Category: Article

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is notoriously thorny where film and stage adaptations, even the recent premiere that inaugurated the Guthrie’s new theater, are concerned. Leave it to a group of avant-garde New Yorkers to set aside the adaptation imperative and take on the whole enchilada: Basically, Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz is an unabridged audio version of The Great Gatsby performed, word for word, onstage. The conceit is that an ordinary office worker has cracked open the book and, as he gets drawn in, prevails upon coworkers to play out the scenes; the goal is to have certain Gatsby images spring to life onstage as they do, so indelibly, in the minds of readers. And apparently these Service folks have hit on something, receiving wondrous reviews in Brussels, Amsterdam, and Zurich (this is Gatz’s American premiere). While the onstage antics do add some humor that F. Scott never intended, be aware that this undertaking goes for six and a half hours—no joke. View it on consecutive evenings or take it all in during one marathon performance. 612-375-7600; www.performingarts.walkerart.org

Done in the style of an old-fashioned radio play, this production comes replete with the sound effects that go beyond approaching footsteps and door slamming. The zinger part of Kid-Simple’s plot is that its protagonist, a high school science-fair champ named Moll, has invented a hypersensitive listening device that amplifies the world around us. Minneapolis-based playwright Jordan Harrison has written in all sorts of crazy effects that set up the show’s sound artist, another local named Mike Hallenbeck, with quite the challenge. How to realize the racket of batting eyelashes, or create the sound of a field mouse’s growing toenails? Tom Keith, the Prairie Home Companion sound-effects maestro, might have some competition waiting in the wings. 1501 4th St. S., Minneapolis; 612-338-6131; www.emigranttheater.org

This is “sort of a mini Fringe,” according to the organizational brains behind this endeavor, although this particular festival does bear the modest touch of a curator. Hundreds of scripts for ten-minute plays, mostly by local writers, were submitted to the Bedlam company. They plucked the finest of the bunch—which, in most cases, meant the funniest—assigning them a director and cast of Bedlam regulars as well as non-actors from the streets of Cedar-Riverside. The resulting program of sixteen bite-sized playlets leans heavily upon stilt-walkers and other lo-fi antics that are the signature of Bedlam’s punk-rock gypsy aesthetic. 514 1/2 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-341-1038; www.bedlamtheatre.org

The Chinese have been using acupuncture for cosmetic purposes for centuries; while here, in the medically advanced West, we like to suffer for our beauty by winching away the years or injecting our faces with bovine toxin. But these methods give some people pause, especially when they can no longer even furrow their brows to think about it. Combine hesitancy about such invasive methods with simultaneous acceptance of acupuncture and holistic medicine and, bing-bang, constitutional facial acupuncture renewal is now offered at spas and acupuncturists throughout the Twin Cities.

The key word is “constitutional.” “Beauty is about health,” said Peggy Miller, a St. Paul acupuncturist, massage therapist, and herbal-medicine specialist. “I would take a complete history, look at your tongue and feel your pulse, and treat the whole person, not just your wrinkles. If we can improve circulation, reduce stress or pain, and generally improve your health as we stimulate the muscles and lines on your face, you’ll look better. People won’t think, ‘Wow, surgery.’ They’ll think you look rested and healthy.” Acupuncture clients are also encouraged to actively enhance the process by making dietary or lifestyle changes.

I was on the table in Miller’s office with a bolster under my knees, nature sounds on the boom box, a fountain trickling in the background, and a warm towel over my face. I’d decided to check this acupuncture thing out. Miller had put a few skinny needles in my wrists and ankles to give my qi (the Chinese term for energy, life force, mojo) a heads-up. She replaced the towel with a paper mask that had been steeped in herbal tea and anchored with a heated gel mask. Since this was the Reader’s Digest version of the process, I relaxed for five minutes before getting down to it.

Miller explained that different points on the face respond differently when stimulated—motor points can stimulate a muscle to contract (lifting jowls, for example) or they can sedate the muscle and thereby relax lines, which is the idea behind Botox. There are points that stimulate qi, bringing moisture and blood circulation to the face. Inserting needles in deep lines causes micro-trauma that the body attempts to address by pumping blood to the scene, plumping it up, and filling out the line. Some acupuncture facials involve up to eighty tiny needles, but I was happy to get by on only eight, since they stung a little at first. Peggy turned down the lights and went away for fifteen minutes, during which time I meditated about what to make for dinner and my qi visited some places it hadn’t seen for a while. Miller, who is old enough to call herself a hippie, yet has lineless, glowing skin, returned to remove the needles and paint my face with a mixture of egg whites, herbs, and flowers. This she removed with a warm towel, afterward massaging in some face food—a moisturizing herbal concoction of food-grade purity.

Technically, the two jade face rollers (like a mini paint roller, but with cool jade stones where the fluffy roller would be) massage and calm all that heat and qi that have percolated up to your face. I just liked the way they felt and the soft, clicking sound they made. Miller then spritzed me with rose water and sandalwood and said I could lie there until I was ready to leave, or until they locked the building.

Miller recommends between ten and twelve treatments, as does Bonnie West, the acupuncturist at Fusion LifeSpa in Deephaven. You may require occasional tweaks after that to perk up your liver and brighten your complexion. Miller charges fifty to sixty dollars for what is usually a ninety-minute appointment. West gets more than a hundred dollars, and word has it that New Yorkers will pay as much as three hundred dollars to galvanize their qi. But compare these prices with the three to five thousand dollars it costs to get an average facelift, or the eight hundred dollars for Botox, and acupuncture starts to seem like such a bargain that your frown lines will disappear like magic.

Daughter could not discern outright wrinkle reduction at dinner that night, but noted that the pasta seemed to have been prepared by a person with the soul and spleen of a twenty-two-year-old.

Walking north along Second Street through Northeast Minneapolis, one eventually happens upon the most unusual variant of a white picket fence: Based roughly on piano keys, it has the occasional cutout or half-missing panel that allows passersby a peek into a thriving vegetable garden. This artsy parapet belongs to David Salmela, a musician, software designer, and, most visibly, the owner and co-curator of Creative Electric Studios, the gallery and performing arts space adjacent to the gardens, which seems to collect rock musicians and all their tangential art projects. Although the fence was built to look more welcoming than forbidding, Salmela said that neighbors subscribe to varying opinions about it. As one old-timer strolling by recently asked him, “Did you make that fence? Were you drunk when you did it?”

With uncombed blond hair, saucer-shaped blue eyes, and a wardrobe of rumpled T-shirts and jeans, the thirty-five-year-old Salmela exudes the sort of youthful exuberance that might be mistaken, by cynics, for naiveté. Certainly, there’s a pipedream quality about his plans for the old storefront. But that impression would overlook the considerable amount of muscle and thought he’s already put into improving the place, which was essentially a floor-to-ceiling trash heap when he bought it in 2001. Today, the building and its grounds serve not only as an art gallery, performance space, and community gathering spot; the upper-level apartment is also home to Salmela, Jenny Adams (his girlfriend and Creative Electric co-curator), and pal Kurt Froehlich (also a curator at the space).

The fence came about when Salmela contacted the renowned, Duluth-based architect with whom he shares both a first and last name (but to whom he is not related). “I asked him if he would like to do a project with me and he said ‘Yes, but I have a waiting list of two years,’ ” the non-architect Salmela recalled. “‘But I have this son-in-law in the Twin Cities … ’” And that’s how Salmela hooked up with another architect, Souliyahn Keobounpheng.

Keobounpheng designed the fence, and drew up the plans for an ultra-modern shed that juts off the back of the building like a caboose and is made of various found materials, mostly wavy corrugated sheet metal. The architect’s plans for a third-floor addition and renovation of the garage into art studios are yet to be realized. Salmela is still chewing over the presumably steep price tag for those projects; but, he insisted cheerfully, where there’s a will there’s a way. “I’ll figure out a way to do it. I want to do it,” he said.

Salmela’s gumption is not dependent on Keobounpheng’s involvement. Inside the building, he and friends have hammered out a loft that doubles as a guestroom for visiting artists and storage space. Upstairs, he installed a handsome tin ceiling as well as an eco-friendly (and newly trendy) corn-burning stove, which he and Adams discovered at the Living Green Expo. Another ecological feature: To minimize storm-water runoff (and the associated tax the city slaps on “impermeable surfaces”), Salmela designed and built a rain catcher. The contraption collects water from the building’s rooftop and deposits it, via a large pipeline, into a two-hundred-gallon tin tub, where it stands ready to water the beets, peas, and squash.

Duluth has a polo club left over from the days when it was one of the richest cities in America. Old Italian men still play bocce ball in the city’s West End. The Coney Island hot dog stand is the same one my dad went to in 1922, and the menu boards are still up from those days. If you walk in the woods you find, in the middle of the wild, a lilac bush that once stood by someone’s front door, and sometimes the stones of that doorsill, too—an archaeology of the mundane. There used to be more people here, not less. The green is sprawling back over the built land (which is the opposite of what happens farther south, where stone and asphalt spread in a ceaseless glaciation).

Skyline Parkway is part of this—Duluth’s future receding into the past. It’s an almost-continuous route that lies along the crest of the basalt hills like a stone boa, running parallel to the lakeshore through the entire city. The views from almost anywhere along its length are spectacular, except when it disappears into the scruffy forest that replaced the original white pines. The road has a long and interesting history, tied up with the abortive dream of Duluth becoming the “largest city in the nation.”

The parkway was built piecemeal from 1889 on, initially pushed forward by William Rogers, the first head of Duluth’s parks board. Rogers had been President Rutherford B. Hayes’s private secretary, and later, as a real estate developer, acted as the agent for property Hayes owned in Duluth.

Rogers seems to have been pathologically optimistic. His estimate for building the first five miles of the parkway was five thousand dollars; it cost three hundred thousand. In a letter to Hayes, his statement regarding the future of the city was equally wide of the mark: “It is easy to read its future now, standing on the upper terrace of the bluff overlooking the City … [no one can] doubt that one of the great cities of the world is here in the making—one of the largest if not the largest on the continent.”

In those early days, tallyho parties in horse-drawn coaches rode the Parkway, which was to have served as the spine for an elaborate system of greenways and parks that would lace the hill to the shores of Lake Superior. These, sadly, were never built.

The Parkway, though, eventually extended east to Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve, and on to Seven Bridges Road, named for the stone bridges that were Mayor Snively’s legacy (this stretch of road was his gift to the city, and in the 1920s, Snively used to show up there in overalls to put in time with the work crews before heading to City Hall). To the southwest, it pushed on all the way to Jay Cooke State Park, though this segment is now in ruins.

Now, you can pick up Skyline Parkway at Beck’s Road, just west of the city. Intermittently graveled and paved, it runs up Spirit Mountain and along the ridge above the city, passing Enger Tower above and the old industrial landscape of Gary and West Duluth below, ’til it finally starts snaking into the city streets. It takes some persistence to follow the Parkway through this stretch, as it appears and disappears into the city grid, occasionally adopting other names in its circuitous route through the neighborhoods. But if you make it to Hawk Ridge, you’re back on Skyline proper. From there, the parkway goes unplowed in the winter and can be pretty rough any time of year, but its ridge offers the best place for watching migrating birds and thunderstorms.

From Seven Bridges Road, the parkway winds down through boreal forest and crosses Amity Creek, with its little rapids and waterfalls, seven times until it emerges onto Superior Street just past Sixtieth Avenue East, some thirty miles from where it began.

It has come to my attention that I’m a messy eater, which wouldn’t be such a problem were I not so often clothed at the scene of the crime. Properly seated at a dining table, kitted out with a shroud-sized napkin, seltzer water, and an array of absorbent paper products, I can confidently churn through the most watery pho with greased shrimp; a steaming heap of soba noodles studded in lively vegetables and oozing garlicky black-bean sauce; piping-hot Thai coffee served in a wide-rimmed cup; and peeled peaches with floorward ambitions. Unfortunately, most eating—and subsequent food-related incidents—do not take place in such a controlled environment.

Typically, I dine at my desk. By around 8:30 a.m., I’m ready for lunch. I have set up a pastiche of coleslaw, a green salad with pears and potentially explosive blue cheese in a balsamic vinaigrette, a couple of cheese-and-spinach cannelloni floating in marinara, and a ragged, shingle-sized piece of focaccia topped with a snake pit of grilled shallots and onion—all spread out on the five-inch-by-five-inch piece of desktop real estate between my printer and keyboard. The task at hand is undertaken with a plastic demitasse spoon. Pepped up by the repast, I peck at the keyboard, tug at the mouse cord and, against all odds, work is produced. But at a hideous cost.

According to the immutable laws of physics, only three pieces of cabbage can be transported on a plastic spoon, and yet the coleslaw, in its dressed form, travels in wet glops composed of at least eighteen shreds. It will not abide dividing, like the atom. And I very nearly manage it, but, millimeters from my lips, the glop topples, landing with a heartbreaking splat on my knees. Only upon being raked up does the slaw forego group formation and start acting as eighteen incorrigible free agents. Then an inopportune phone call sets off a phone-cord-to-spoon chain reaction, which catapults the blue cheese with startling force. Fly little cheese, fly. The diaspora extends to the very edges of my office universe and several lost tribes are not discovered until I stand up.

My final ode to Jackson Pollock is accomplished via intense downward pressure on the titanium-enriched cannelloni, which takes wing and flies like a marinara-soaked arrow to my heart. But first it hits the jacket over my heart, wetly.

It is, I don’t know, humbling—to view, at the end of each day, such graphic evidence of what a fresser I am. The sheer amount of food, the reckless speed at which it’s consumed, the shocking lack of hand-eye coordination; it’s all there in the darkening splotches that spread, like melanoma, throughout my wardrobe. In fact, this is damn humiliating, but it’s not the end of the world, thanks to my twenty-four-ounce bottle of Shout Ultra Gel with the plastic-brush-applicator top.

I could go on at length by listing stuff I’ve banished with Shout, but here are some of the highlights: 10W40 sauce from Huong Sen, blackberry jam, neck grease, Seven Seas salad dressing, road dirt, and black rubber tire marks on some beloved lilac peau de soie pumps (don’t ask). Once—and here’s a testimonial that should be featured on Shout bottles—I purchased a white, perfectly filthy, one-hundred-percent cashmere coat for just $7.99 at Savers. I suspected some of the stains were bodily in origin, but what I feared even more was the synergy between such bodily fluids and mysterious commercial dry-cleaning toxins. With so little to lose, I applied Shout liberally, per the directions, loaded the whole unstable mass into the washing machine on cold/delicate, and am now rocking a Jackie O. look that is out of this world.

Dear Nostalgia,

I hate you. And yet, you are brilliant. Because if I ever stop hating you, I will long for the days when I did hate you and then I will hate you all over again.

The French called you maladie du pays—the disease of home—which, though I hate you, does not do you justice. The Spaniards called you el mal de corazón—a wrongness in the heart—which is a lot closer to what you’re doing to me. You used to be a diagnosable medical condition and I give you mad props for that. During the Civil War alone, eighty-six people died from you.

You obviously plan to take me next.

Oh, it’s not my homeland that you seduce me with (though I do sometimes pine for the dollar well drinks at Pat’s Tap in Hawkeye, Iowa). It’s not those stupid 80s shows either, no matter how drolly Mo Rocca can recall the Rubik’s Cube.

It is when I lie down in my bed next to my wonderful husband, while our boys (ages five and three) sleep snugly in their bunk beds. That’s when you poison me. Because of you, Nostalgia, I am not lulled to sleep with thoughts of my growed-up boys’ future double wedding to the virginal twins of my best friend Sharise. Nor am I taken away to a magical island where my husband and I madly make love and then eat a bucket of nachos.

No. Not since Jake Hammond moved to town.

Like a backward-flowing River Styx you have seeped into my nights, Nostalgia. You’ve inked some deal with my Bible-camp boyfriend and Morpheus himself to kill me slowly with my own dream, which isn’t a dream at all, now is it? No! Your weapon is my own memory! It is Jake’s Drakkar Noir-dipped neck, his hands steadily moving toward my ass as we cling to each other during the final song of eighth grade’s “Summer Goodbye” dance!

“Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses, but you already knew that, didn’t you, Nostalgia? Didn’t you?!?!?

Damn you, Nostalgia! Why won’t you let me appreciate those sweet children of mine today instead of longing for today twenty years from now, if you even allow me to make it to then? Why won’t you let me appreciate “Sweet Child O’ Mine” as a stellar rock ballad when I hear it, instead of ripping me back to one sultry night in 1988 at Camp Ewalu. The night I wore a halter top, the night Jake Hammond first feathered his fingers down my bare spine … Oh God! Make it stop!

You’ve got me in your sweaty claws now, Nostalgia. Even “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is about you, you, you. Just keep digging in your nails. The doctors said you induced a “wasting of the vital powers” among Civil War soldiers. You are showing no mercy to me.

If you haven’t killed me by the time you get this, it’s just because I’m not home. I’m parked outside Jake Hammond’s Linden Hills apartment, my eyes of the bluest skies thinking of pain, wondering why it all passed me by.

You’ll find me. It will only be a matter of time.

Thanks a lot, asshole.

Wish I were here,

Stephanie Wilbur Ash
Fridley, Minnesota

The patterns in Andrea Carlson’s paintings swirl in the corner of your eye and hold a fierce repose when you look at them straight on. There’s something living in there. It’s not so much complicated as simply un-nameable. In Aadinzookanaag (Spirits), for instance, angular cloud shapes stay just at the edge of resolving into figures of animals and birds, while the black and white chevrons of the receding landscape indicate a charged ground, a place where anything could happen. Still, representation isn’t quite the point here; invocation is. The meaning that Carlson conjures isn’t an interpretation, it’s a force.

These complex, demanding, funny, lavish, and sexy paintings (it’s typical of Carlson’s work that you keep coming up with words that you usually don’t think of together) are something completely new as well as ancient, and they’re getting their twenty-six-year-old creator noticed in many quarters. Along with her solo exhibition this month at Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis (Culture Cop opens September 8), Carlson has shows coming up at Banfill-Locke Art Center in Fridley and in London at the October Gallery; she will be featured next April at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in a two-person show with fellow Ojibwe painter Jim Denomie.

Carlson, who grew up in International Falls and Hutchinson, is a Grand Portage band member with Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) and Swedish roots and, as of last year, an MFA graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She now lives in Minneapolis and keeps a studio in the north loop warehouse district. The work she makes there looks immediate and current; its intensely designed surfaces, thinly painted in glowing colors and sharp black and white, refer to a vivid world, one that is purely of her own making. Yet its images are faithful, in their own impure way, to two traditions.

Since 2004, she’s been painting a series called Aadizokaan, works that powerfully embody the sacred stories of her Anishinaabe ancestors. The Aadizokaan works will be featured in the exhibition at SooVAC alongside a new series that brings the artist’s Swedish heritage into the mix—and her individual life, as well.

Carlson’s earlier work took its motive force from the impossible, the catalyst that supplants the ordinary with the fantastic. A wooden stump, for example, becomes the round ass of a demigod. In her new series, the transformations build. Swedish Dala horses—those red-painted carved wooden steeds that seem, here in Minnesota, empty nostalgia—appear, in the context of Carlson’s work, newly energized as sacred creatures (which they once were, back in the old country). Teapots and carnival glass also turn up: These were charged objects in the house of Carlson’s grandmother, carefully tended things that accumulated meaning from their passage through time. And in one new piece, a vibrator makes explicit a strong sexual thread that also lurked in the earlier mythic paintings.

Carlson studies the Ojibwe language (she describes her skill as “conversational,” but not up to the fluency of elders). The tribe’s traditional words and stories have given her many of the threads of imagery that appear in her paintings, and the amazing subtlety of the language has been an influence, as well: There are thousands of ways to conjugate verbs, and compound words can be breathtakingly precise. She explains this in describing a painting titled Gagiibwaabimo. “It’s actually the image of a dead wolf, gutted, ripped out on the inside. This is Naniboujou’s nephew who has just been killed and eaten by the Mishipiizhiw, the water lynx, a bad guy, so Naniboujou’s going around crying. When I was studying the stories and retranslating them, and I came across this word gagiibwaabimo, which means ‘His eyes are puffed from crying.’ I was so floored by it, that there was one word that described this whole thing, that I wanted to paint an image that went with it.”

Another characteristic of Anishinaabe language—its robust humor—appears in Binewidgee, a piece whose word means “the ruffed grouse’s asshole.” This word comes up in a traditional storytelling at a climactic point, telling listeners they’ll have to wait for the end of the story the following night. In the painting, the little x that marks the relevant point on the bird’s stern has an exquisite comic force among Carlson’s elegant forms.

Part of what’s striking about Carlson is how sure she is in her work, how confident in her mastery of an absolutely original and sophisticated style. That may well be because she has been working at it since she was a toddler. Her father still has a small sculpture she made back then, a reindeer created from a stuffed nylon stocking. “He keeps it in this little box,” she said, “my first piece of art.” Even back then, she had confidence that she would be understood and her efforts would be taken seriously; her father, Rudolf Carlson, taught art in schools in International Falls and Hutchinson, and is a painter working with hyperrealism and abstract subversions of hyperrealism.

“He taught me a lot,” Carlson said of her father, “and now, I guess, my job is to ruin everything. It’s one thing to carry your family’s identity and it’s another to find your own style. There are things that I remember from him, about what colors go together, formal patterns—but the thing is not to just follow.”

By that she also means not just following herself, either. A brand-new painting, Under the Blanket, included in the SooVAC show, prominently features a blue-willow teapot. Describing its origins, she recalled, “I was up north, on an island, at a sacred site. There were graves where people leave tobacco and things, and there were other kinds of offerings, too: all these sparkly barrettes with horses on them, really girly, and I realized that modern things can be offerings. I’d been making the Naniboujou paintings, really traditional and formal, and I wanted to break it up, and this tea set seemed so much part of the other tradition. It kind of started off being in opposition to the Naniboujou imagery, but then I was speaking to an elder and he said he’d seen the exact same tea set left as an offering at a burial site. I thought, ‘Well, I guess there’s a reason besides all the meanings that are loaded onto this thing in the European world.’ So I did the teapot, sort of Victorian kitschy, as if it was left behind as an offering in a mysterious landscape.”

Carlson performs the magic trick of using absolutely specific material to create art that is universal. Her family has a long involvement with artifacts from all sorts of cultures, collecting everything from beadwork to teapots to McDonald’s toys to Scandinavian décor. Carlson is a collector, too; she says she particularly likes objects that feature landscapes, which she might portray in her work: “I can have in the painting a place within a place, a world within a world.”

Given the controversy over the last few years about “authenticity” in native art and writing (most recently, David Treuer offers some blistering thoughts on this in a new book of essays), one wonders if Carlson anticipates a reaction to the multiple worlds she includes in her paintings. Or, more pointedly, whether she, as a person of dual heritage, gets labeled “inauthentic,” not a real Ojibwe artist.

“I started questioning authenticity, what is ‘real’ native art. A lot of native artists are questioning this, a lot of people are angry,” she said. “It angers me to have someone determine what’s authentic. Damien Hirst can have a herd of artists painting his work for him and no one questions the authenticity of those paintings. But if you’re, say, transgendered and native, then your art isn’t ‘real.’ So I just started playing with it. An elder said to me once, ‘Human beings are ninety percent water, so get over yourself. We’re all water, water is ancient. We all drink it, we share each other’s cups.’ ”

It’s not blood but paint that Carlson puts her faith in. She believes that pattern has always been a home for spirit, and that artists can make forms and rhythms that spirits recognize. She’s very matter-of-fact, although also a little embarrassed, when talking about it. “There’s a spiritual relation to pattern. There’s something out there, it’s drawn to something of its own nature, like a hummingbird to the color red. To me, patterns are a representation of spirits to themselves … Spirituality is out of fashion now, but if you don’t look at it as a religion, but as a ‘spiritual practice,’ you can get people to talk about it,” she said. “I started thinking about it as a methodology. You say, ‘I had a vision,’ or ‘spirituality,’ and people just shut you off, but if you say, ‘I stop food and water for a while, it increases my dreams,’ any scientist can respect that.”

Ultimately, though, she’s forging her own path, regardless of where criticism might be coming from: “I look for a way of navigating the world without stepping on too many feet.”

Teeming with beautiful people who routinely burn beds or weep openly out on its streets, Pedro Almodóvar’s Madrid is a strange and magical place. Exploding in color, it is a city subjected to a constant torrent of emotion and deceit churned up by outrageous women and handsome but impotent men. The Spanish capital—where all his movies save his newest are set—is a place that makes the real world seem destitute by comparison. Watch one of his films and then ask yourself: Why aren’t Almodóvar’s people wandering our streets? Where are the transsexual whores who mingle with the city’s top actresses? The paraplegic cops who sleep with and marry heroin addicts? The babies who are born on city buses, squalling while midwives bite their umbilical cords free? Almodóvar might say that they are everywhere we can come under the spell of a movie. Like the aged Don Quixote transformed into madness by his romances, his coterie of oddballs is enriched by films, even as they try to live up to cinema’s impossible fantasy.

Almodóvar grew up in the Castilian/La Mancha region of southern Spain, in the rural town of Calzada de Calatrava, the son of a muleteer father and a beloved mother who wouldn’t take any grief from anyone. Calzada had no cinema, but when Almodóvar was eight his family moved to the only slightly more prosperous hamlet of Caceres, where the school and the movie house shared a street. Like most aspiring filmmakers, he watched his favorite pictures again and again, memorizing the names of directors, cinematographers, editors. His diet included the wacky sixties comedies like The Glass Bottom Boat, one of Frank Tashlin’s Doris Day vehicles that feature Day-Glo sets, as well as headier fare, including Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk. In an effort to get his eldest boy an education, Almodóvar’s father sent Pedro to a Catholic school, where he was almost immediately abused by the priests. Finally, at sixteen, he ran away to Madrid, ignoring his father’s threats to call the police. This was not a light warning, as the cops under Franco were notoriously brutal, especially to homosexuals, and the headstrong Almodóvar was just coming out of the closet.

His early career was bizarre, to say the least. Almodóvar sported fishnet stockings and fronted a punk rock band. He wrote a novel about a tampon magnate who is involved in a love triangle. Working with underground magazines and comics led to his job at a major magazine, where, pretending to be a female porn star, he wrote a weekly column. All the while, he toiled at the national telephone company, saving money to buy his first Super-8 camera. Then he hit the streets of Madrid, making clandestine shorts until the new constitution, passed in 1978 after Franco’s death, allowed filmmakers to express themselves in public. As if to flaunt this freedom, Almodóvar named his first feature-length film, made that same year, Fuck, Fuck, Fuck Me Tim! It tells the story of a blind guitarist whose girlfriend, once he becomes famous, also loses her sight. By now, Almodóvar’s career as anything but a filmmaker was over. “Cinema is a vampire lover,” he told an interviewer in 1988. “It doesn’t let you do other things.”

His devotion to this vampire lover proved to be more fruitful than anyone could have imagined, as he produced eight films in the next ten years that were enormously successful, in Spain and abroad. In the early years, critics did their best to pigeonhole Almodóvar, lumping him in with the likes of Fassbinder, John Waters, and, unbelievably, Russ Meyer. To a Spain coming out from under the oppression of the Franco regime, Almodóvar’s eccentric films were refreshing. As other Spanish filmmakers did, Almodóvar could have spent his career trying to expunge the memory of the dictatorship, but, to the dismay of some critics, he chose to make films that “den[y] the memory of Franco” by being utterly apolitical.

In fact, as Almodóvar matured, his movies became powerful emotional vehicles about dreamers struggling against the weight of the world—and often using a love of film to transform their wretched lives. It is not hard to imagine how he would end up taking this route. Even mediocre movies can engage the spirit, mesmerizing viewers (including, especially, budding directors) with a host of media, encompassing writing, music, dance, photography, and, of course, acting and directing. Explaining the intense use of color in his films, Almodóvar has said that it “is my way of fighting the austerity of my origins.” Anyone from a lugubrious small town lacking in culture and even actual color knows that a mediocre picture like The Glass Bottom Boat can be a profound joy. How often do small-town nobodies recreate the dance steps of Singin’ in the Rain or, perhaps more pathetically, the longbow techniques of an elf in Lord of the Rings? Almodóvar, like too many of us, trusts film implicitly, believing that the stories unfolding before him were ones that could change a person’s life. They certainly changed his.

And so, armed with a camera, Almodóvar set out to show the world a life informed by film. 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (the first film screening as part of the Viva Pedro! retrospective, which begins on September 15 at the Lagoon Cinema), which established the filmmaker’s reputation in America, not only references some of Billy Wilder’s comedies of the sixties, like One, Two, Three!, but also Rear Window in many of its shots as well as its story (in fact, a voyeuristic shot of a woman dancing is a direct copy of one from the Hitchcock film). But Almodóvar is not content simply to borrow from his masters: Pepa (played by original Almodóvar muse Carmen Maura) meets her lover dubbing films in Spanish, most notably Joan Crawford’s voice in the western Johnny Guitar. Her paramour’s jealous and psychotic wife comes out of a decade-long trance when she hears her husband’s dubbing the voice of Crawford co-star Sterling Hayden—and with that, the fun begins. What is considered perhaps the most over-the-top melodramatic western in history is a catalyst for the characters in an over-the-top melodramatic comedy.

In an early scene in All About My Mother (1999), the filmmaker’s tribute to the Almodóvar matriarch, the titular mother and her doomed son watch All About Eve. The film draws out a telling conversation that will inform the rest of the movie—which becomes in many ways a remake, albeit a very sweet one, of the catty Bette Davis vehicle. Mother is, then, both homage and remake. As if that weren’t enough, there’s a play within the film: Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, a piece of drama so dominated by its cinematic double that its Stanley Kowalski is forever judged by Marlon Brando’s performance. Here, though, Almodóvar seems intent on returning Streetcar to its rightful place as a vehicle for Blanche—and his own female characters in All About My Mother.

Classics like All About Eve, Vertigo, Rear Window, Johnny Guitar—to name but a few—are invoked like saints in Almodóvar’s films. But these are not just sly references from a precocious cinema-studies wonk (Almodóvar was self-taught, anyway); rather, they offer clues to his characters’ motivations, or serve as outright plot devices used to move the story forward. Unlike the Coen brothers in their weak moments, Almodóvar never references a movie merely for homage. Like a mobius strip circling back upon itself, this is a cinematic world under the influence of a director god, whose characters, at the same moment, watch movies in this little world—and act, often tragically, upon them.

His characters are condemned to live, as many of us do, encircled by clouds of Hollywood fantasy that can enrich lives as much as they can destroy them. Almodóvar’s people watch movies obsessively, act out fantasies, try to look like other people, are filmmakers, dancers, and musicians themselves, lost in their art. But there is an honesty to them, because Almodóvar recognizes that their dreams are a necessary part of a cruel world. These people may not have anything else going for them besides their attempts to live up to impossible fantasies—but the world is a better place for those attempts. “All I have that’s real are my feelings,” admits a transsexual whore in All About My Mother. Could anything be more real?

In his masterpiece Talk to Her (2002), Almodóvar borrows from Vertigo in a manner that directly propels his own story and makes it meaningful. Noticing his nod to Hitchcock’s most uneasy thriller will reward the viewer, who can then see that the protagonist, Benigno, will take a path eerily similar to that of Jimmy Stewart’s character, Scottie Ferguson. But you can ignore the reference to the Master of Suspense and still be fulfilled—whereas the Coens’ nod to Night of the Hunter in The Man Who Wasn’t There has no value whatsoever, except to elicit knowing looks on the part of film buffs. And Talk to Her’s most intense scene is hidden by the film-within-a-film (a wildly erotic silent film called The Shrinking Lover, one of Almodóvar’s own short films), which not only inspires the protagonist to rape his comatose charge, but also allows Almodóvar to hide this depraved act by showing us the silent picture.

Almodóvar’s work over the last dozen years has attained a level of emotional maturity that virtually no other director today has achieved. Put simply, he makes us care deeply for people who commit revolting acts or who are utterly self-destructive. We watch in awe as they take whatever anodyne can soothe the cruelty meted out to them in (often short) lifetimes. That Almodóvar does this without hovering over the pain and sorrow, and instead offers restraint and respect—no matter what the crime or moral decision—makes his films unique. For this reason, attempting to summarize one of his plots can seem like an invitation for abuse. Could you really convince someone alien to Almodóvar that Talk to Her, the story of two men who love two respective comatose women, one to the extent that he impregnates his and wishes to marry her, would be anything other than exploitive? At best, this sounds like a sick comedy instead of searing melodrama (and also the best film of its year).

One has to wonder: Did poverty and a life in the wastelands of Spain push Almodóvar to these heights? Did the combination of his abuse and his intensely loving family somehow help him to create a world without loathsome characters? Almodóvar adores his rapists, his drug addicts and transsexuals, loves the brutish men who demand blow jobs at inopportune moments; he loves the sinner nearly as much as the sin, and possesses a cunning instinct for family, for those who are lost, for the underclass, and for the rich. Growing up in small Catholic towns, it is unlikely that he encountered too many transvestites and criminals—the movies would prove, then, to be his first window into the sordid, and often sympathetic, world of the big city: the place that would become his Madrid.