Category: Article

The 1992 telling of this anti-holiday tale on National Public Radio launched the career of author and commentator David Sedaris. His look at Christmas from the perspective of a verbally abused adult, one wearing the curly-toed shoes and green tights of a Macy’s Christmas Elf in New York City, is hilarious and uniquely Sedaris. Bryant-Lake Bowl’s version of his modern classic will make you think twice before you stand in line to sit your kids on the lap of a strange fat man. 810 W. Lake St., Minneapolis; 612-825-8949; www.bryantlakebowl.com

True life is the stuff of great art—an axiom put to great use in Inherit the Wind, a play loosely based upon the infamous Scopes “monkey trial.” Written in 1955, the script re-imagines the plight of John Scopes, the high school biology teacher who, in 1925, was famously prosecuted for teaching evolution theory. Both the sixty-year-old script and the ninety-year-old trial are still timely, with evolution versus creationism continuing to dog our public school teachers. (All of this makes us question any theory that suggests humans—especially lawmakers—might actually be evolving.) This staging is part of Fifty Foot Penguin’s “anti-Christmas show” tradition, offering a dramatic courtroom battle a la The Crucible and Twelve Angry Men. Cedar Riverside People’s Center, 425 S. 20th Ave., Minneapolis; 612-381-1110; www.fiftyfootpenguin.org

So maybe some of us do want sparkle and magic at the theater this time of year—and that’s OK! Especially if it’s done by Dolls frontman and master choreographer Myron Johnson, who playfully integrates old-fashioned ballroom dance and avant-garde compositions, giving his work an off-kilter texture. His throwback charms are well-suited for revitalizing a familiar fairy tale, and he has vowed to follow closely Cinderella’s enchanting storyline. Still, while you might not expect a cross-dressing showgirl as the Fairy Godmother, it’s hard not to be suspicious about Johnson’s intentions for the belle of the ball. And yet it is a family-friendly show, so bring the young ’uns to revel in the Dolls’ madcap dancing, screwball costuming, and offbeat tunes—spiked, no doubt, with a few surprises. 345 Washington St., St. Paul; 651-224-4222; www.balletofthedolls.org

According to Japanese folklore, Taiko drums can carry the prayers of their players to heaven. As disciples of this tradition, this collection of drummers use enough force to wake the Samurai spirits who initiated this ritual. The annual Taiko Blizzard festival—featuring Mu Performing Arts’ Daiko drum core and the renowned Winnipeg-based Fubuki Daiko squad—blends pulsating beats with rhythmic, athletic dancing and action-packed stunts. Given such gushing intensity for both the eyes and ears, it’s no surprise that sold-out shows are as much a part of this tradition as the concert itself. 1420 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-340-1725; www.southerntheater.org

A welcome Christmas gift from Wes.
If you measured the success of a film director by the number of cool actors who stand in line to work with him, Wes Anderson would surely win by a long shot. And why not? If you pay close attention, you quickly understand why a film like Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums is so beloved by character actors and movie critics alike. These films are rich in humane humor, and they feature some of the smartest writing and show off one of the most charmingly quirky sensibilities in major motion pictures today. These are qualities you cannot buy through special effects or soundtracks or even a twenty-million-dollar leading lady. They are the unique sensibility of a true auteur—and Anderson is head and shoulders above pretenders of his generation like Spike Jonze and Sofia Coppola. The color palette alone of Anderson’s newest Bill Murray vehicle is making our mouths water—pastel blues, grays, and pinks frame a wacky story about an oceanographer who is slightly more Clouseau than Cousteau. As for our own Bill Murray worship, this film will be a welcome relief from his temporary setback of Lost in Translation, a grossly overrated exercise in directorial vanity.

That eight-hundred-page bulge in many a geek’s stocking this year is Clarke’s first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, whose titular characters are magicians who decide to redirect British history. Clarke’s incredibly detailed and ambitious work weaves real and imagined history, mythology, and period manners into a sly, often humorous narrative. Her book has been called “a Harry Potter for adults,” but, since we often saw adults reading the Harry Potter series in the first place, consider this a lengthy and highly entertaining continuation in the literate public’s attempts to escape reality. Clarke talked to us from a German hotel room as she settled in for a night of solitude after a long day on her book tour.

THE RAKE: Fantasy literature isn’t usually highly regarded, but Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was a contender for this year’s very serious Booker Prize. Do you think attitudes towards the genre are changing, or is there something different about your book?

I certainly think attitudes are changing a bit toward fantasy and toward genres in general. A few years ago when Philip Pullman’s was longlisted for the Booker, some people questioned the book’s right to be there, simply because his book was a children’s book. But no one blinked when Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell made the longlist. Barriers between categories are breaking down a little. It helps that “literary” writers are borrowing from different genres—finding a vitality there, which is perhaps sometimes missing from literary fiction. I suspect it helps that Strange and Norrell is a bit of a blend of genres. Sure, it’s fantasy, but there’s also some historical fiction, adventure, and mystery. So the fantasy comes wearing an interesting post-modernish dress.

Who is most like you: Jonathan Strange or Gilbert Norrell? Who did you enjoy writing more?

Neither is much like me. But there are a few similarities between me and Norrell. We both like staying at home, surrounded by books and being quiet. In that way, Norrell is quite like lots of writers—except that he doesn’t write anything. I probably enjoyed writing Strange more, because I suspect he has more good dialogue, by which I mean more funny dialogue. But Norrell was good to write, too, especially when he was being ridiculous.

Your book is heavily footnoted and as carefully researched as a made-up world can be. What are your favorite reference sources?

I particularly like secondhand books on social history, English folklore, and old country ways and beliefs. For example, there’s a Welsh author, George Ewart Evans, who interviewed English country people in the fifties and sixties about what they could remember about past customs and beliefs. Some of their stories reached back to the mid-nineteenth century. He talks about things like horses’ skulls buried under floors and beliefs about bee-keeping, stuff like that. Horse-whispering was once quite a big thing in Eastern England and Scotland.

For the behavior and ideas of the country gentry in the early nineteenth century, Jane Austen can’t be bettered. There’s also a series of little books published here [in England] by Shire Books on all sorts of odd subjects: spoons 1645-1930, candle lighting, mausoleums, smocks, smoking antiques, and so on. I collect these compulsively. But what I like best is the research I’m going to do next. Once you’ve begun and you’re seriously into it, it becomes a bit like homework, but the research you’re going to do next is always interesting.

I hear you’re a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Did you take any lessons from its writers as you worked on your book?

The things I loved in Buffy are the same as the things I love in other literature and films. A pushing-together of light and dark, comedy and themes of death, madness, loss. A wonderful quirky style of dialogue. Wonderful characterization and plots that come out of the characterization. I hope that I got some of these things into Strange and Norrell. I’m actually expecting Buffy to influence my writing a little more in the future.

Not to give anything away, but you wrap up your book in an unusual fashion. What was your intention with this?
One of the things I tried to avoid in Strange and Norrell was the usual big fantasy showdown between a clear source of good and a clear source of evil. It’s much more about people with good and evil in them. I think that that is reflected in the ending.

Susanna Clarke reads December 9 at Barnes & Noble, Har Mar Mall, 2100 N. Snelling Ave., Roseville, 651-639-9256 and December 10 at Bound to Be Read, 870 Grand Ave., St. Paul, 651-646-2665

Boehlke, the Jungle Theater’s artistic director, is currently hard at work reprising Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas’ radio play that takes place in Llareggub, a fictional Welch fishing village. Despite its name, which happens to be “bugger all” spelled backwards, Llareggub is a quaint, charming place where everyday folks just happen to speak in Thomas’ sprawling poetic tongue. Even though Boehlke was immersed in all things Welsh, we persuaded him to prepare a shopping list for an imaginary exile to an unpopulated tropical isle (which would probably be most welcome come January).

1) The Complete Works of Shakespeare because, well, I would want to read something that has great variety and density of subject matter, that is both lightweight and profound, with comedic and tragic elements to it. Plus, when I finally got off the island I would have some plays I had all worked out in my head!

2) A simple kitchen kit: A really good knife, cutting board, and hand juicer to prepare some simple and beautiful meals on the island. I suppose one could rip at the food, but I would like to retain a modicum of civilized behavior. I once was a caterer so I know how important a good knife is. I used to bake gourmet desserts for the Loring Café right before I founded the Jungle. Also, with a knife I could carve a pan flute. As Shakespeare said, “Music soothes the savage breast.”

3) A hatchet to make a charming bamboo hut with a palm leaf roof that would provide shelter. I think there is something innate in us as humans that insists on building structures for protection from the clime.

4) A clothing kit: a hat with a brim because I’m fair, so I could enjoy the sun; white shirt and white pants made of natural fiber to protect me; and a string to create a necklace of driftwood or a stone to hang about my neck.

5) Pencil and paper tablet to write, because we all have a need for self-expression and a way to record the philosophical and poetic considerations we formulate. Since there’s no one but me on the desert island, but because one’s need to communicate is still intact, I would need to write to be fulfilled.

My blood is just slightly tainted. I’ve never tried to hide my HIV-positive status, and I am, if anything, a little embarrassed by how useful I’ve found it. In my defense, one works with what is at hand—it’s not as if I sero-converted simply to get some good material. But then what? What can I say about blood that makes me more interesting than anybody else? Emily Carter on blood. Better than Emily Carter on drugs, I say.

But I have another alibi, or an excuse, or at least an inspiration. It all started with Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet. In that movie, blood was beautiful, and so was death, and so, in fact, was everything else, including the title, The Blood of a Poet.

“The blood of a poet.” I want it—the phrase, not the blood—for myself. The glamorous and distant idea is, of course, that someone would actually allow her blood to be spilled for poetry, for beauty, for freedom from cruelty. I sit in my warm little office, my computer playing a radio station from Cape Verde, and I contemplate blood. Meanwhile, it’s being spilled on the floor.

That’s what the news reports said about the video of the terrorists terrorizing all those Russian schoolchildren and their parents and their teachers. Blood is clearly visible on the floor. You can see blood on the floor. For something that’s supposed to be kept on the inside, blood is certainly beautiful. It is scarlet, perhaps to call attention to itself. In nature, bright color is reserved for mating or warning. The little frog that looks like a jewel is often poisonous. Even, and especially, the birds know this. Bright colors tell you to stay away unless you want a painful death. There is no such warning on the human label. Terrorists, for example, look exactly like human beings. Their blood is no more a warning (or an invitation) than anyone else’s.

I watched the video of the schoolchildren and the blood on the floor because curiosity is stronger than choice. I’m no more of a ghoul than anyone else, and the desire to see what shouldn’t be seen is only human. Blood on the floor, hair on the walls, that’s the promise used to get my attention. You can see blood on the floor. The blood seeps into the tiny moats between the tiles, and threads its merry way along a maze-like path of cracks, just like it did that lunchtime twenty-five years ago, the trickle escaping from the gashed head of a boy who’d just thrown himself off the third-floor balcony and into the stairwell. Bright red blood running through the black and white marble.

I remember the face on Brenda, the school psychologist—frozen half-smile, whispered curse—before she bolted to the emergency phone. It was a small school for disturbed but talented adolescents and it didn’t take long to get the word that Brenda and the fallen boy—a Zappa-worshiping, Tuinal-gulping kid from an outlying suburb—had been having an affair. The whole school was crazy; I have no idea whether or not it was true. I just remember marveling at the fact that the boy was still, somehow, alive. The human body, that eggshell full of guts, amazed me with its strength. Even when the inside got outside, the way it was never supposed to do, that thing can take a licking and keep on ticking. It’s true, or we’d all know even more people who had driven themselves to death at an early age.

Anyway, that certainly was not the blood of a poet. It was the blood of a messed-up adolescent boy who, the story went, had just been dismissed by the beautiful older woman who no longer found his services necessary.

There’s actually not much that’s poetic about blood, a liquid medium in which basic processes occur. Respiration, mitosis, meiosis, whatever. It’s just not that exciting a substance, in the end. It fades, for one thing. All those handkerchiefs dipped in Dillinger’s blood were splashy red to start with and ten minutes later were nothing but faded brown, instantly sepia-tinged and historical. Blood fades as fast as the shock of seeing it. The first decapitation video, I was transfixed. I was about to see a human head removed from its body, to look at death. Naturally, the tawdry mess of it is what stays in the mind, the inept sawing, the face with no particular expression, as if surprised mid-thought. In the pornographic light of poor production, the blood looked almost black. That was only the first video. The others appeared, one after the other, in a toxic flurry. It has been a year of death presented like two fat hookers faking sex with each other for rent money. No elegant vampire would want that blackish, sticky, clotted substance.

The blood of a poet, in other words, oozes prose-like out of the body. It carries no potent charm; in the societal power structure, the poet is less significant than the plumber, who, at least, is a hero when he last-minute fixes the pipes everybody thought were going to be frozen all weekend. The blood of a poet is worth less than the blood of a plumber.

So, oh well. So be it. I am no poet, but I am poetic, and my blood carries a little something extra. Gugu Dlamini’s blood carried the same virus as mine. She, however, lived in South Africa in a place where your HIV status didn’t get you any grants like the one for HIV-positive writers I just applied for. What her HIV status got her, when she disclosed it, was stoned to death. Her blood was the same color as mine, but she herself made a brighter splash. She knew that in her town, disclosure meant death, but she disclosed. She was sicker of the denial than she was from the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus, the kind of sickness that makes one ready, almost eager, to have her own blood spilled. Which is what I call transgressive, which is what I call “edge.” I don’t know if I have it, and, God willing, I’ll never need to know. I can picture the red brushstroke painted by the first stone, however, a gash splitting her eyebrow like a signature. There was nothing to protect her. “Can’t you see,” the poet Akmatova exclaimed, “I am naked, vulnerable, while the rest of you have armor?” There was someone who was not afraid to let it spill. I like to think of her and Gugu in heaven, laughing, happy and drunk upon the blood of so-called saints.

Though we usually tend toward the testosterone, we’ve been getting in touch with our feminine side around here lately. Manicures and massages, girl-power nights—we even broke in our new “Smart Women Make Changes” eraser by rubbing out the groveling ex. So we’re eager to see this theatrical take on the sexual revolution, blending fact and fiction and told variously by a fifties-era psychotherapist, his wife, their daughter, and a contemporary single mom. Picture Freud in a nightie: It’s got nothing to do with the performance, but it sure is funny!