Author: rakemag

Let’s All Kill Constance is a welcome change from Ray Bradbury’s most recent m.o. Whereas in recent years he’s stuck to short stories, this one’s a full-length novel, and an offbeat satire of noir fiction. Bradbury’s best known, of course, for intensely allegorical, morally resonant science fiction like Fahrenheit 451. Constance follows two previous mysteries from a decade or so back—Death Is a Lonely Business and Graveyard of the Lunatics. All three are set in a Chandlerian Hollywood of the 1950s. But it’s not a hardboiled world. Our man Ray is too much the optimist—the softie, really—to start going all James Ellroy on us. (Though there’s a collaboration we’d like to see.) This novel has been in the works for more than three years, interrupted by a minor stroke and ceaseless other writing projects. Well past 80, Bradbury still puts out at least one book a year, and it’s gratifying to see him back in (long) form.

The Krazy Kat cartoons, first published in newspapers in 1913, are among the very first examples of high art emerging out of the comic-strip format. On one level, Herriman simply drew endless variations on the same few themes, with funny-talking animals (“why, there’s a lotta l’il mices got bigga burdins than you”) getting bonks on the head. Krazy Kat loves Ignatz the mouse, who returns the affection by hurling bricks at his cranium. Krazy interprets this as love, which in some bizarre sense it is. Complicating this further is Offisa Pupp, a cop who constantly arrests Ignatz for assault and has his own unrequited feeling for Krazy, who may or may not be female. Out of this weird menage, Herriman forged worlds of surrealistic meaning, gaining fans as diverse as Walt Disney and E. E. Cummings. The 80-year-old humor found in these strips is something of an acquired taste nowadays, but if anything, the quaintness accentuates the sense of unreality. This collection, designed by Jimmy Corrigan artist Chris Ware, is part of an ongoing series of reissues that will see the strip through its 30-year run.

Published to coincide with Mailer’s 80th birthday, Spooky Art gathers more than a half-century of essays, forming a bookend with his seminal 1959 collection Advertisements For Myself. As its subtitle implies, it’s intended as his definitive statement on the craft. But the sheer scope of the 350-page book means it’s of wider interest than your typical creative-writing textbook. Mailer expounds on his own career, with digressions that would be sufficient for a large tome of their own. Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead, catapulted him to fame in an age when novelists had as much prestige as movie stars. He made the most of his power and hipster cachet, co-founding the Village Voice in 1955, and winning the Pulitzer twice for nonfiction, in the process helping to invent New Journalism. He worked throughout the 1960s for radical causes, declaring himself a revolutionary and “psychic outlaw,” then made a bitter enemy of the feminist movement. His personal life, like his writing and politics, careened wildly between brilliance and shocking excess, perhaps best epitomized by the day in 1960 when he announced his candidacy for mayor of New York, then later stabbed his wife during a drunken argument. While we don’t think we’d want Norman as a houseguest, he can sure knock out the memorable prose, and his opinions on literature are fiercely held and passionately stated. This is the lion surveying his kingdom, and it’s a pleasure to hear him roar.

Baker first made a name for himself in the late 80s, with a series of short but dense novels that mapped the detail of daily life right down to the aglets at the ends of your shoelaces. Normally, this kind of observational detail is the territory of serious psychedelic drug users—but Baker is nothing if not sober and highly readable, and he therefore comes off as a loveable and obsessive eccentric. The fountainhead of the Baker canon is simple, encouraging, and humane—the conviction that there are worlds inside worlds all around us, and an infinite number of stories hidden in the finite. With Box of Matches, Baker returns to fiction, after a productive five-year sally into nonfiction. (Last year’s Double Fold was a brilliant study of how American libraries are trashing their paper collections. It was also an incidental survey of the history of American newspapers that landed him a National Book Critics Circle Award.) Early indications are that the plot is as thin as ever, and the detail is thick and heavy—just the way you want it in a Baker novel. Ruminator, (651) 699-0587, ruminator.com

Sesame Street doesn’t enjoy the untouchable status it once did. In recent years, the TV show has come in for some mean academic scru-tiny that finds it as ineffective (in its alleged “educational” programming) as it is cloying. It certainly didn’t help to lose head Muppeteer Jim Henson, who died back in 1990. It also hasn’t helped that the folks entrusted with the copyrights have jumped at every opportunity to cross-promote Sesame Street with every two-bit burger-joint that wants to put Elmo in a Happy Meal. It’s a small wonder, then, that the show and its constellation of characters continues to capture the attention of our kids. We’d take Kermit over Tinky Winky or Barney any day of the week. (Which is really the point of the most hostile takedowns of Sesame Street—that its creators work too hard to convince parents that it’s good kids’ programming, when a bunch of soft shapes in felt suits saying “goo” is all the droolers really want.) Anyway, we’ve found Sesame Street Live is a great way to introduce your kids to live theater in a stadium setting—something that can be truly frightening, especially if your first experience of this kind is, say, a Vikings game. Target Center, (612) 673-0900, targetcenter.com

Marvin’s Room is about the struggle to keep going in the face of impending death. Naturally, it’s a comedy, and a remarkably gentle-natured one. Although the play grew out of the AIDS epidemic, playwright Scott McPherson opted to move the setting outside the gay community. A wise choice; the issues it raises about caretaking for the seriously ill are universal, and will only grow more prominent as the U.S. population ages. The story revolves around the relationship between estranged sisters Bessie and Lee. Bessie, the responsible one, has given up her dreams to take care of their slowly dying father. But when she is herself diagnosed with leukemia, she has to find a way to reconcile with the flighty Lee, who’s also struggling with her arsonist teenage son. This all has the potential to descend into mawkishness, but McPherson’s black humor offsets any excess sap. His own story adds authenticity and pathos; McPherson wrote the play while he and his partner were both dying of AIDS, and he would not live long enough to write another one. Theatre in the Round, (612) 333-3010, www. theatreintheround.org

George Bernard Shaw didn’t shrink from a fight. The ardent socialist not only agitated for social change through his writings, but helped create the leftist movement that would become Britain’s Labour Party. Even in a career such as his, though, this comedy stands apart, because the profession in question was prostitution. Incredibly provocative when Shaw wrote it in 1894, Mrs. Warren shocked Victorian audiences with its title character, a good mother who made her career choice because the other options as a poor single woman were even more degrading—and that lack of opportunity for a better life was what really made Shaw mad. The play was such a hot property it had to wait 11 years and cross the ocean to New York before it could be staged. Even then, the cast was arrested after the first performance, and it didn’t debut in England for another two decades. Somehow, we doubt Mrs. Warren is any less challenging or relevant today. Guthrie Theater, (612) 377-2224, www.guthrietheater.org

Whew! One of the truisms of the theater business is, of course, that the show must go on—even after Jeune Lune’s incredible year. Their recent production of Hamlet was widely acclaimed to be the finest staging of Shakespeare this town has ever seen—which is saying something, given the Guthrie’s longtime stake on that turf. We live in physical and literal times, and the Jeune Lune’s traditional approach to pomp and circumstance in drama—big costumes, stunning sets, lots of action—plays well, we think, to the Fear Factor generation. The Guthrie isn’t the only theater who should be feeling the heat: Now our friends on 2nd Avenue are putting together what looks like a local version of a Cirque du Soleil operation. (Perhaps Jeune Lune operatives learned a few tricks when they hosted Cirque’s gala premiere after-party last summer.) A Circus of Tales is billed as a fairy tale in a circus ring—we suspect it’ll have more narrative direction than a typical Cirque offering, and less of a freak-show-meets-the-X-Games sensibility. (Don’t get us wrong, we love a freak-show-meets-the-X-Games sensibility, but we also don’t mind a little narrative direction.) Theatre de la Jeune Lune, (612) 333-6200, www.jeunelune.org

As part of their Saturday Midnight Movie series, the Uptown follows up Almodóvar’s Talk to Her with the first of his films with wide distribution outside Spain. 1988’s Verge is a black comedy about a woman whose lover has left and won’t tell her why. She tries to contact him throughout the day and ends up running into his new lover, his wife, a friend wanted by the police, and Antonio Banderas, who wants to sublet her apartment but ends up repairing her phone. A couple of wild taxi rides through Madrid, a unique gazpacho recipe, and Arab terrorists somehow work their way in as well. It’s very funny, in a twisted way, and foreshadows the over-the-top characters to come in Almodóvar’s future films.