesto Mahieux’s complex portrayal of a man desperately scheming to keep loneliness at bay. Mahieux plays the ugly but charismatic Peppino, who falls headlong for the vacant but beautiful Valerio (male model Valerio Foglia Manzillo, assuredly not cast for his acting chops). Taking the young hunk under his wing, Peppino lavishes money and gifts with a rather obvious ulterior motive. But the entrance of a pouty-lipped looker named Deborah leads to a dangerously unstable love triangle. The film is far from perfect, with an over-telegraphed resolution and a major subplot that seems to exist merely for an extra frisson of grotesquerie. But, creditably, it’s resonant of both the dark sensuality of Mulholland Drive and unhurried naturalism of Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise. The Embalmer has plenty of the right stuff. U Film, 10 Church St. S.E., (612) 627-4430, http://www.ufilm.org