Category: Article

In the classic arts, things remain decidedly nationalistic. Just as the Italians get most of the credit and attention for opera, the English seem to command center stage in dramatic theater. And bridging the two, though often dismissed, are the Germans, who not infrequently bettered their cultural neighbors in both categories. Wagner, no matter what you think of him, was a colossus of opera. And his poetic forebears, Goethe and Schiller, got as close as anyone will to equalling Shakespeare. Park Square offers here the world premiere of a “new adaptation” of Schiller’s classic play about Mary Queen of Scots’ sudden-death-overtime with Queen Elizabeth I. We’re not sure this classic needed a new treatment. But we’re all for a new staging of the play, widely believed to be the best treatment of one of the most popular dramatic subjects. Park Square, 20 W. 7th Place, St. Paul, (651) 291-7005, parksquaretheatre. org

Playwright Gavin Lawrence garnered good notices for Cut Flowers, a dark and often angry drama set among low-wage workers in Washington. His latest, warmhearted family comedy, Salt Fish, has a lighter touch. It’s based on the history of his own family, which emigrated here from the South American country of Guyana, and especially his grandmother, a nurturing matriarch who filled his head with stories and his stomach with the tasty piscine dish of the title. Lawrence directs and acts in this production, which also stars Karen Malina White of TV’s Malcolm & Eddie. Mixed Blood, 1501 S. 4th St., (612) 338-6131,mixedblood.com

Naked people have not yet become boring to the artists of the world. When Icebox owner Howard Christopherson put out a call for artworks based on the human nude, he was sent so many entries—500, from seven countries—that he doubled the size of the show. In total, 112 artworks made the cut, encompassing photography, body painting, watercolor and oil paintings, sculpture, and digital media. Naturally Christopherson has included a few items that frankly seem a bit, erm, erotic (“You have to. That’s part of the deal,” he notes dryly). But there’s an impressive range of mood on display, from Ken Weissblum’s Daliesque “Frames” to J.E. Jasen’s “Lover’s Brooch,” a wrought piece of jewelry with an eye in the middle to keep watch over straying sweethearts. Don’t miss the short but funny documentary on legally blind photographer Flo Fox and her (ahem) “Dicthology” series, a bawdy celebration of artfully costumed organs, and we don’t mean Wurlitzers. Icebox, 2401 Central Ave. N.E. (612) 788-1790, www.iceboxminnesota.com

It is one of life’s mordant ironies that Macalester art professor Rudquist, who often painted skulls, would pass away in 2001 of brain cancer. But Rudquist had a streak of mordancy himself, expressed in such comments as “Bone, of any species, is an extraordinarily beautiful material.” This overview of his career does show the more buoyant side of his creativity as well, but the centerpieces are those images of death to which he returned throughout his career. The six-by-nine-foot “Great Skull” is arresting by itself, but more interesting is his “Must We Always Expect War” series. Executed over a 40-year span, it explores the human penchant for brutality through the repeated re-imagining of a monstrous, distorted bony head, reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes. Rudquist’s paintings are rooted in Renaissance ideas, but his bold and unexpected color choices put his personal stamp on the work. Janet Wallace Fine Art Center Gallery, (651) 696-6279, www.macalester.edu/art

We love the Bell Museum, we really do. It is old, humble, a little bit musty, and very, very quiet—those carpeted walkways through the exhibit halls are ever so effective at creating a pleasant hush. It’s the perfect antidote to the sense-jangling overload that can be the adult experience at the larger, glitzier family museums in town. Visit the Bell during the week and you may very well have the place to yourself, unless your arrival coincides with a school group. Natural Wonders, the Bell’s current exhibit, gathers environmental art from more than 180 schoolchildren across Minnesota. Large albums contain photographs of all 750 submitted works, in which students explore their views of nature and interpret the natural world through painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and other media. Bell, 10 Church St. S.E., (612) 624-7083, www.bellmuseum.org

Can an all-night jazz club in downtown St. Paul survive on nothing more than caffeine, nicotine, and donuts? The owners of Brilliant Corners hope so. The plan is to fill this hip new space with all kinds of jazz, from the most modest local ensembles to major national acts—charging covers accordingly, and serving up nothing stronger than coffee. It’s a wonderful space. Bright orange and red walls collide above the stageless floor, the better to make jazz of all kinds more accessible at all hours (reportedly, closing time will be at 4 a.m.). The club’s gala grand opening should be exciting too. New jazz wonderboy Matt Wilson (no, not the Toolmaster of Brainerd) gigs here March 7 and 8. Serious fans of local heroes Happy Apple will know precisely what to do with this information. (651) 224-8642, brilliantcornersjazz.com

Louise Erdrich is fighting sleep. This explains a lot.

It’s said that the threshold between sleeping and waking—the lucid yet lawless terrain of twilight—is a cracked door to enlightenment, a conduit to the divine. How apropos that, here in the grainy borderlands of consciousness, the Minneapolis novelist puts pen to paper and struggles (yes, struggles) to write. Writing becomes a talisman against sleep, as she strings one word after the next simply to stay awake.

Erdrich’s exhaustion is the well-earned reward of a life equally matched to the richness and complexity of her writing, and that’s the way she likes it. The demands of a writing life combined with motherhood—demands unveiled with rich clarity in her 1995 memoir, The Blue Jay’s Dance—are still fresh and concrete for Erdrich, who has a two-year-old and two adolescent daughters at home. As if to defy the constraints of traditional female domesticity, Erdrich writes prolifically, with 15 published books to date, including her latest novel, The Master Butchers Singing Club, in which she turns her attention to her German-American ancestry and in particular, her paternal grandfather’s experience of fighting in World War I on the German side, before immigrating to the United States and plying his trade as a butcher.

Erdrich, whose previous novels have rummaged the lore of her French-Ojibwa maternal heritage, primarily writes fiction. But she draws heavily from genealogical research, family legends, personal tragedy (she suffered the deaths of her son, and her husband, Michael Dorris), and the mythical landscape of her North Dakota childhood. She has published eight novels plus assorted poetry, nonfiction, and children’s books. She is a permanent fixture on bestseller lists and a favorite of critics and scholars, and her voice is celebrated as one of the most important in the annals of Native literature.

All of this is just not enough. Three years ago, Erdrich opened an independent bookstore, Birchbark Books, near her home in Kenwood. It is a gathering place for the Native American arts community and a repository for a hand-picked crop of books reflecting the convictions and idiosyncrasies of the owner: Native writers, local authors, small runs from independent presses, literary novels, and obscure volumes alongside classics in fiction, parenting, gardening, and spirituality. The entire southwest corner of the store is dedicated to what Erdrich describes as high-quality children’s books, the sorts of books you really want to read to your kids. Beside the parakeet cage is a tiny reading nook—The Hobbit Hole—tucked under the stairs and looking out at pretty red shelves topped with Native American Barbies and hand-crafted birdhouses.

This eclectic montage is scattered thoughtfully amongst other offerings. Displays of Native handcrafts—quilts, pottery, baskets, and paintings—punctuate tables and shelves, along with books and little glass cases of herbs, jewelry, and music. Erdrich refers to the bookstore as an extension of her home, and the warmly scuffed maple floorboards, birch-bark reading loft, and brightly upholstered chairs and rockers do create a comfy ambience. But for Erdrich’s true fans, the bookstore’s physical manifestation of her tangy sense of humor promises further delight. For example, a large, ornately carved wooden confessional towers against the eastern wall. Patrons are invited to sit and read, or just think, inside the confessional, where cleanliness is literally next to godliness. (Shelves on one side of the unit display Wash Away Your Sins body care products and handmade cedar soaps; shelves on the other side hold an array of lush hardcovers on spirituality.)

While Erdrich fends off sleep for the sake of another novel (her current work-in-progress begins in New Hampshire, where she lived for many years, and wends its way back to her homelands of Minnesota and North Dakota) and tours the nation to promote The Master Butchers Singing Club, new manager Brian Baxter (formerly of Baxter’s Books) runs shop at Birchbark and does his damnedest to manage Erdrich’s schedule as well. His first task may be to bring the shop into the black, since the hand-written FAQ propped near Birchbark’s cash register says the store currently operates at a deficit of three to five thousand dollars each month. But “We’re passionate about this place and what it stands for and we’ll hang in there until… either we make it or go broke,” the humble sheet of cardboard assures loyal customers. Profits, if and when they materialize, will go back to the Native community. Meanwhile, the bookstore is committed to providing a “grassroots outlet for Native gardeners, artists, a place for books—provoking, intelligent Native and non-Native literary books, noncorporate, out of the box, and cheerfully eccentric in a world dominated by monolithic interests.”

Not a simple mandate, but Erdrich enjoys life most when it’s “really complicated.” She thrives in the deepest and sometimes darkest interstices of human experience, personal and political borderlands where cultures collide, and where humor and tragedy, love and hate, success and failure, and life and death spill over the thresholds and become inextricably linked.

The Rake spoke with the overbooked Louise Erdrich about success, kids, writing, bookselling, and on a quiet Friday evening when her two-year-old daughter was too tired (or rather, too soundly asleep) to participate in the pow-wow Erdrich was otherwise committed to attend.

David Cronenberg is infamous for his unique style of horror filmmaking. His films–among them The Fly, Naked Lunch, and Dead Ringers–gaze with icy formalism on worlds where biology has gone mad. They’re a catalogue of physical breakdowns, sexual dysfunctions, florid mutations and hallucinations. His latest, Spider, based on Patrick McGrath’s novel, stars Ralph Fiennes as a muttering, schizophrenic Londoner who obsessively scribbles notes in an invented alphabet, struggling to make sense out of his fractured relationship with his mother (Miranda Richardson, terrific in a triple role). Quieter and largely grue-free, it’s still a clearly Cronenbergian film, and his best in years. The Rake crashed into the director recently for a Q&A.

RAKE: Last time I was here at Nicollet Island Inn it was for a romantic evening with my wife. Now I’m back, on Valentine’s Day, with the director of "Crash," "Rabid" and "Videodrome." Is that a bad sign about the future direction of my love life?

DC: I had a very lonely experience last night. I was alone in my room. But it is rather romantic. I think you’re safe. I think you’re OK.

RAKE: What attracts you to the subjects you choose to make films about?

DC: It’s hard to say… For me, filmmaking is a philosophical endeavor. I’m talking to myself and trying to explain things. Trying to explain the human condition and existentially what I am and what society is and what culture is and what art is and all those things. And I understand too that the first fact of human existence is the human body. And that’s something people try to avoid accepting, because if you accept the body as the totality of your existence as an individual then you accept mortality, you accept death. That’s a very hard thing to do even as an exercise.

RAKE: You’ve said that your intention with Spider was less a realistic portrayal of schizophrenia than a story with wider resonance to the human condition. What do everyday people have in common with someone as eccentric as Spider?

DC: Imagine taking away from yourself those things that Spider doesn’t have. He doesn’t have a wife, a family, a job. He doesn’t seem to have a religion, doesn’t seem to have politics. If you take all those things away from most people, I think you’ll end up with someone potentially very close to Spider. That is to say, feeling very disconnected from the flow of life around him, confused about himself and who he is. Knowing he can’t deal with people. And then struggling with his memories. He’s trying to figure out who he is based on these constantly shifting memories. I relate to that. I can feel that in myself. And I know how fragile identity is, and how much creative effort we have to put into maintaining an identity.

RAKE: Given that, it’s ironic that Patrick McGrath changed Spider’s character so much when he wrote the screenplay from his book.

DC: Yes. In the first draft of the script Spider was writing in English and there was voiceover. In the novel, Spider writes the novel, that’s his job. And that means he’s very good with language and very literary. But hearing that spoken over the face of our Spider, who is very inarticulate, was unbelievable. I still wanted him to write in the journal, because I still wanted to give him something physical to do that would show that he was obsessively trying to remember things; basically he’s taking evidence of a crime for some future use. But I didn’t want us to be able to read what he was writing, so I had Ralph develop the hieroglyphics that he did. As soon as I made the decision to keep the journal, I was setting him up to be an archetypal … maybe a failed artist, whose writings are unfortunately in a language that nobody can understand.

RAKE: Although you do eventually reveal the central mystery of Spider’s past, it’s obvious you’re careful not to explain too much.

DC: There are some things that if you just say it right out, they actually lose their meaning. Some things cannot be expressed without destroying them. So it’s a matter of balance. You be evocative, you give the audience clues, but they have to come up with it themselves for it to have that sense of revelation.

RAKE: Are you making the kind of films that you want to make? Is it too difficult to sell, for instance, a David Cronenberg slapstick comedy?

DC: Well, I’ve never tried that. But I do think my films are generally quite funny, even Spider. But no, I haven’t had trouble that way. I’ve been offered all kinds of films that I haven’t done just because I didn’t want to do them. But I was always happy that people recognize I could do other things, that I had the technique to do things I’m not necessarily known for. I haven’t found that to be a hindrance.

RAKE: Has it become more difficult for you to make movies as an independent filmmaker?

DC: It’s pretty tough right now, just because [moviemaking] is a business and the economy of the world is very shaky. Given the impending war with Iraq, I’d say it isn’t going to get any easier.

RAKE: And you’re not likely to make the next Sergeant York.

DC: Definitely not. Although I did like that movie.

RAKE: On most of the movies you direct, you write the screenplay as well, even when it’s based on a novel like Naked Lunch or Crash. Spider’s a rare exception. What attracted you to this story above shooting one of your own scripts?

DC: Laziness. Like most writers, I’ll do anything to avoid writing. It’s really hard. To do an adaptation is easier. To have someone give you a good script is easiest. Although I was very arrogant about that as a young filmmaker, I felt that you weren’t really a filmmaker if you didn’t write your own script. I’ve come to realize you can have some very interesting experiences fusing your own sensibility with someone else’s, to do things you never would have come up with yourself. In the case of Spider, it’s almost not like an adaptation, because it was the script I read first, and the script was the basis of my decision to do Spider. So you pray that a great script comes to you — and particularly if it has financing already done, that would be great. But if not, then my fallback is to write my own script. A lot of directors don’t have that fallback, because there’s no necessary connection between directing and screenwriting. It ‘s only an accident that you can do both. There have been of course multiple directors that couldn’t write.

RAKE: What effect do actors have on the evolution of your stories? Ralph Fiennes did a lot to refine his character, like adding Spider’s constant incomprehensible mumbling, which is really effective in showing how he occupies his own mental space separate from the rest of us.

DC: He came up with the idea, but I had to say yes to it. That’s how it works. In a collaboration everybody comes up with suggestions, not just the actors. The costume people, the production designers, they all come up with possibilities and options. But the director has to say yes or no to them because the director is the only one who has the big picture. He’s the only one who’s there for every scene and every moment, and will be responsible for putting together the editing. But you don’t want your actors to just be puppets. That’s not acting. You want an actor to have a lot
of input. That’s why actors like to work with me.

RAKE: Spider drinks his tea with about four heaping spoons of sugar. Was that a reference to Jeff Goldblum’s coffee habits in The Fly?

DC: I try very hard not to worry about connections that people might make amongst my films. I’m not a self-referential filmmaker. But I didn’t take it out for that very same reason–to ignore the existence of this other movie I made and go with what I think his character would do. I thought it was an accurate observation that Patrick made about the way a lonely man like that might be, the way he drinks the tea. It was in Patrick’s novel that Spider keeps eating all that sugar. And certainly Patrick was not thinking of The Fly. There it had a different meaning, which was that [Goldblum’s] metabolism was changing [as he turned into the Fly]. In this case it’s just what lonely people often do, just this comfort thing. It’s an entirely different meaning.

RAKE: If you couldn’t be a filmmaker, what would you choose to do?

DC: I always thought I’d be a novelist. And I was kind of surprised to find myself in filmmaking. Often I much prefer to read a book than see a movie…. I don’t actually watch my own movies. There are too many associations. Maybe when I get senile and can’t remember that I made those movies, I might be able to judge them objectively.

In many states there is a law, or at least a strong suggestion, that you ought to stay the hell out of the way of people who can actually drive. To wit, if you are not passing someone, don’t drive in the left lane of the freeway; if you are coming to the end of an entrance ramp, accelerate into the traffic so you can slow slightly to merge into an opening. Don’t stop at the end of the ramp and wait for things to open up.

When I could afford it, the first thing I did was buy a German car. If you really like to drive, other than a ’68 VW bus, it doesn’t matter much which German car you buy, because they will all go like a banshee, turn like a woman’s mood, and stop in less time than it takes George W. Bush to tell you everything he knows about diplomacy. Big motor, big suspension and big brakes are everything you need, short of a comely companion, for happy motoring. Except, of course, for a road free of Minnesotans.

I learned to drive in a couple of courses—a performance course that taught you how to turn fast, get out of the trouble you got yourself into by turning too fast, and why you should buy new tires every year. I also took a racing course taught by someone who had actually won Le Mans that taught you all of the above, and that going 190 mph is more fun than you think.

So, while I have to admit I’ve never gone 190 on a civilian road, I have touched 145 on the occasional deserted stretch of I-94 when some Mustang driver thought he was Carroll Shelby. When I passed him, I still had two gears to go, but it was my exit anyway so there was no point in rubbing it in. That, and I was afraid that he’d do something stupid and I’d be needing another new set of tires sooner than I planned.

But I really learned to drive in Europe, where left lane drivers who aren’t going way the hell over the limit don’t last long. If you want to experience terror, try passing someone in the left lane in a Renault 5 at 125 km/hr and have a semi come up and tap your rear bumper because you aren’t going fast enough for him. I now rent nothing less than a BMW 5 series in Europe. If he can bump me at 190 km/hr, I guess I should be going faster.

So, why should you check out an Audi A6? It’s the Quattro, pure and simple. The all- wheel drive under all that power just makes it a joy to go like the 5th Armored Division through Baghdad without worrying unduly that you’re going to screw up and lose it. Add all those creature comforts like cup holders (which you won’t find in a Porsche) and it’s almost like being in an SUV, which is what your wife drives and you can borrow when you have to pick up building materials and other large manly things.

But unlike the Explorer full of plywood, this baby handles—especially if you use the Tiptronic transmission (the Porsche-developed racing automatic) to control your torque. You can accelerate effortlessly thorough turns, downshift to blow past those Suburbans in the left lane, and make it home in time to watch the car chase from Ronin (featuring an Audi S8, which is too much car for you) on cable. Don’t get any ideas though, that just because Europeans can drive like that, that you can, too. Remember you are still in Minnesota and that someone is bound to stop in front of you at the end of the on ramp, and that most of the time here, you may as well be in a Ford Fiesta.

I liked Mike O’Brien better than I knew him. He was a friend of my friend Charlie and we’d exchanged some boozy repartee at a few of Charlie’s parties over the years. He was a big Irish sort of American—funny, loud and a wonderful story teller. He grew up in Tunisia and spoke fluent French.

We last saw each other at Charlie and Veronique’s wedding in Sollies-Toucas, an old village about nine kilometers north of Toulon, France. I was living in Spain at the time and another friend flew into Barcelona to meet me and my wife and we all drove over to Toulon a couple of days before the wedding to meet O’Brien and a few other college buddies and make sure we got the party groove down before the actual ceremony.

One of those intervening evenings included one when 14 Americans and a couple of French sailors drank 24 liters of the local claret with Monsieur Meaux, one of Veronique’s neighbors. Monsieur Meaux was a retired French navy captain and was enlarging his home by hand chiseling a wine cellar out of the granite mountain outside his bedroom. He let us all take a few whacks with his big sledge after we’d had some wine and hummed along to a few French sea chanteys.

Veronique’s father did his bit to mitigate the claret’s effects by turning out crepes with butter and jam as fast as he could, but he was slowed a bit by having to constantly open more bottles of claret. Although none of the Frenchmen spoke English, we were able to adequately mime our comradeship and laugh until 4 a.m. By that time, we’d made so much noise the entire male population of the neighborhood and a couple of their dogs had joined us for a few more carafes and a nude swim in Veronique’s family pool.

We slowed down a bit the next day for the actual ceremony. I was an official witness, which mostly involved saying “Oui” when the priest looked at me and signing a bunch of French paperwork I didn’t understand. As insurance against the possibility I was confessing to the previous night’s international incident, I signed O’Brien’s name.

The wedding party in the town square was eventually subsumed by a general village celebration, because the wedding day happened to correspond to the anniversary of that day in 1944 when the Americans last arrived in Sollies-Toucas for a party from which the Germans had been rudely excluded. All the older Frenchmen were wearing their medals from the Resistance and bought us many drinks and kissed our cheeks. They danced with our women, and we with theirs. Monsieur Meaux reaffirmed his place in our hearts when he asked a particularly buxom older friend of Charlie’s parents, Mrs. Jones, to dance the rumba. She declined politely, in English, which he didn’t understand, and pointed to her chest as partial explanation that she’d just had heart surgery. “Yes, they are very nice,” Monsieur Meaux agreed.

Not all the French were so amiable, though. There were a couple of twins from Paris who had come to the party to play the part of the clichéd French who hate Americans. They sat across the long table from me and O’Brien and made snotty comments in French about the Americans who had come to their country and danced with their women, drank their wine, ate their crepes, and didn’t even bother to speak French.

This went on for an hour or so until O’Brien had had enough. He leaned over the table, grabbed Pierre by the tie and pulled him right through the wedding cake plates and wine glasses. “If it weren’t for Americans, you’d all be speaking German now, you prissy poodle pumper,” he said calmly. He let go of Pierre’s tie and Pierre dropped hard back into his seat.

Pierre and his brother both jumped to their feet to challenge O’Brien. On our side of the table, the six of us who could still stand up did so. Monsieur Meaux stood up, too, although it was unclear if he wanted to rumble or rumba, since he was standing on the side with us Americans and still eyeing Mrs. Jones.

Pierre and frère sat down faster than you can say Vichy.

So, given this experience, it came as no surprise to me that the French aren’t anxious to fight in Iraq. What was a surprise, though, was hearing that the owner of Cubbie’s restaurant in Beaufort, North Carolina was going to stop calling his French fries French fries because he’s mad at the lack of French support for our foreign policy. I’m tempted to phone Cubbie to explain that, if being called a pooch’s paramour wasn’t enough to get a Frenchman in a bellicose frame of mind, renaming pommes frites probably wasn’t going to do the trick either.