Author: rakemag

The Jungle seems to have struck on a formula worth exploring. After a long and successful (and extended) run of The Blue Room, David Hare’s adaptation of Schnitzler’s La Ronde, The Jungle now presents this premiere of a script by St. Paul playwright Craig Wright. Blue Room, you’ll recall, is a sort of Eyes Wide Shut for the stage. It explores the more uncomfortable regions of love, sex, loyalty, and betrayal in a moderately avant-garde setting. It seems to be a subject Minnesota audiences are digging, and this production looks at it with a more homegrown perspective. Wright’s new script is set in “fictional” Pine City, Minnesota (apparently it bears no relation to the real Pine City; we’ll try not to worry about it), and involves a wrenching adulterous affair that tears two couples apart. If you want to catch Wright at the peak of his writing powers while he’s still a local—he’s off to L.A. to join the writing staff of HBO’s Six Feet Under later this summer—now is the time. Jungle Theater, (612)822-7063

This is a six-shooter of great Westerns encompassing the sweep of the genre in all its forms, from the highly traditional to the highly revisionist. Let’s round them all up: The Magnificent Seven, a remake of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, is breezier and less insightful but tremendously entertaining. Yul Brynner shines as the white-knight gunslinger, and Eli Wallach is suitably nasty as his bandit enemy. Wallach got a far more nuanced role as Tuco in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, butting heads with squinty Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef over a coffinful of gold coins. The most obscure of the series is Sam Peckinpah’s 1962 Ride the High Country , which, like his later The Wild Bunch, meditates on men of action at the close of their careers—in this case, longtime oater actors Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a treat for William Goldman’s clever script and nifty performances by Paul Newman and Robert Redford, but you may want to head out for some popcorn during the cloying “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” musical interlude. Cat Ballou presents the bizarre spectacle of leathery Lee Marvin playing for laughs, in a dual role as the silver-nosed villain and the good-hearted drunk Kid Shelleen. Dustin Hoffman goes Marvin one better in Little Big Man, Arthur Penn’s satiric look at the Old West from the Indian point of view. Hoffman’s hapless schlub Jack Crabb bounces around from missionaries to Indians to Custer’s cavalry, immersing himself in every new environment without ever really knowing what the hell is going on. Tragic, biting and often very funny, this one’s the best of a good bunch. Oak Street Cinema, (612) 331-3134, oakstreetcinema.org

What better way to spend your Monday nights than in the dark with Billy Wilder? This summer’s Walker Art Center-run outdoor series gives due props to the Austrian expatriate, who died in March leaving behind one of Hollywood’s richest legacies. The six films here barely scratch the surface of his filmography. Besides familiar classics Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and Double Indemnity, there’s also the Jimmy Cagney-led One, Two, Three, Wilder’s wry parody of Cold War capitalism. For a date movie, try Sabrina, which runs rings around the recent remake, despite the creepy age difference between Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn. In Kiss Me, Stupid, Dean Martin mocks his own celebrity image (on purpose this time, unlike much of the rest of his career) as a star stuck in a podunk town and besieged by would-be songwriter Ray Walston (My Favorite Martian). As for the music half of “Music & Movies,” the Walker’s winning equation couldn’t stretch any wider. The Twin Town’s contingent includes metalboyz Likehell, hip-hoppers Heiruspecs, and jazzbos Happy Apple. Black-Eyed Snakes (a side project of Low main man Alan Sparhawk) slithers though a Jon Spencer-style fuzzbox blues sound, while Kentucky natives Freakwater add a dash of alt-country to a traditional Appalachian folk set. Nabbing the prize for longest trek to Loring Park is West Africa’s Super Rail Band, led by Malian guitar god Djelimady Tounkara. Check the Walker website for specific acts, movies, and dates. Walker Art Center, (612) 375-7622, walkerart.org

Some of us have a love-hate relationship with the short story: We love it for the discipline and small miracle required to write a decent one, and for the simple, satisfying fact that we can read it in a single sitting. But we hate it for not pulling us in and keeping us there the way a good novel does, for whetting our appetite, as, say, the smell of microwave popcorn might, and then leaving us hungry for something else. Minnesota native Jean Harfenist has offered a compromise with her first book, A Brief History of the Flood. This collection of short stories builds chronologically from 1959 though 1970 on the life experiences of the same main character, Lillian Anderson of Acorn Lake, Minnesota. Lillian, whom we meet first as an 8-year-old, tells it like she sees it in a narrative voice that powerfully captures her chaotic, hard-edged family life, although she speaks from a safe distance rather than from the middle of the fray. As Lillian grows up, she continues to say it straight in this collection that is at once stark and hilarious. In the collection’s title story, Lillian’s mother pleads with the IRS by writing a multi-page tragi-comic letter: “I suffer allergies and high-grade headaches, as well as poor teeth. (Seems I’d be better off dead, but the children need me.) Also, Mr. Anderson needs frequent tranquillizing, and much Excedrin, all of which shows up on pharmacy bills scotch-taped to pages 9-36 of The Return.” Lillian at first points out the letter’s flaws, until her mother’s face goes blank like a “popped balloon,” and “one eye looks huge, like she’s had a concussion.” So Lillian backpedals with a compliment of her mother’s writing talent. “That’s a lie,” Lillian admits as an aside, “but the IRS won’t read past the first paragraph anyway.” We will, though.

Kate DiCamillo has some writing habits that we truly envy. She writes every day at the same time, and produces at least a page or two of usable material. She continues to get together regularly with the same group of writers who’ve been meeting for years now to critique one another’s work. And she “hangs around” mentally with her characters until they tell their stories clearly enough for her to capture them faithfully on paper. These habits have paid off. DiCamillo’s first novel for young adults, Because of Winn-Dixie, was named a Newbery Honor Book, and won a handful of other awards too. DiCamillo’s latest, The Tiger Rising, is darker than her debut novel, tackling the tough stuff of death and divorce, pent-up sadness and open rage, and doing so literally and figuratively through the story’s characterization and its surprising plot. She meets her subject with clarity and resists the temptations of sentimentalism and melodrama. And she crafts characters that manage to be simultaneously quirky and colorful and engaging and believable. Rob, the protagonist who’s unable to express his grief over his mother’s death through any means other than an itchy rash on his legs, hovered about near DiCamillo’s writing life for years before finally materializing in The Tiger Rising. A word of warning, however: for kids who aren’t yet equipped with the emotional resilience to survive sad endings, it may be best to save this book for later. As one 12-year-old reader put it on Amazon.com, this book was “slow, dumb and hard to understand, it would have been a lot better if the tiger hadn’t been shot.”

We have to confess we’re not familiar with Mosley’s signature series, the Easy Rawlins line of detective stories, but it’s been a sin of omission. Truth is, we’ve been putting off acquainting ourselves with those books because Mosley had ventured into more high-brow territory with a few intriguing side projects in the 90s. In 1996, he first set the mystery genre aside to focus on a cycle of stories, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned , involving Socrates Fortlow, a disheveled and aging but righteous tenant of inner-city L.A. Then he took on his most ambitious project to date, R.L.’s Dream, a fascinating and fictional account of Robert L. Johnson, the legendary Delta bluesman who allegedly sold his soul to the devil. Actually, it’s only incidentally about Robert Johnson. Rather, it’s a long and thoughtful meditation on what, exactly, the blues is all about, set in a gritty and mostly convincing narrative. We’re told that fans of Easy Rawlins have been biding their time (the last Easy Rawlins mystery came out in 95, a few years before we got hooked), because what Mosley lacks in the way of creating complex three-dimensional characters he makes up for in his expertly constructed mysteries. We can’t wait to sample him at his best, after these years of literary aspiration. What could be easier than sitting back and listening to the man read from Bad Boy Brawly Brown, which will be available July 2? Ruminator Books, (651) 699-0587, ruminator.com

This is the guy who wrote Fight Club, which of course made him an instant millionaire because it was made into a crap movie starring Brad Pitt. But don’t let a major motion picture stand between you and a delightful new author. Palahniuk is one of those hip celebrity writers who deserves the attention, if only because he manages to write serious and satiric hardcovers that are easier to read than a cereal box. Which of course doesn’t necessarily guarantee staying power. (Calling Mark Leyner? Hello? Dude, where are you?) Easy to read, sure, but also effortlessly capturing elements of the zeitgeist in which we live. Palahniuk specializes in misanthropic young men who come up with ingenious rip-off schemes and slacker strategies, eventually careening into surreal parallel realities. After Fight Club, he penned Survivor and Choke—essentially sequels with completely different characters and situations. A unified body of work or a one-trick pony? Longterm player or a passing fad? Prolific because dangerously forgettable? Decide for yourself at this local reading—that is if you can stop laughing with this expert black humorist who operates in the style of Vonnegut, Coupland, and Easton-Ellis. Ruminator Books, (651) 699-0587, ruminator.com

It’s hard to compress Gary Hallman’s fruitful three-decade career into a single gallery show. Though he’s honored here with a one-person show spanning both floors—the sum of all the PARTs, as it were, and only the fourth time they’ve done this—we found ourselves wanting to see more. The show begins circa 1971, with Hallman’s outdoor shots focusing on interplay between light and shadow. In the 1980s, the U of M art professor moved away from pure photography into deliberately manipulated images like “Rayos de Luz y Calor,” a self-portrait shot through with hand drawn beams of light. Unlike most fine-art photogs we know, Hallman has embraced technology over the years. His 1990s experiments with computer-altered self-portraits obscured his face behind deep green and red fans. They’re perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most colorful in his portfolio. Hallman’s not afraid to reinvent his methods, nor to go back to classical photography when there’s still something to discover. Other work moves in a surreal direction: Pompeiian frescoes share space (and fate?) with bland suburban house-scapes, and a swarm of nudes streams between the heads of two men like a thought they share but can’t shake off. His most recent work changes course yet again, this time returning to formalism for a set of industrial still-lifes that coolly observe the sterile kitchens and computer rooms at Wells Fargo’s downtown operations center. PARTS, (612) 824-5500, partsphoto.org

People sometimes say that if a meteor struck Uptown, the Twin Cities would lose half its artistic community. While we’re still waiting for NASA to get back to us on the scientific accuracy of that metaphor, it’s certainly true that Intermedia Arts’ annual celebration of the Hennepin & Lake ZIP code’s creative set has no shortage of participants. Curators Peter Haakon Thompson, Lisa Ganser, and Malichansouk Kouanchao have gathered more than 100 artists in disciplines from painting to web art to video. Thompson’s also giving out large scarlet letter A’s to folks who live in the area. They’re for hanging on your window to show your support for local art, but if you’re looking to spice up your reputation we suppose you could always flounce around Calhoun Square pretending you’re Hester Prynne. On July 5, the gallery’s Films First Fridays series will feature work by filmmakers from the area. After that, you can see those works in a video installation. Perhaps the best day to check out the exhibit, though, would be July 4, when you can honor your country’s independence at Intermedia’s always-groovy Art Car Parade. Opening reception June 30, 1 p.m., free. Intermedia Arts, (612) 871-4444, intermediaarts.org

We set out on our expedition to scale Everest in a rusty Toyota loaded with five famished explorers and a trunkful of climbing rope. I could not help but feel underequipped, since weeks of fruitless searching had turned up no Sherpa guides anywhere in the metro area, not even in the yellow pages. St. Paul can be harsh, unfamiliar terrain, and I think it unwise to travel there without experienced direction. My navigator suggested that I instead find Grand Avenue on a road map “like normal people do,” and after careful consideration, I complied. Our gamble paid off. Everest on Grand turned out to be a cozy Nepali and Tibetan eatery across from Kowalski’s Market. Though our servers were a bit slow, they were attentive, friendly, and willing to answer that most uncomfortable of menu-related questions—“and how do you pronounce this?” Half our party ordered momo, a meat-filled dumpling, but only one went for new gustatory territory and got the yak momo. It is perhaps the only exotic meat we’ve tasted that does not taste like chicken. It’s like beef, but sweeter, and well complemented (concealed?) by a spicy tomato-herb sauce. The rest of our team, a motley assemblage of architects and teenage vegetarians, found satisfaction in the many tasty no-meat dishes such as aaloo-dam (potatoes, onions and tomato in gravy) and jogi-tarkari, a vegetable curry. For desert, booniya and lal mohan—small, light confections so sugary sweet we could already feel the sting of the dentistry bills. Everest on Grand, (651) 696-1666, hotmomo.com