All the would-be writers out there claiming that having kids makes it impossible to start a novel should take a tip from Antonya Nelson. When the kids are young and demanding, write short stories during Sesame Street. When they get older and head to grade school, expand with a novel or two. When adolescence hits, go back to short stories, but be careful not to touch on anything too overtly autobiographical. That formula may sound simplistic, but with insight, empathy, and wily craftsmanship, Nelson has made it work. Now, with her kids in phase three, she’s produced a new collection of short works. Many of these stories dwell on the miasma of miscommunication, the cruelty, and the loneliness that falls upon both adults and sub-adults during those delightful teen years.
Author: rakemag
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Manderlay
The most insightful films about the Holocaust certainly haven’t been made by Germans, so why shouldn’t a Dane director investigate the legacy of slavery in the United States? Of course, that leaves redemption and uplifting escapes out of the script, but the story Lars von Trier tells is filled with assumptions, speculations, and unexpected turns that make Manderlay less a history lesson than an allegory. The second film in his “America Trilogy” finds Grace (played by Bryce Dallas Howard; Nicole Kidman declined this itchy sequel to Dogville) and her gangster father discovering a plantation where slavery was apparently never abolished. Appalled, Grace confronts the dying master and takes over, intending to run the place as a free community and make right a situation that has simmered to a point of psychological perversion. That hardly makes it an uplifting film, though. Von Trier shifts the victim role around with casual and even insulting ease, and his script takes enough dark and uncomfortable turns that many African-American actors were turned off (though Danny Glover takes a leading role, most of the other black characters are played by British actors). Ultimately, Manderlay is a sort of bizarre fairy tale–one made by a man who, because of his fear of flying, has never even come here.
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From Syria >> Board Game Diplomacy
Game Night at the American Language Center in Damascus is an eagerly anticipated annual event. Each classroom offers a different game, with a volunteer to explain the rules, supervise play, and arbitrate potential disputes. A day before the event, my co-worker Tanisha informed me that I’d be presiding over the board games Risk and Monopoly. The choices were purely coincidental. But the juxtaposition of games offered an unintended comment on American culture. “Have fun,” the language center seemed to be suggesting to its students, “and gain first-hand knowledge of two things Americans have excelled at over the years: accumulating wealth and invading other countries.”
As the students poured into tiny classroom seven, I discovered that both Monopoly boxes were missing dice and game pieces. The Risk game sets were also incomplete and required about five minutes to assemble. But I enlisted two students, Tarek and Amer, to separate and stack the perforated sheet of game cards while Nawras and I made the dice by placing tiny stickers onto the uneven surfaces of three black plastic cubes. Amer’s brother Alaa and a reticent female student named Noor sorted the plastic armies according to color. As we set up the game, I explained the rules. Game cards are distributed among five players, with each card representing a particular territory on the board. The students must distribute their armies according to whatever cards they receive. The purpose of the game is to occupy territories and attack adjacent countries, while the ultimate goal is to eventually conquer the entire world. Armies are lost by low rolls of the dice. The reward for conquering a territory is a game card, and these cards can eventually be exchanged for additional armies.
Ten minutes into the game, his position on the board already virtually indefensible, Nawras’ cell phone erupted with a popular Arabic tune. “Joel, I have to go,” he informed me moments later, and headed for the door. In the absence of newcomers, I decided to sit in. My presence seemed to spur an instant, politically motivated enthusiasm in the other players. This newfound interest was confirmed by Amer and Alaa’s two brothers who entered the room minutes later. “Where are you from?” one asked me. I pointed to the west coast of North America on the game board. “We are four Iraqis,” he laughed, and the rest of the room laughed with him.
Veterans of Risk understand that the game is won and lost by ephemeral alliances that form between players. Essentially, you can’t win without the help of other players, so you try to persuade them it’s in their interest to attack someone else instead of you. Tarek and I were friends outside of class, so we formed a non-aggression pact out of mutual self-preservation: I wouldn’t attack him in Europe if he left me alone in Africa. But the common enemy of the four brothers from Baghdad is obvious, so I decided to find out if Noor could be persuaded to do my military bidding. I gestured for her to overwhelm Alaa in Asia from North America. “Come on, Noor,” I said. “If he holds onto Asia until next turn, he gets an additional seven armies. You can’t allow that.” But Noor, who is Syrian, required no convincing from the Iraqi brothers to join their anti-American alliance.
I plotted my next move. Apparently inspired by the sight of my unintentionally serious countenance bent over the board, Noor lobbed an insult in my direction: “You look like George Bush!” My mouth dropped open. “I was joking,” she assured me a moment later, and all was forgotten except for the job at hand: to gang up and attack me in successive turns. Amer in particular was clearly delighting in watching his American teacher erased from the board. As we fought over South America and Africa, denying each other armies by pushing into each other’s territory, his brothers plotted my eventual destruction from behind the scenes. Whenever Amer won a roll against me, he gleefully exclaimed, “See you!” before removing my plastic pieces from the board.
Tarek, languishing in Europe, was the first to be eliminated. Just before he was attacked by Amer’s brother Alaa sweeping in from the territory labeled “le Moyen-Orient” (the Middle East), I intervened ineffectually on his behalf. When Alaa eventually decided to attack me in Egypt, I responded with mock incredulity: “Come on! Mubarek wants peace! Can’t we all just get along?”
Other students came in and gathered around to watch. Amer’s brothers continued to whisper strategy to Noor, making sweeping motions with their hands—like a conductor motioning for a crescendo from the tympani section—over my weakly held territories in Africa. It was Amer who was rewarded with the task of finally finishing me off—a moment of sweet justice denied his country in the real world. I began to wonder how the game would end. Noor would be the next to go, I reasoned. But would Alaa and Amer eventually have the fortitude to attack each other? Amer, however, had a more benevolent plan up his sleeve—a harmonious alliance of Christian and Muslim brothers controlling the world with no unilaterally aggressive American army in sight to foul it up. As soon as I was off the board, he proclaimed triumphantly, “Now we can have peace!”—Joel Hanson
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Ask the Dust
Robert Towne brings to the screen what has been called the greatest novel about Los Angeles ever written. Ask the Dust is the gritty tale of a young Italian man, Arturo Bandini (played by Colin Farrell) who struggles to write the Great American Novel while trying to pay his rent, get enough to eat, and fight his feelings for Camilla (Selma Hayek), an impoverished Mexican waitress. All the while, memorable lowlifes drift in and out of his life, eventually vanishing into the Southern California desert. Originally planned as a part of Towne’s “L.A. Trilogy”–Chinatown is the first–Ask the Dust’s story is relentlessly bleak and mournful, and fans of the novel will be displeased to learn that Towne foolishly has meddled with what was one of the greatest endings in modern literature
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Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
“More than a state of mind, the South is an atmosphere. The blood rules them. They don’t rule the blood.” That’s coming from Florida native and alt-country singer Jim White, who takes us on a weird, close-up tour of the hidden crevices of the Bible Belt in this meandering documentary. Through encounters with locals who sing, pray, and search for roadside treasure, director Andrew Douglas aims to make it clear that there are still many inhabitants of the Old South who are in no danger of succumbing to our nation’s growing cultural homogeneity. With a musical backdrop by the likes of the Handsome Family, Johnny Dowd, Lee Sexton, and David Johansen.
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Following Sean
Anyone who’s ever accidentally blown pot smoke into the face of a baby should see this film. It all started in 1969, when filmmaker Ralph Arlyck made a short documentary about a precocious boy named Sean. This four-year-old was the son of San Francisco hippies extraordinaire, and in the film he famously claimed, “I smoke grass.” When Arlyck asked him to describe the experience, the tyke retorted, “If you have any grass, I’ll show you.” Decades later, Arlyck has tracked down Sean and, in a new documentary, reveals what became of him. Just so you know, Sean is not in prison, nor does he collect pretty butterflies. 612-331-3134; www.mnfilmarts.org/bell
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The Busby Berkeley Collection
When it comes to frenzied musical numbers, no one in Hollywood history has been as audacious–or parodied–as Busby Berkeley. Less a choreographer than a master of the chorus line, Berkeley’s style borders on the orgiastic. Films like Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933, Dames, Gold Diggers of 1935, and 42nd Street feature his trademark scenes in which legions of dancers move as one. Dozens of identical blondes gyrate in outfits that make them appear to be a flowering artichoke; leggy swimmers kick in an “aquatic zipper” while Berkeley’s probing camera swoops beneath their thighs, creating, in the words of one critic, “a tunnel of dreams.” The Dude’s nightmare in The Big Lebowski was inspired by Berkeley’s cinematic spectacles; this DVD set will allow them to infiltrate your dreams as well.
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Neko Case
What a hoot to try on Patsy Cline’s persona–minus the car accident, the plane crash, and all the heartbreak in between, that is. With a hipster-hoedown wardrobe, a good-time band, and an audience that appreciates country music, Neko Case has had scads of fun reviving Cline’s swingy, traditional sound with a dash of foxy urban attitude. She hails from the Northwest, attended art school, and started out as a punk rocker and sometimes-member of the New Pornographers, so Case can’t lay claim to dead Southern relatives who played banjos with their teeth, or whatever passes for cred south of the Mason-Dixon line. But with her new album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Case lays Cline to rest and heads toward a much more distinctive and arresting sound. Spiritual, dark, and relying on a knack for storytelling that transcends genre and region, these songs reveal a fascinating lyrical voice that her previous works only hinted at. If this is the down-deep Neko Case, we’re crazy, well maybe not so crazy for loving her.
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Elvis Costello
Dear Elvis: We love you. You are the crown prince of geeks the world over, a shining example to funny and funny-looking folks everywhere, and anyone with compromised vision can thank you for keeping plastic horn-rimmed glasses in stock and in style. You’ve written so many great songs, both smart and jumpy punk, and perfect, unforgettable pop. But your music, lately? It’s time to level with you: The lounge act has grown stale. Why are you putting out yet another smooth piano jazz album? Aren’t you done with that yet? Is this what happens when you marry Diana Krall? No offense–we wish you endless bliss together. But she’s so much better at the slinky, chic jazz thing, let her do that by herself. And you? Elvis, you belong in a stinky bar, spazzing out onstage in front of a loud, unruly band. See you there soon, OK?
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Cantus Anniversary Concert
Cantus started ten years back as a collective of the St. Olaf College Choir’s finest male graduates. They were not just fine singers but also, as it happens, pretty fine-looking to boot, which could help to explain the troupe’s staying power. Cantus now celebrates its first decade with a concert that flits through the group’s unusual repertoire, which includes Smokey Robinson’s “Who’s Lovin’ You” and a pop rearrangement of “Danny Boy.” But the program’s highlight is sure to be the finale, a Cantus-commissioned world premiere by Wisconsin-born composer Lee Hoiby. It’s inspired by one of the many “deliver-in-case-of-death” letters to come out of Iraq, addressed to the wife and children an American soldier left behind. 612-435-0046; www.cantusonline.org