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At first, Indigo McCarthy hadn’t realized that an agent from the Department of Agriculture was shadowing him. But he soon learned. The pursuit started at U.S. Postal Service Station No. 4245. The Ag agent was a mole in USPS who’d requested a transfer to Vermontville, the tiny hamlet bordering the resort lake. A lot of middle managers from the city spent summer weekends there with their families. It was the weekend of the Fourth. At the post office, the Ag agent found that he liked sifting through other people’s mail, particularly when the mail had the potential—the energy of activation—to contain harmful animal or vegetable products. Such secret parcels threatened the nation.

In Indigo’s case, it was a manila envelope with no return address and a Berkeley postmark (itself suspicious), which contained three small packages of Kool-Aid powder: Lemon Punch, Fruit Cocktail, and Wacky Blueberry. Oh, Indigo McCarthy must have been up to something, the agent knew.

In the tiny post office break room, he blew his nose on a standard-issue department handkerchief, a wheat stalk embroidered on each corner. He double-checked the pump load ammo in his wrist gun, and resealed the envelope with a glue stick he’d picked up from the Ben Franklin store in town. None the wiser. He grimaced. The field office in Milwaukee had the wherewithal to give him a wrist gun, but a ninety-cent glue stick was apparently out of its league.

A few men and women in trim blue uniforms were coming into the break room from the Secret Break Room that even the infiltrating Ag agent dared not venture into. The aggie hurried. Any one of them could be a plant, he reasoned, from any agency. It was best to be too careful. Indigo knew none of this fifteen minutes later, as he yanked the envelope and two postcards from his PO box and walked away. How could he have? Professional spies were on the scene.

As he drove his cherry-red SUV from the post office to the lake, past a series of dales and abandoned hobby farms, an Immigration and Naturalization Service official in an SUV followed him. Star-spangled rectangles of cloth rippled on every street corner. The air exploded with toy explosives. The INS agent’s SUV was white and didn’t blend in well. She’d been working this case for a few days, and it was finally coming to fruition. Suspicious packages always portended something suspicious. The INS agent had Indigo’s credit report on the front seat, as well as a Xerox of his recent international itineraries to Canada and Mexico. For “business.” The agent chortled. Indigo had two girls. His wife was a pharmacist. The wife waved at him as he pulled up to their time-share lake cottage. Clean white stucco, worn in, peonies obscuring the cobblestone path through the front yard. But in a pleasant way.

The INS agent sped on, but not before a metal strip adhering to her passenger-side doorknob took several photos of Indigo’s hand, which held the postcards and envelope. The photos were uploaded to a satellite and then down to a processing station in the basement of a Miami funeral home.

Unbeknownst to the INS agent, the ghostly afterimages of the photos were intercepted by a Department of Transportation agent hiding in some shrubs across the street, holding something akin to a laser pointer. She uploaded the images and started running away from the SUV, toward the nearest airport, where there was a Cessna waiting to take her back to Duluth.

“Who are those from, honey?” Marsha, the wife, said. A quick, hot peck on the cheek. It was hot outside. Their marriage was on the rocks. (One didn’t need to be a spy with advanced training to see that!) The two girls, Esther, five, and Miranda, seven, were in the lake, splashing, adorned with life preservers shaped like smiling killer whales. Below the submerged black fins and the legs kicking out, an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms bureau agent waited with scuba gear and sonar implants, listening. Like Virginia Woolf, he had stones in his pockets when he jumped into the water. He’d learned that through a debriefing of “great American subversives,” and won a certificate for the idea, which hung over his desk back at the Cedar Rapids headquarters. He was quite proud of both the certificate and the desk. The girls giggled. A trout was brushing against their toes.

“I don’t know,” Indigo said. “I haven’t really looked at them. It’s probably just junk.” It’s all junk, he thought. “I need a beer.”
“Get it yourself.” Freeze, retreat. Snap, Indigo opened the screen door and got a beer, postal cargo still in hand, snap, a wide-angle lens captured Marsha’s backside as she walked down the cobbled sandstone path to the lake. The sandstone was imported from France. Super suspicious, code red. Snap again, the cobblestones and her ankles, for good measure. Not everyone was honorable.

Within the lake’s circumference (it was shaped like a pill bug, twitching, ready to curl up), other children played, but in a desultory fashion, as if they knew something unpatriotic were going on in the McCarthy household. Speedboats sped by in front of their cabin a little more slowly. In a few hours they would be angrily shaking their fists, assembling in the town hall, shouting, “Burn down the stucco! Burn down the stucco!” (If the Forest Service agent hiding in a stand of trees had his way.) He couldn’t get close to the house without blowing his cover, which was that of a middle-aged man who had just lost his consultancy job, masturbating amongst the trees, and that was all that could be said about him, except for the pictures he took, three-fourths of which were of Marsha’s behind. Forestry espionage was hard, especially since it was department policy to deforest, which left very few trees for hiding places.

Indigo sank into the inviting folds of the sofa with his beer. Before he sipped, he set the beer down on the coaster. The coaster released a pheromone undetectable by the human nose. Indigo moved toward the blinds to draw them—a cold chill brushed against his neck, the kind of primitive but still efficient “first strike” response that Indigo’s ancestors had used when hunting for giant elk in the Pictish highlands. Most of the time they didn’t succeed. His wife went into the bathroom to make a call and masturbate. The vibrator was hidden in a carved-out copy of The Prince. Not that little fellow who planet-hopped and got his ass handed to him by a snake; rather, the no-holds-barred paragon from Florence, back when Europe mattered. The pheromone drifted out of the living room and underneath the front door, to a badger waiting in the brush five hundred feet away. Upon detecting the scent, the badger rose to its hind legs to get the circulation going and scurried around the perimeter of the lake through the brushy, as yet undeveloped lot adjoining the McCarthys’. The badger was much more nimble than his species profile; a strict Department of the Interior training regimen ensured this. He also had a small but deadly explosive charge wired to his cerebral cortex, with plasticine woven through his underbelly, but his superiors hoped it wouldn’t come to that. The secret logo of the Department of the Interior was the badger. Screw the docile buffalo, content to chew prairie grasses on the official stationery and apparel of the department. (What happened to the buffalo? Buffalo Bill happened to the buffalo, that was what.)

“C’mon, little buddy,” the badger handler of the DOI said, waiting in a pickup truck on a road on the other side of the lake, listening on headphones to the badger’s labored breathing. But then the breathing stopped.

“Honey, do you smell something funny?” Indigo said, calling out to his wife. She didn’t answer. The packages of Kool-Aid still rested unopened next to Indigo’s elbow. Trembling in the air conditioning. The daughters in the lake were listening too, in anticipation. Children had intuitions about perfect summer days, that they could disappear at the drop of a hat. It was a survival tactic.

There was a soft, but still distinct, explosion a couple of lots over. A man screamed: “I’m on fire, I’m on fire.” Forgetting his cover. But what else could be expected from a Health and Human Services agent who had no experience with badgers in the field? Explosives-laden badgers, at that? The HHS agent—who’d convinced himself through several seminars that his work was to protect the McCarthy children, always think of the children—saw the wiring running underneath the badger’s belly and then pounced from his hiding place in the marshy scrub. He had attempted to take the badger by the tail and club it to death against a rock. But the nearest rock was barely within sight along the lake path, a good two-minute walk away, which required hauling the badger by hand. The animal wasn’t human and therefore didn’t require health or services. For all he knew, the badger could be a double agent for those nasty Belgians. The badger, then, sacrificing everything for the good of the department, exploded.

Screaming ensued. Indigo, startled, sat up. The Interior agent began crying and sped away, the mission lost. The ATF agent at the bottom of the lake chucked all of his stones at once and began to surface. Indigo called out to his wife again, who again didn’t answer. The screaming stopped. All was still, pleasantly so. Fishers cast their rods. Sunbathers, pale as groupers, turned over on their floating rafts in syncopation.

Indigo couldn’t decide what to do next. He needed backup, 911. He needed a fire marshal in his corner. He picked up the phone, but the line was dead. Marsha had his cell phone.

“Marsha?” he called. “Kids?” He went to the bathroom door and tapped on it. No answer. He rattled the handle in that special push-pull that only he knew. Marsha had locked herself in before.

The bathroom was empty. The window was open, letting in a breeze that felt much too cold, too much in the throes of autumn. Too much autumn. The lake would close and board up in autumn, leaving the residents of Vermontville to waddle between snowbanks en route from car to church or bar. Which was what they probably wanted. They wanted to be left alone by people like Indigo, sophisticated to the point of having agents after him. He looked out the window and saw no one in the yard or the black, quiet lake. He started yelling “Marsha, Marsha,” veering back to the living room. Sitting in the chair he had recently departed from was a man in a black suit. He was wiry thin, and his pianist’s hands were tearing into the manila envelope. Beer frost was on his lips. He had drunk from Indigo’s beer, an outrage somehow more vile than his very presence. Indigo stood there, too afraid not to speak, but lacking words to adequately express what was now in front of him.

The agent ignored Indigo and tipped the open package down into his lap. The three Kool-Aid packages slid out like origami. The agent carefully placed the manila envelope onto the coffee table and made a stack of the Kool-Aids. Indigo could see, with the motion of hands, the shine of pearlescent gloves.
“Who are you?” Indigo said.

“The members of your family are being held as enemy combatants.” The agent didn’t look up. “I imagine you want to know about your family. Families are important.”

“Who are you?” Indigo asked again. And then, “‘Enemy combatants’?”

“Stop asking so many questions. It’s clear you hate your family. Since you didn’t ask about them. So let me ask the questions, buster.” The agent stood up. “What do you know about these Kool-Aid packages?” He shook the lurid colors.

“I don’t know—I don’t know who sent this—”

“Let me give you a hint. Bad people. People are either good or bad.”

“I want a lawyer.”

The agent snorted. “Listen, I told you. Your family consists of enemy combatants. They are thus exempt from the Geneva conventions as well as U.S. jurisprudence. Let us not speak of them again.”

“My daughters—they’re just kids.” Indigo considered rushing the man, or rushing away. He couldn’t decide. It seemed like an important decision. He wanted it decided for him.

“Children enjoy Kool-Aid. This is natural.” This statement was simple enough that Indigo suspected a trap. “But as I advised you before—”
Indigo cocked his head. “What’s that noise?” There was a noise. He wasn’t paranoid, not really. It was a sound like a video game, pixels chiming and exploding, a player raking in a high score.

The agent put a hand to his ear. For the first time, panic filled his eyes. He straightened his spine. “Fuck,” he said to himself. “It’s too early.” Then he realized that Indigo, a noncommissioned citizen, was his audience. “There’s a Blackbird coming,” he said. “A drone has been launched. Your cottage—” The firework sounds increased. Yes, it was the Fourth of July, a holiday designed to remember the Declaration of Independence that several wealthy planters and shippers had made against a king. But the screeching sound was different, from the sky, plowing down like the future instead of the past. The future always came from the sky.

The agent got up and ran, ignoring Indigo. The Kool-Aid packets were still on the coffee table. Indigo could hear the agent screaming on the lawn, running toward the lake. For cover. The boom was fast and deafening. Seconds passed. Indigo scooped up the packets and dived under the coffee table. He didn’t quite fit there, but then again, the imitation plywood would afford little solace from the detonation of a smart bomb, anyway. So Indigo was not worried. I have a stomachache, he thought, as the sleek chrome object hit the surface of the earth. Bomb-shelter position as he learned in Catholic school, hands over head, orange-juice light—

Not exactly the surface of the earth.

The surface of the lake turned white and horizoned. The window steamed and then shattered, letting in the hothouse air from the outside. Indigo slid out from under the coffee table, clutching the Kool-Aid to him. His whole body shook as he stumbled out of his house, toward the hot lake. The grass on the water’s perimeter was scorched. No one boated or cavorted. The sky, it seemed to Indigo, as he began running toward his car, ought to have been splotched with gray, ready to rain. But the weather never tracked anyone’s interior state—the sky was jewelry blue.

Something white and light landed on his shoulder, and he flinched. Something landed in his hair. He fished it off. A leaflet. Leaflets falling everywhere: “Your locale has been targeted for subversive activity. Please vacate the premises and contact proper authorities.” The too-late leaflets began to snow around him in earnest. He couldn’t see the source; there wasn’t a plane in the sky.

He opened the door of his SUV and entered the cool vinyl cave. His wife was lying on the backseat. His children were lying on the backseat behind the backseat, curled into each other. They all slept. He didn’t want to disturb the moment so he started the drive into town. Opening the window, he tossed the Kool-Aid packets out, one by one. He touched the button; the window sealed shut like a guillotine.

The silence in the car had no precedents, no antecedents. The silence was a vehicle with four bodies in it. Indigo didn’t want to disturb anything. Close to town, the abandoned farmhouses encroached on the newly built super-Wal-Mart. Or was it the other way around. At any rate, the farmhouses loomed with doorless thresholds, sagging floorboards, gutted ovens. He didn’t want those abandoned places. He didn’t want to be abandoned. At this point in the game, watching what he said appeared the best way to achieve that goal. Marsha snored, beginning to wake. He would not tell her about the agent. He would not ask about the package or let on that he knew about her affairs. Probably she had affairs. All he wanted was to drive into town, and then his family would wake, and once in town there would be a parade to attend—patriotic clowns on stilts, the VFW marching with their scarecrow uniforms, cheerleaders throwing sparkled batons high in the air. The batons would fall into hands. And later, when the sky was dark, fireworks would burst upon the public square. Marsha opened her eyes. She sat up and yawned, stretching her arms. It was unclear whether she had a care in the world.

“Indigo,” she said, still half-asleep, peering down at their children. He clenched the wheel until his knuckles whitened. “Indigo, the kids don’t have their seat belts on. But they’re lying down. Should I wake them? Are they safe?”

NOTE: “The Fourth” is from Alan DeNiro’s debut collection of short fiction, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, recently issued by Small Beer Press.

Why wasn’t David Rakoff delighted about the prospect of being exiled to a desert island, even a fantasy one? After all, the Canadian-born writer and actor said “OK” when Outside magazine asked him to take “an intense, weeklong wilderness course, where I was trained in primitive skills such as animal tracking, skinning, shelter construction, and the like” (the resulting essay later appeared in his first book, Fraud). Then there was the twenty-day fast, “where one is supposed to just credulously let go and put one’s trust in the lack of food to effect its wonderful magic in releasing toxins and making you feel better than you ever thought possible.” About this experience, he told a story as thought-provoking as it was hilarious on the public-radio program This American Life.

Rakoff also asserted that “on some level I am the perfect person for a game like this. I am deeply concerned with self-sufficiency, even though I can’t drive. I cut my own hair, I recently made my own jeans, I made all the lamps in my apartment, and my freezer is full of bags of animal carcasses suitable for boiling down into stock as needed.”

So what was the problem? Thoroughly confusing us, Rakoff finally admitted, “I am terrible at stuff like this”—not at being exiled to a desert island, that is, but at selecting just five things to take along. Probably it’s his intensely inquisitive nature. For example, during his fast, he had so many questions that his “guru, a man who through his own constant spiritual questing was a paragon of inner peace and enlightenment, a man who was by his own admission a personal friend to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, became openly abusive, and I, for one, can hardly blame him.”

Things began to make sense. If Rakoff seems kind of neurotically self-analytical, not to mention self-contradictory and perhaps a tad self-loathing—well, remember, he is a writer. Also, he lives in New York.

Then there’s his obsession with time travel. Apparently he ruminates “at least once a day” on how he would have been “just as useless a member of society” five hundred years ago as he is now. “I don’t know how to make a light bulb or an electrical circuit or a pill,” he said. “I wouldn’t even seem smart or modern enough to be burned as a witch. I’m not joking. I really do think about this daily and use it as an excuse to feel bad about myself.”

That’s when we felt it was necessary to tell Rakoff to buck up. He did so immediately and, in a “penitential spirit,” came up with the following to pack in his desert-island kit bag:

1. My bowdrill supplies, those wooden implements I carved at wilderness camp, by which I can make fire using nothing more than sticks and some downy vegetable matter like dried grass. (I really can make fire with this. It’s far and away the coolest thing I can do. Children who have seen me do this have never gotten over it.)

2. A good carbon steel hunting knife.

3. A whetstone for that knife.

4. Plastic sheeting, preferably opaque, for constructing weatherproof shelter and for stretching over a hole in the ground and gathering the resulting condensation for drinking water.

5. Finally, Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, a work I have never read and likely will never get to. Only so that when eventually, in that arid and neglected place, those who come after me might look from those pages (now yellowing and curled like dead leaves) to my sun-bleached bones, and think to themselves, What a waste. Of course, they will be wrong.

Rakoff will be the featured guest at the Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library’s annual meeting on October 3; for tickets call 612-630-6155, or visit www.friendsofmpl.org. Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff’s latest collection of essays, is available in paperback on September 12.

Fashion fuels itself on the past, spinning out retreads, revivals, and re-interpretations, produced at what seems to be an ever-faster rate. In fact, because of this profusion of styles, you’d have to go back to the early 90s to find evidence of the last really big rally around one particular look. For a few short years, young rockers and their fans took seam-rippers to their jeans, mussed up their hair, and piled on layers of figure-obscuring garments: extra-long-sleeved thermals, unbuttoned flannel shirts, hooded sweatshirts, misshapen cardigans, and, of course, work boots (an aesthetic that, itself, borrowed not a few things from the late 60s).

Fashion also fuels itself on subcultures: Some of those early 90s grunge fans were clothing designers. The 1992 collection that a young Marc Jacobs designed for Perry Ellis was based on flannel skirts, cashmere thermals, layer upon layer upon layer, even skull caps. This season, not surprisingly, Jacobs is credited for having picked up the speed with which designers rummage through our past; he has spearheaded a “grunge redux” style made up of chunky, knit headdresses and baggy, shirt-tied skirts. For those who like to relate fashion trends to larger influences, the revival seems apropos, given the United States’ wars in the Middle East then and now, as well as its battles with a decidedly lackluster economy.

The difference today, though, is that, with our fractured culture and always-splintering preferences for music, art, and fashion, there’s little chance tastemakers will converge on any one influence. The mid-1980s continue to be an abundant source of inspiration, judging from all the legwarmers, leggings, and ultra-wide belts. A slow burning of embellishment is also afoot, making way for more austere, minimalist treatments—another echo of what transpired in the early 90s, when tailored dresses and coats took on simple cuts and long, severe lines. As with last year, boots continue to play a central role, alongside plenty of dark and muted colors, a flash of metallics, and piles upon piles of knits.

To view the fall fashion images, click on the PDF below.

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.

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.”

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

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.