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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.

It was like a scene from a mobster film set in the Prohibition era. An overcast day on tired Minnehaha Avenue in South Minneapolis. I pulled up to the nondescript, red brick building that bears a sign reading “Tapestry Folkdance Center.” From the outside, it was quiet, barely a soul in sight. I figured the rendezvous was canceled for lack of interest. But on the other side of the glass door, swinging big-band tunes offered a friendly welcome, and a brief trip down a carpeted office corridor revealed a new old world whose residents are lindy hoppers. The whole thing was so seemingly undercover and speakeasyish, you’d think the president had outlawed dancing. (He hasn’t, has he?)

Disappointingly, there were no flapper gowns or cloche hats, this being a modern and altogether relaxed midday gathering, but there was lots of energy. These are the people who continued with swing dancing even after the initial (and subsequent retro) crazes had passed, and on this Saturday afternoon, the trend-bucking swingers were fantastic. And they should’ve been, given that it was the “Cats Corner Competition,” the annual contest to determine regional qualifiers who would go on to compete at the American Lindy Hop Championships in Connecticut in October. Despite that opportunity, and the cash prizes that come with it, the air lacked that certain tense hostility one expects at competitions. Instead, during the half-hour of open dancing prior to the beginning of the contest, the smooth wood floor was alive with smiling, laughing dancers, some there to perform, some there to watch, support, and take to the floor during breaks. Old and young, they were twisting, swinging, and spinning, most of them with a different partner every song.

The first competition was the fast dance, a two-minute improvised dance to music of the band’s choice. Seven couples each took a turn, adding their own individual flair to the performance. With the lindy, it’s all about feeling the music; although the moves themselves aren’t that hard to master (one female competitor had been swing dancing for only six months), you’re simply 23 skidoo if you don’t have rhythm. This wasn’t a routine the dancers performed; instead, they were actually dancing to the music, to each other, for themselves. And, the scene being rather small, most of the competitors knew each other and cheered the others on. Bizarre, wholesome, surreptitious fun.

Cindy Gardner sat down beside me after a dance during the second open-dance hour. She and her husband, Terry, teach lessons through their company, TC Swing, and were the organizers of the day’s events. Cindy has been teaching swing since 1979 and is revered in the community. She gazed around at the whirling, cheerful dancers, beads of sweat glistening along the bridge of her nose. “All this without drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes,” she noted. “Although Terry will have a cigar when we get home tonight.” True enough, but it was only 2:30 in the afternoon. There were still two competitive events to go, then prizes and a break before the evening’s dance, an event that happens on the first Saturday of each month and draws around 400 people of all lindy abilities. I didn’t mention to Cindy that I had heard several of the competitors outside discussing the most opportune time to hit the liquor store.—Katie Quirk

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

It’s well past the 10 p.m. curfew Minnetonka imposes for minors, and 40 teenage boys are in lockdown. They’re spending the next 10 hours at Game Tech, at an all-night LAN-o-thon, where they will battle each other in video-game tournaments until 8 a.m. LAN parties are erupting all over the country, and serious gamers are paying big bucks to spend the night networked with each other. Tonight’s entrance fee is $25. Most of the kids admit their parents are footing the bill.

Despite the signs that say “all-night party,” I’m convinced I’ve stumbled into the wrong place. The room is crowded with 17 computers and numerous TVs with video-game consoles. It looks more like a Best Buy warehouse than a party palace for Gen Y kids with attention deficits. But there are telling details: A collection of action-figure miniatures? Check. A raft of junk food? Check. Extreme beverages? Check. (“Have you ever had Bawls Guarana?” one boy asks me. “It keeps you up all night. We drink it all the time.”)

Game Tech owner Kevin Meitsma is the lone chaperone. A father of two of the teenage partygoers, Meitsma jumps on a table and lets out an earsplitting whistle, by way of laying down the ground rules. “You will not leave this room,” he commands. “But what if we have to go to the bathroom?” a boy asks. Yes, that’s allowable, young man. “You will listen to me when I’m talking,” he says. That’s not so easy.

When they find out I’m a reporter, massive cheers erupt, and they do their best Wayne and Garth “We are not worthy” cries, despite the fact that the Saturday Night Live characters hit their peak well before these kids had their first dial-up connection. (See, so media-savvy.)

Another boy, 15-year-old Eachan Lunn of Minnetonka, is skeptical. “You’re not going to write a typical story about how violent video games are and scare our parents, are you?” To be sure, the brace-faced boys will be spending all night gorging on an all-you-can-eat Happy Meal of violence, whether it’s playing Capture the Flag in Unreal Tournament 2003, engaging in World War II combat missions in Battlefield 1942, randomly killing each other in Counterstrike, or whacking prostitutes and suspendered stockbrokers in Vice City. But to be fair, the stockbrokers beg for it (“Don’t mess up my hair!”), and it is a virtual reality.

According to Game Tech rules, the kids must get their parents’ permission to stay and play. “I just, like, tell them how much fun it is,” says 14-year-old Mike Dunn. “They totally understand because they were geeks when they were younger, too.” Wearing an oversized Nirvana T-shirt and a computer-geek-chic haircut, Dunn says he wants to open a Japanese restaurant with all the cash he’ll earn as a video-game programmer. What’s so great about video games, dude? “I like that I can die. And still not be dead,” he says, with a smirk.

What unites Dunn and everyone else in the room is their pride in being self-proclaimed geeks who are more into computers than girls or booze or skateboards or any of the other temptations of modern boyhood. I learn that, after 10 minutes, I hold the record for a female visit. I learn that, despite their nerd status, a few of the guys have girlfriends other than Lara Croft. And I find out that, unlike the little punks I knew when I was a teenager, these guys would rather play a hand of Magic than take shots of Mad Dog. They call themselves teenagers? I was expecting to bear witness to some form of illicit behavior, at least a few punches thrown or a bottle of contraband smuggled. But I discovered that, in this parallel universe, these 14-year-olds are able to hold more interesting conversations than most 30-year-olds I know. I’m not sure what that says about me, but I do know it’s 1 a.m., I’m completely Bawls-free, and Real World reruns are whispering my name. Though I don’t need to, I ask permission to leave the premises.—Molly Priesmeyer

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

A joke that starts off “a duck walks into a bar,” has good odds of being funny. Ducks are funny. A joke beginning “a water buffalo walks into a bar” just doesn’t have the same ring. But “a can of Spam walks into a bar”—now that’s hilarious. Spam’s one of the funniest things about Minnesota, next to ice fishing and the Third Avenue Bridge. So when a company that makes spam-blocking software tries to trademark the name “Spam Arrest,” and Hormel takes legal action, it’s funny. It’s funny on a gut level, in a way that it wouldn’t be if, say, unsolicited email had developed a nickname like “Chicken-in-a-Biscuit” or “Coke.” But is the case, now working its way through the legal system, actually something to laugh about? Or is Hormel just responsibly protecting its business interests?

Preserving the trademark of a popular product takes hard work and dedication. If you don’t actively go after those who misuse your trademark, a court could declare it a generic term, and thus no longer eligible for a trademark. “Yo-yo” used to be a type of “return top,” but since the company that invented it unwisely marketed their product as “a yo-yo,” and not “a Yo-Yo® brand Return Top,” the word fell into common use and the company lost the trademark—and the name recognition that came with it.

The brilliant Minnesota folks who invented in-line roller skates got it right. Rollerblade® has been successful in preserving its trademark. Style books for major newspapers and magazines now spell out that writers should use “in-line skating” in place of “rollerblading,” because a trademark cannot be a verb. Type “rollerblading” in a word-processing program with automatic spell-check, and you’ll get that jeering red underline that indicates the word isn’t supposed to exist. This is the result of hundreds of thousands of dollars Rollerblade spent on advertising to teach writers the correct way to use its trademark. Company spokesman Nick Skally expressed sympathy for Hormel’s predicament. “Can you imagine? I would not like to be in their shoes.”

But is Spam really in the same situation as Rollerblade? Competitors in the meat industry are not claiming “Spam” has become a generic term; Armour, for example, calls its comparable offering “Potted Meat Food Product.” The chances of Hormel’s canned meat becoming confused with another are not high.

A more salient and worrisome question might be this: Who in the wide networked world doesn’t call unwanted email “spam”? “Spam” translates to “spam” in German, French, and Norwegian. And in August of 1998, the word entered the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time, with the definition “irrelevant Internet messages sent to a large number of people.” Officially, Hormel says it does not object to use of “this slang term to describe unsolicited commercial email”—as long as it doesn’t appear in all caps like “Spam” does on its can.

Does the dictionary status of “spam” lessen Hormel’s chances of blocking a trademark using the word for an unrelated product? In a personal, noncommercial, and solicited email to The Rake, Hormel representative Julie Craven responded by cleverly avoiding this and all other questions posed to her, instead stating, “We object to someone else trying to commercially exploit a brand we created and made famous.”

New York patent lawyer Michael Brown remains skeptical of Hormel’s case. “I don’t see how Spam Arrest harms Hormel at all. I don’t think anyone receiving unsolicited email is going to immediately have a revulsion against luncheon meat. I mean, that they didn’t have before.”—Katherine Glover

If it’s possible to credit the last three years’ resurgence of the movie musical to one person, it has to be the late Bob Fosse. His highly physical, breathlessly sexualized choreography has influenced nearly all the genre’s post-millennial successes—most obviously last year’s Oscar-winning Chicago. Fosse also directed two of the last great musicals before the genre completely collapsed in the 1980s, and both are out this month on DVD: Cabaret, the 1972 celebration of Weimar decadence, and 1979’s All That Jazz, his brilliant if overlong self-epitaph. The odd one out in this bunch is Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 Moulin Rouge, a huge popular success that proved musicals could still be palatable to today’s audiences. We found it unwatchable, sorry to say—terminally shallow and giddy as laughing gas. But we’re convinced of Luhrmann’s talent (check out his debut, Strictly Ballroom), and if he can dial it down a notch, next time he could be the director who finally outfoxes Fosse.

Watching Arnold Schwarzenegger lumber his way through Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, I was struck by a nagging, persistent quibble. Why on Earth would anybody build a 55-year-old android killing machine? That’s like building a sex robot modeled after Bea Arthur. Granted, at no point in T3 does the Austrian oak actually pull out a card for the American Association of Retired People, nor does he quip, “I’ll be back—to purchase strained prunes and adult diapers.” But there’s no getting around the fact that Schwarzenegger is, to use the immortal parlance of the Lethal Weapon movies, getting too old for this shit.

Schwarzenegger and rival Sylvester Stallone (who can currently be seen camping it up in a jokey supporting role as the bad guy in Spy Kids 3-D) are among the last of a dying breed: the rugged, stoic action hero, the kind who can carry an entire rusty vehicle on his muscle-hewn shoulders.

When I was growing up in the 80s, there was an unchanging constellation of action heroes. At the top there were of course, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Clint Eastwood, alpha-male Horatio Alger-types whose rise to glory had already become the stuff of legend. Below them were lesser but still commercially viable pretenders to the throne: pretty boy Jean-Claude Van Damme, Methuselah-like Charles Bronson, unsmiling Dolph Lundgren, hirsute redneck Chuck Norris, and ponytail enthusiast Steven Seagal, who is best known these days for running like a girl, lying about CIA connections, and getting shaken down by the mob.

Needless to say, nearly everyone in that list, other than Eastwood, who moonlights as a respected auteur, has aged about as gracefully as a Zubaz track suit, and many of Eastwood’s most recent acting roles have made references, usually explicit, to the advancing age of The Man Who Long Ago Played The Man With No Name. With the exception of Eastwood and Schwarzenegger, all the other guys have starred in at least one film that’s skipped multiplexes altogether, on its way to a less-than-auspicious premiere at the neighborhood Blockbuster. Haven’t been seeing much of Stallone on the big screen lately? That’s probably because his last two starring vehicles, the sadly titled Eye See You and Avenging Angelo both went direct to video.

Then again, Stallone is a direct-to-video newcomer compared to Van Damme, who has recently struck out with such not-ready-for-the-multiplex fare as Derailed, The Order, Replicant, Coyote Moon, and The Legionnaire. Or Seagal, who has alternated between direct-to-video vehicles and Joel Silver-produced theatrical releases where his fading star is augmented by a motley array of co-stars and sidekicks.

Schwarzenegger hasn’t had a flat-out hit since 1994’s True Lies, and one of the unexpectedly poignant aspects of T3 is that it writes Arnold’s (and company’s) approaching obsolescence into its narrative. Schwarzenegger’s character in the film is the android equivalent of an Atari 2600—a hulking anachronism who just can’t compete with the sexy new technology represented by Maxim cover girl Kristanna Loken. It’s thematically fitting, since technology, particularly the kind used to great effect in The Matrix (and much lesser effect in its army of imitators), has played a large part in killing off the action hero. If special effects, wires, and high-tech trickery can make Tobey Maguire, Drew Barrymore, and Keanu Reeves look like they can outfight Bruce Lee, then what’s the appeal of a 50-something martial artist like Seagal? His non-existent talent? The pony tail, maybe?

Given the cruel, Darwinian nature of survival as an action star, it’s no wonder today’s most promising action heroes (Vin Diesel, The Rock) look like freakish, steroid-addled caricatures of their predecessors. In order to survive, the action hero has to evolve, and that evolution has been halting and troubled at best.

Another factor in the demise of the conventional action hero is the skyrocketing cost of making, marketing, and releasing movies. A decade and a half ago, a definite theatrical niche existed for modestly budgeted action vehicles. As budgets rise exponentially, outstripping inflation and squeezing out all but the most fool-proof, high-budget, high-concept fare, that theatrical niche simply doesn’t exist anymore. Like an aging athlete still trying to make a living with his best years behind him, yesterday’s action heroes have been demoted to the movie-making equivalent of the minor leagues.

No wonder Schwarzenegger is considering a move into politics. Mr. Maria Shriver has fared much better than nearly all his contemporaries, but his career has been sliding downhill for a long time; he hasn’t been a sure thing at the box office for around a decade. Reprising his most beloved roles—sequels to True Lies and Conan the Destroyer have been rumored for years—will probably keep Schwarzenegger on professional life support, but as the actor approaches his 60s, juicy new roles are likely to elude him.

As a concerned citizen, I find the idea of Governor Schwarzenegger terrifying. I still vividly recall the T3 star endorsing the elder President Bush with the following bit of heavily accented would-be mirth: “I just played da Terminaytor on da big screen, but Maacheel Duk-a-kis is da real Terminaytor of America’s few-chah!”—a patently ridiculous claim that brings to mind far-fetched images of the shrimpy former governor of Massa-chusetts striding maniacally through a post-apocalyptic U.S wasteland of his own making.

But as someone who loves a compelling, larger-than-life personal narrative, I find the idea of Governor or even President Schwarzenegger to be infinitely compelling. If he were to go into politics, Arnie would be like Ronald Reagan adjusted for inflation, a true-blue, all-American success story as improbable as it is irresistible. At worst, he’d be the next Governor Ventura: an amusing idea in theory, an unfortunate one in practice. Even if he lost, he’d still continue to loom large as one of his chosen country’s biggest icons.

Schwarzenegger’s film career, though still monstrously lucrative, offers nowhere to go but down. If Arnold runs for office, the second act in his brilliant career could be a doozie. I’m just glad I don’t live in California.