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  • Bitter

    After the radiation treatments, my mother wanted only green bananas. Bananas that weren’t even fruit yet, not a drop of sweetness throughout.

    “These I can taste,” she said. “My tongue has all but died.”

    She hadn’t died. Yet. Although she was past bargaining with God, she still wanted to barter with me. She would try to quit smoking, she said, but only if I promised not to drink and drive.

    “Ah … you must be thinking of one of your children from a previous life. Mom, it’s me, Charlene, remember—the nerd? I barely drink, and I don’t even own a car.”

    Tears appeared as spontaneously as an accident. The past clung to her eyelash like an unripe fruit. I caught a glimpse of my younger, glamorous mother, dazzled and bewildered, plucked from circumstances and asked to dance.

    “One has regrets.” She stared. “And requests.”

    “OK; it’s a deal,” I said.


    Soon, the materiality of the bananas     grew indigestible. The disease or the treatment had turned her stomach, so she switched to chocolate, the darker the better. Less solid, still strong. She could taste it along the back of her life, she said.

    She got the idea from To Kill a Mockingbird. She wouldn’t smoke while I read aloud, two whole hours. Instead, she ate one square of 85 percent cocoa, bit by oily crumb. Like scary Mrs. Dubose, she’d drool, curse, and shake until the timer sounded. Unlike Jem, I hadn’t been made to read to her as apology for my temper. Still, guilt tapped my shoulder like an addict.

    I lied to keep my bargain. After readings, my mother’s back was straight as a dancer’s as she bragged of her twitchy muscles, dry mind, wavy mouth. She’d had two fewer cigarettes than the day before. I said I was trying, but that the cravings were too strong; I couldn’t resist always having one more beer. Worse, I’d crashed into the garage door, mangled it and the fender too.

    “An accident means you didn’t mean it.” She spat from the back of her tongue. “Bastard. I didn’t mean it.”

    By the time I was bringing her Turkish coffee for her meals, my mother’s words were turning to steam. Still, she put her hand on mine when I relayed my troubles.

    “Mom, I’m so sorry. Last night, Mom, I hit a cat. I killed it; horrible, Mom. I promise I’ll stop now; I really will.”

    “Relapse … cat … ” she whispered. “Reprieve … ”


    As always, books were closed    , stories told and not told. I wanted to sit on the aqua couch at the coffee shop and stare at the mural of Audrey Hepburn; I wanted to hear Jem’s father in the book say, “She was the bravest person I ever knew.” Shifting in the café line from foot to foot, I’m not sure what I forgave my mother for.

    Maybe the smell of the roasting beans would be enough to open the cliffhanger back of my throat. Myself, I’d never had a cup of joe; I was thinking of trying one, that universal morning bitter. In front of me, the black liquid poured.


    Cindra Halm is the author of     Inflectional Weather, a poetry chapbook published by Press of the Taverner. She teaches at The Loft Literary Center and contributes to Rain Taxi Review of Books. “Bitter” is part of a forthcoming anthology, Blink Again: Sudden Fiction from the Upper Midwest (Spout Press).

     

  • Do You Really Believe?

    One morning last summer, leaving my apartment on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, I noticed there weren’t many people outside. It was a fine June day, but there wasn’t the usual line of cars in front of Starbucks. No commuters schlepping insulated mochas, no dog walkers, no window washers at Cafe Latté, and no one else waiting for the 7:23 bus to downtown Minneapolis.

    On the bus there were about a third as many riders as usual, and the kindly woman with the thick black braid was not in her usual seat. I tried to read, but panic was setting in. By the time I reached the skyway, my stomach was a prickly ball. I passed the jewelry store near the U.S. Trust Building and checked my watch. At least two clerks should have been in the display windows, draping necklaces and stabbing rings onto their holders. But the shop was dark and empty.

    I knew it had happened: Jesus had fulfilled his prophecy, returned to Earth, and taken the believers. Now the Apocalypse was beginning. My hands were clammy as I dialed my mom’s number; I was certain she would not answer, now or ever again. When she picked up and chirped “Why … good morning!” my shoulders eased, but my heart was still pounding from the adrenaline. “Hi, Mom,” I said weakly.

    It’s strange being the kind of person who sees a half-empty bus and thinks “Apocalypse!” In part it’s the result of watching Armageddon-inspired movies like Left Behind, but mainly it comes from being raised in an ultra-conservative church. When I was growing up, our congregation in the hamlet of Phillipsburg, Missouri, interpreted the Bible with the kind of literal fervor with which a non-believer might read IKEA assembly instructions—midway through a construction effort. On the outside, we looked like any other Christians: we dressed up, we sang, we went to Sunday school, we read the Dr. Dobson inserts in the church bulletins. But we also followed rules against women preaching, praying aloud during church, or serving communion; as well as the tenet that the only way to heaven is to make a public testimony and be fully immersed in water. Most of all, we believed that we had the one true way to heaven. In other words, we actually took the Bible at its word—unlike the Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Seventh-day Adventists who were, sad to say, bound for hell.

    Given this background, and my family’s continued devotion, I was rather smug during the 2004 election campaign, when national magazines were breathlessly reporting on the huge swaths of the voting public who considered themselves “born-again Christians.” “No shit,” I thought. (I had already left the flock.) After Bush’s win, I read how Karl Rove and the president’s other operatives had used a database of some 5,000 churches, as well as church directories gleaned from across the country, to home in on and court evangelical voters. Some 350,000 “pro-family” conservatives volunteered for the Bush campaign and nearly six million evangelicals—including three and a half million who hadn’t voted in the 2000 election—cast votes for Dubya. As Bush moved into his second term, the power of the religious right seemed palpable. Pundits talked in awe about Dr. James C. Dobson—the one who we read in church bulletins, the so-called Protestant Pope who built Focus on the Family, a $130 million, 1,300-employee media ministry in Colorado Springs, and the venerable National Association of Evangelicals, with thirty million members. It seemed like Rove had indeed established a “permanent majority” of conservative Republicans.

    But behind the scenes, in the conservative Protestant capital of Colorado Springs, there was some serious soul-searching over a study released by George Barna, a well-respected evangelical pollster in southern California who had developed a reputation for delivering scientifically sound data on U.S. religious trends. In December 2003, he conducted a telephone poll of 2,033 randomly selected Americans from numerous cross-sections of the population, who were asked a series of questions:

    1. Would you call yourself a Christian?
    2. Have you made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in your life today?
    3. Do you believe that you will go to heaven when you die because you have confessed your sins and accepted Jesus Christ as your savior?
    4. Do you believe that you have a personal responsibility to share your religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians?
    5. Do you believe that Satan exists?
    6. Do you believe that eternal salvation is possible through grace, not works?
    7. Do you believe that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on Earth?
    8. Do you believe that the Bible is accurate in all that it teaches?
    9. Do you believe that God is the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity?
    10. Do you believe that God created the universe and still rules it today?

    Barna discovered that a solid thirty-eight percent of the U.S. population could be classified as “born-again” Christians, meaning they answered yes to the first three questions. The part that knocked strict Bible literalists on their heels was how few of those born-again Christians have a “Biblical world view”: only nine percent of them qualified by answering yes to all ten questions.

    Worse still, Barna found that the ideological move from being “born again” to having a “Biblical world view” is crucial to developing evangelically “correct” views on divorce, gay sex, pornography, gambling, abortion, and other social issues near and dear to Bible literalists. As it happens, born-agains are not all that statistically different from their heathen counterparts in terms of how they act, or what they believe. For instance, the divorce rate for born-agains is exactly the same as for those who haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as their savior: thirty-five percent. But overall compare those with a Biblical world view to born-agains and there are marked differences down the line. True evangelicals (those who take the Bible literally) are thirty-one times less likely to accept cohabitation, eighteen times less likely to condone drunkenness, fifteen times less likely to condone gay sex, and on and on and on.

    “There was a growing sense even before the Barna study that things were bad, that a large number of Christians were not living the Christian life,” says Marc Fey, an evangelical life coach and consultant in Colorado Springs, and director of something called “Christian Worldview” at Focus on the Family. “But what the Barna study really did was galvanize us in our belief that something had to be done.”
    The question they faced: How do you convince ninety-one percent of born-again Christians that showing up at church, voting Republican, and putting a Jesus fish on the SUV isn’t enough?

  • Planet Pickett

    A gauntlet of black-and-white portraits of jazz luminaries lines the walls of the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant on the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. Nearly all of these musicians have appeared at the Dakota in one of its two incarnations. The trick with this sort of self-promotion-as-interior-decoration is in the execution. To do it right, a place needs to have attracted top-notch talent and established a unique rapport with artists over many years, to the point that the portraits themselves seem to address the wistful adage "If these walls could talk."

    Veering left from the Dakota’s entry, the first portrait you see is of Joe Williams, the Count Basie Orchestra vocalist. Back in ’96, the then-seventy-eight-year-old Williams frolicked with unvarnished joy across the Dakota stage, delivering an unbelievably potent performance. Recalling that night in Richard Grudens’ book The Music Men, Williams said, "I don’t remember feeling that good. I think every pore in my body was open…. " The singer inscribed his Dakota portrait to the man most responsible for the club’s legacy-founder, co-owner, and frontman Lowell Pickett: "Lowell, Best. Love, Joe Williams."

    Next in line is a similarly signed shot of Stanley Turrentine, a man of massive physique and a tenor saxophone tone to match. Many years ago, Wynton Marsalis and his band finished their concert at the Guthrie and hurried over to catch Turrentine’s final set at the Dakota, only to discover they’d arrived too late. No matter. Lowell (as he is known to most everyone) invited them in, convinced a cook to stick around and feed them, and the two bands ate and jammed in the empty club until two in the morning. Beside Turrentine on the wall is a picture of trumpeter Roy Hargrove. Lowell first met Hargrove at the 1989 Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy; he was the road manager for Moore By Four and Hargrove was still a teenager yet to release his first record. Since then, the Downbeat poll winner has performed at the Dakota on numerous occasions. "To Lowell, The most comfortable jazz club in the world for musicians and patrons. Peace + Love."

    The tributes go on and on: nationally renowned jazz cat, pungent memory, heartfelt inscription. Finally, there’s McCoy Tyner, the pianist in John Coltrane’s legendary quartet who went on to become an influential dynamo in his own right. Tyner and Pickett were friends for more than a decade before Tyner became the Dakota’s first national jazz act in the fall of ’88.

    Then the legacy jumps from the wall of portraits to the bandstand. It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and for the eighth year in a row, that means hip, ironic trio The Bad Plus are playing the Dakota. Lowell introduces the group, wryly noting that the crowd is larger now than it was for the band’s first show at the club in 2000; also that the trio is fresh from a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall and an effusive write-up in The New Yorker. What he doesn’t say is that back in high school, before they even knew each other, two of the three Bad Plus musicians, pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Reid Anderson, were at the Dakota for that first McCoy Tyner gig.

    Three weeks before The Bad Plus took the stage, the Detroit blues singer Bettye LaVette played her now-regular winter engagement at the Dakota. After decades of barely scraping by, LaVette’s career was finally showing a pulse when she got a call from Lowell. Four years later, LaVette sits in her dressing room after wowing the capacity crowd she now typically draws to the Dakota. She talks about "the night Lowell and I sat right here and talked until almost daylight. Oh, you should have heard us going back and forth from the ladies rest room that night! I’m threatening to burn down the bathroom because my picture isn’t in there. And he’s saying, ‘Well, let me get to know you better.’" LaVette lets out a big laugh, then suddenly gives me a no-bullshit look from behind her tinted glasses. "Lowell is just somebody I want to hang with. I do a million gigs a year and I don’t know any other club owner or any other promoter who I’d want to hang with."
     

    Judging from his childhood and public mien, Lowell Pickett is one of the last people you’d expect to be earning hanging privileges and trading bathroom bon mots with a sassy, streetwise black woman from Detroit. He was born and raised in Austin, Minnesota, the Hormel company town where his father ran the local J.C. Penney and his mother was a music teacher and ardent cellist. Lowell was their third child and second son, reared in a quiet neighborhood, tucked away from the countercultural changes of the ’60s. Lowell’s folks were molded by the Depression, which meant that the family never ate out and pinched pennies to invest in education.

    "My father grew up dirt-poor in the middle of North Dakota; at sixteen he had to find a place for his family to live. He couldn’t afford school, and used to read college catalogues the way other people read travel brochures," Lowell says, explaining how his dad gently coaxed him into attending Shattuck Academy, at the time an Episcopalian military school in Faribault (now most famous for such alumni as Marlon Brando and Nick Nolte), first for the summer and then for a year. When he graduated from Austin High in ’67-right in sync with the Summer of Love-he had already been accepted to St. Olaf College in Northfield. He planned to earn a law degree, and was considering a double major in business administration.

    That careful, cultivated side of Lowell, now fifty-nine, can be seen as he introduces acts from the stage or roams the club troubleshooting. He’s almost always attired in a gray suit and matching tie, and his longish hair and short, graying beard are immaculately groomed. He’s a bit hangdog around the cheekbones and shoulder blades, but his voice has the dulcet, reassuring tone of an FM radio host. He can also display the unerring formality of a funky but ace maître d’.

    But that’s the master disguise, the veneer of decorum acquired (and required) when you grow up in the sticks. A less obvious but more important side of Lowell is the dreamer and adventurer-the one who’s always ready to receive, or concoct, what the flamboyant reedman Rahsaan Roland Kirk once referred to as "Bright Moments." The moments when Joe Williams turns back the clock and breathes through every pore; when Turrentine and Marsalis are sharing a blues and some blackened fish in the wee hours; when McCoy Tyner passes a baton to The Bad Plus before the group even existed in the minds of its members.

    This side of Lowell was kindled at St. Olaf, where he landed a roommate from Philadelphia. Lowell’s mother had made sure her children took piano lessons and w
    ere steeped in the classics. Show tunes were also played around the Pickett household, and Lowell had ventured further, from the New Christy Minstrels into songwriting-oriented folkies such as Donovan, Tim Hardin, and his first musical hero, Bob Dylan. But this dude from Philly had been a drummer in a rock band back home and had an entirely different crate of sounds. "Cream and Moby Grape and the Grateful Dead and the Mothers of Invention," Lowell says, reverently rolling out the names. "I had never heard that stuff before. I just loved it."

  • Stupidity on Two Wheels

    So, it sucks to park
    the car on Hennepin Avenue in the winter – scaling the piles of snow hardened
    into ice, trying not to fall against (or under) the filthy auto, hoping that
    busses and SUVs will not take the car door off (or at least slow down if they do) when you get get the frozen lock
    unlocked … it especially sucks getting
    into/out of a car parked on Hennepin when you’re toting a 10-month-old, however
    good-natured, and all of his attendant baggage. It sucks to do this at least
    twice daily, which you do when you don’t have any other place to put the car.

    But that’s not the
    source of my outrage for the purposes of this here post. The outrage was sparked
    the other day, once the baby and I were safely settled in the car (frozen, poorly designed car
    seats in frozen cars … there’s a topic for another post) and driving this car
    on Hennepin toward Calhoun Square. Shortly we came upon a woman on a bicycle.

    That’s not the
    source of my outrage, either. I’m totally pro-bicycle. I especially have to hand
    it to people who ride their bikes in winter – we should all be so virtuous. But
    I do have to mention that people who bike on icy thoroughfares like Hennepin –
    sans helmets – are, in a word, nuts. Or stupid. Hennepin is already narrow, and
    it’s made narrower still with those aforementioned frozen snow piles on either
    side. And if the conditions are icy for cars, might they be even more so for
    bicycles?

    But I’ll hold back
    on the outrage there, even. As a pro-bicyclist, I believe that bicyclists own
    the roads, too. They can ride wherever they want, and if they want to take
    their lives into their own hands by not wearing a helmet and by riding on busy,
    icy streets, that’s their business.

    So
    where is the outrage already? OK: The outrage comes in because there
    was also a child riding on the bike, behind the woman (who was, let’s
    presume, the mother of the child).

    A bit more outrage
    comes because this mother had apparently decided to make things "safer" for the child by putting a helmet on her – but
    she wasn’t wearing one herself. So your kid can become a motherless quadriplegic
    but hey, at least she might possibly retain some or even all of her mental
    faculties should a collision occur on icy, busy,
    narrowed-by-frozen-piles-of-snow Hennepin.

    This
    idea of helmets-for-kids-but-not-their-parents is akin to another source of outrage: How
    politicians fall all over themselves to be pro-health insurance for
    children — but not their parents. So little Susie can have her annual checkup
    and/or cancer treatment, but Susie’s insurance-less mom? She might die because
    she ignores some health problem or
    she might go into financial ruin dealing with said health problem, because she doesn’t have health insurance — leaving Susie
    physically healthy (by some standards) but motherless and/or living in abject poverty.

    But I digress,
    having delivered most but not all of the outrage. There are a couple more bits.

    Bit #1: Watching as this helmet-less mom-with-child runs a red light on her bike on
    the aforementioned icy,
    busy, narrowed-by-frozen-piles-of-snow Hennepin.

    Bit #2: Spotting the same mother and child, 45 minutes later, riding the other way on Hennepin —
    and this time, they’ve taken on another pint-sized passenger. Somebody get me a
    Rolaids.

  • Something Fishy in Woodbury

    I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I drove out to
    Giapponese, the new sushi bar / restaurant in Woodbury. Sushi is everywhere
    these days, including the refrigerator cases of local supermarkets, and since
    the sushi restaurants all tend to get the same ingredients from the same
    suppliers, it has become a pretty generic product. But the name – Italian for
    “Japanese” — was intriguing, and the online menu sounded pretty interesting:
    smoked salmon bruschetta and poki (the Hawaiian version of tuna tartare); and
    some varieties of fish and shellfish that seldom show up on local sushi menus,
    such as kawahagi (file fish, a member of the blowfish family) kinmeidai (golden eye snapper), kohada (gizzard shad) and walu (the Hawaiian name for a variety of escolar, sometimes sold as white tuna.

    When I asked for omakase (chef’s choice), chef-owner Henry
    Chan immediately knew what I wanted, and proceeded to serve up a delightful
    series of courses: raw scallop, Tasmanian salmon, halibut rolled in a thin
    ribbon of cucumber, a whole small mackerel presented as sashimi, and a roll of
    tempura shrimp and avocado topped with tuna. Chan, who grew up in Wisconsin, recently moved here from Eau Claire, where he owns
    the town’s only sushi bar, the Shanghai Bistro.

    Chan clearly has a passion for sushi, and listening to him, he sounds really committed to bringing in the best quality and most interesting varieties he can find. The selection is still pretty limited, but he says that as his sales volume grows, he will be adding more varieties. If you want to be notified when new and interesting varieties of sushi and seafood are available, send him an email at twinscroll@gmail.com. I just got an email yesterday, announcing the arrival of his live tanks (for holding lobster and shrimp), and a shipment of Hamma Hamma oysters from Washington state.

    I’d like to go back sometime to try the Kobe beef steaks – a 16 ounce bone-in New York Strip and a 14 ounce ribeye, both $55. This isn’t the original Kobe beef from Japan, where the cattle are massaged daily and fed rations of beer, but it’s the same breed, Wagyu. Chan gets his beef from a friend who has a herd of Wagyu near Augusta, Wisconsin. $55 for a steak sounds pretty steep, compared to what other restaurants charge, it’s a bargain. Locally, Cosmos has imported Japanese Kobe beef on its menu for $17 an ounce (which would work out to $272 for a 16-ounce steak), and even that is a bargain compared to Craftsteak in Las Vegas. Craftsteak charges $105 for a 14-ounce American Wagyu ribeye, $184 for an eight-ounce Australian Wagyu ribeye, and $240 for an eight-ounce Japanese Wagyu steak – which works out to $480 a pound.

    Giapponese Sushi
    10060 Citywalk Drive
    Woodbury, MN 55129
    Phone: 651-578-7777


  • Laura Flynn

    Flynn’s debut about growing up in 1970s San Francisco with a paranoid schizophrenic mother sounds like the sort of overwrought therapy masquerading as literature we’ve been inundated with for years—but it’s actually as convincing as it is harrowing, and is ultimately a beautiful testament to the remarkable resilience of children and the power of imagination and (it really does hurt to write this) love. As her mother’s illness spirals out of control, and her father (presumably worn out from accusations of Satanic proselytizing) leaves the family, Flynn and her two sisters find solidarity and survival in books, fantasy, and, most touchingly, in the sorts of imaginative flight they’d originally learned from their mother.

    February 8th.

  • Charles Baxter

    Charles Baxter, whom we’re happy to once again claim as a local (he recently returned from a long exile in Ann Arbor) has been at it for twenty-five years now, and his body of work—which includes novels, short stories, poetry, and essays—has gained both a national reputation and a cult following. His novel The Feast of Love was a National Book Award nominee and was recently made into a film. Baxter’s teaching at the University of Minnesota these days, but he keeps turning out books (he’s purportedly an insomniac), and his latest, The Soul Thief, involves a graduate student wrestling with the realization that he may not be who he thinks he is. Or something like that.

    7-8 p.m., MinneapolisCentral Library, 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis; 612-630-6174.

  • Chip Kidd

    This is apparently what we’ve come to: In an age when we’re reminded on an almost daily basis that nobody reads books anymore, one of the biggest celebrities in publishing is a guy who designs book jackets. That, of course, would be Chip Kidd, the graphic designer with a classic quarterback’s name. You’d think maybe the guy would be content with having designed fifteen-hundred covers and counting—his work is ubiquitous and, to his credit, almost always ridiculously stylish and unmistakable—but you’d be wrong. Turns out Kidd also writes novels, and on the heels of his debut The Cheese Monkeys (an art school yarn) comes The Learners (a novel with a lot of ruminations on graphic design). You certainly can’t accuse the ambitious Kidd of not writing about what he knows. The publisher says the new book also involves “advertising, electroshock torture, suicide, a giant dog, potato chips, and the Holocaust.”

    7-8 p.m., Minneapolis Central Library, 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis; 612-630-6174.

  • Night Train and Other Ojibwe Stories: A Celebration of Writing and Sisterhood with the Erdrichs

    Not since the Brontës bulled their way to prominence in nineteenth-century Duluth has the flyover cultural set seen a distaff literary dynasty—or, quite honestly, any sort of literary dynasty—the likes of the Erdrich sisters. By now everybody knows Louise (independent bookstore owner and author of the award-winning Love Medicine and all sorts of other critically acclaimed novels, children’s books, poetry, and short story collections); and everybody should know Heid, who for our money is a more consistently stunning poet than her more celebrated sister. The impetus for this family reunion, however, is the publication of Night Train, a debut collection of short stories by Lise Erdrich, the sister we confess to knowing almost nothing about. We do know, though, that she was a 2007 Bush Foundation fellow, and Sherman Alexie has said of her collection, “This book challenged, entertained, thrilled, and scared me.” No idea how often they actually get a chance to sit down together, but we’re guessing they’ll have plenty to talk about.

    7 p.m.-8 p.m., Minneapolis Central Library, 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis; 612-630-6174.

  • Yo Ivanhoe Goes to the Movies!

    Believe me, I fully recognize that a guy pretty much has to
    be a moron and a glutton for punishment to criticize Diablo Cody at this point.
    Either that or he has to be a very, very brave man, a man with the stones of
    Anton Chigurh.

    I’ll plead absolutely guilty on the first counts. As to the
    second, well, yes, ma’am, I do believe I’m your man there as well.

    Let me get some things out of the way before I move ahead
    with my ill-advised temerity (and I’m willing to acknowledge that I have no
    idea whether temerity is always, by its very nature, ill-advised, but I’m aware
    of the possibility).

    I know Diablo Cody is a very smart woman, and based on her
    work I would know this even if she hadn’t let slip in interviews that she has
    the stratospheric IQ of the average postal service Mensan. She’s a sharp, smart character, and almost all of her writing that I’ve seen has been very sharp, very
    smart, and frequently funny.

    The writing in Juno is often very sharp, very smart, and
    very funny. The problem is that it is not the way real people talk; it’s the
    way people talk on television sitcoms, and I guess I hold films to a slightly
    higher standard, at least films that get nominated for Academy Awards –films
    like Kramer Vs Kramer, Forrest Gump, Braveheart, and Titantic. I
    promise you that I wouldn’t have a single complaint if Juno were nominated
    for an Emmy, particularly if they had a category for the snappy Post-Modern
    After-School Special.

    I understand that the legend has it that Ms. Cody birthed
    the Juno screenplay in the restroom at some suburban Target, washing down fistfuls of
    truck stop speed with two-liter jugs of RC Cola or some such while hunched over a
    laptop balanced precariously on the diaper changing station. Fine, I’ll buy
    that if you really want to make a stink about it. I also believe, however, that
    she had some help from a handful of down-on-their-luck former Different
    Strokes     and Family Ties writers (Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying
    that any of these people were in the women’s room with her). And I’m also pretty
    damn sure that somebody from The Simpsons or The Family Guy sprinkled a
    little fairy dust on the thing before she turned it over to Jason Reitman.

    I have other problems with the movie, yes, but I guess I also have
    a few problems with the mythology that I should get out of the way first. I don’t,
    for instance, believe that Diablo Cody was ever a stripper. I just don’t. I
    know she wrote a memoir about the "experience," but I also know that that
    doesn’t prove a damn thing. Wouldn’t you think if this story were true, we’d
    have been inundated with backbiting and lecherous accounts from former
    co-workers and the habitués of the establishments where she purportedly worked?
    Maybe I’m not paying proper attention –although I think I am, and I think it’s
    hard not to– but I haven’t heard a peep.

    I can’t blame her for coming up with a colorful back-story.
    We all love colorful back-stories. They make the strangers we obsess about all
    the more interesting, and they’re somehow even more interesting if they allow
    us to imagine the strangers we obsess about bare-assed naked and covered with
    tattoos. I’ll admit it: if I had a biography or a resume I certainly wouldn’t
    hesitate to pad the damn thing with all manner of outrageous fabrications. All
    the same, I don’t believe a word of this particular tall tale –don’t believe
    Cody was a stripper, don’t believe she was a coal miner, and don’t believe that
    she was the night janitor in a crematorium. I don’t even believe she’s from
    suburban Kentucky. I mean, seriously people, do you honestly believe there even
    is a suburban Kentucky?

    There isn’t, but if there were, I can pretty much guarantee
    you that sixteen-year-old suburban Kentucky girls wouldn’t be listening to
    Patti Smith or the Stooges or Mott the Fucking Hoople. And I hope to God they
    wouldn’t be listening to Kimya Dawson and the Moldy Peaches, either, because if
    so than the place as I imagine it just got a whole lot more hellish.

    My real problems with Juno, I suppose, can be boiled down
    to this: If it’s trying to be subversive it doesn’t work. And if it’s not trying to be subversive it doesn’t work either.

    There’s too much telling and not enough showing, too much
    lazy shorthand about virtually every character, and by the end I don’t feel
    like I really know or care about a single person in the entire movie (well,
    maybe I cared a little bit about the dad and step-mom, even if they didn’t seem
    remotely real to me). The stammering, dorky boyfriend –played by the same
    stammering dork who played the same stammering dorky character in Superbad— is, we are told, "cool." He’s in a band. He also, I presume, likes
    the same sort of impossibly hip music Juno likes. Yet all we see him do is run
    around in shorts and a sweatband. The poor, improbably fertile dork does
    nothing but run and run. Is this supposed to be a metaphor? And, yes, one
    canned moment of sweetness passes between Juno and the dork, but other than
    that the kid doesn’t much seem to understand the gravity of the situation, and
    we get absolutely nothing in the way of character development that would allow
    us to see him through Juno’s eyes. She just tells us that he’s the coolest guy
    she knows, and we pretty much have to take her word for it.

    I’d also love to know what’s up with Juno’s best friend. Who
    is this girl? Does she not seem like exactly the sort of vacuous nobody that
    someone like Juno would openly mock? At any rate, she’s ultimately nothing but
    what she seems, because we get exactly nothing about her to form anything but a
    surface impression.

    And does not Juno have a little sister in this film? Am I
    imagining that? And if I’m not imagining it, why does Juno have a little
    sister? Why is this kid in the movie? Get rid of her. Let some other movie
    adopt her. She serves no purpose.

    I’m pretty sure I could go on and on (just as I’m pretty
    sure that Diablo Cody –whoever she really is– is going to have a long, fine
    career and that her pending horror film will be exactly the sort of riot she’s
    most suited to write), but my ultimate problem with Juno was that in the end,
    in what felt like a terrible cop-out to me, the cute-as-a-button smartass turns
    her baby over to the one pathetic person in the entire film who is most ill-equipped
    to live in the world Cody’s characters inhabit.

    And as long as we’re on the subject of the Oscars,
    and since I know you come here expecting regular, sharp criticism of the
    current state of the cinema, I may as well offer some impressions of a couple
    of the other nominated films I paid eight dollars to see and did not much
    enjoy.

    I love Cormac McCarthy. I generally enjoy the Coen Brothers.
    And I wish like hell I hadn’t seen No Country For Old Men. It’s like McCarthy
    and the Coens teamed up to write an episode of the Andy Griffith Show for the
    End Times:

    Deputy rushes into the room,
    clearly agitated:     Sheriff! A truckload of Mexicans turned up just outside
    of town and they’ve been shot all to blazes! You wanna drive out to take a
    look?

    Sheriff is sitting at a table in
    a diner, squinting at the newspaper and shaking his head incredulously.
    He hesitates, and doesn’t look up from the paper:     No sir, I don’t believe I
    do.

    In No Country, just as in this country, the world is going
    to hell in a hurry. Evil, inexplicably represented by a man with a bad haircut
    and a pneumatic cattle zapper, is an unstoppable force. The poor, old,
    beleaguered Sheriff just can’t be bothered anymore to do anything but mope
    around and offer homespun philosophical ruminations. The crafty Vietnam vet who
    finds the satchel of cash comes up with all manner of crafty maneuvers to
    outfox his pursuers, yet never thinks to transfer all that money into a
    slightly less distinctive –not to mention cumbersome– carrying case. Woody Harrelson shows up and displays
    remarkable skills of clairvoyance in locating both the man on the run and the
    money, but then –just like that– he’s dead. Then –just like that– pretty much
    everybody else is dead as well, except for Evil, which still walks among us
    dragging his pneumatic cattle zapper, and the poor, old, beleaguered Sheriff,
    who right up to the bitter end offers homespun philosophical ruminations to anybody who’s still alive to listen.

    That’s about it. The whole thing looks awfully nice, though,
    I’ll give it that.

    Ratatouille also looks awfully
    nice, but it also sucks. I’m sorry, but I just think it’s a tall order
    to make the whole rats-in-the-kitchen thing palatable, particularly
    when we’re talking about obnoxious rats, and scads of them. I had a
    huge problem with the lazy, jackhammer way Brad Bird and his associates
    named their characters –the snobby food critic is named Anton Ego! Get it?
    There’s also a Gusteau, a Linguini, a Pompidou, a Django, and a
    Skinner. Could you maybe take more than five fucking minutes to name
    your characters before we hand you a Best Screenplay nomination? Is
    that really asking too much?

    And, finally, there’s the sheer ignorance of the main human
    character, Remy. Throughout the entire stinking film the guy has a rat on his
    head pulling his hair and putting him through all manner of contortions making
    the same damn dishes over and over, yet somehow, when the rat disappears, the
    moron doesn’t know how to recreate the recipes he’s made hundreds of times?
    What the hell?

    Somebody in Hollywood –and it might as well be Diablo
    Cody– better send me a check for $24, pronto. I’m for damn sure not going to
    drag my ass out to see Atonement until they do.