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As the put-upon boss of the world’s worst detective once observed, “Give me ten men like Clouseau and I could destroy the world.” But of course, there’s only one man like Peter Sellers, despite the painful attempts of Ted Wass, Roberto Benigni, and Alan Arkin to make us forget that. (Prediction: Steve Martin’s upcoming remake won’t fare any better.) Inspector Clouseau belongs to Sellers the way the Little Tramp belongs to Chaplin. This six-disc set skips over the non-Sellers—and, alas, Return of the Pink Panther, to which MGM doesn’t hold rights. But what remains is pure comic gold.

Ninety minutes into Lars Von Trier’s three-hour experimental drama, the painfully slow pacing had us so bored we nearly got up and left. That would have been a mistake. Staged with deliberate artificiality and an icy-bleak view of the human condition, Dogville is not easy to watch or to love. But this nightmare parallel to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s “Pirate Jenny,” comes with a powerful and uncompromising ending that had us talking for hours afterward. Von Trier fails in his apparent attempt to define a specifically American form of evil, but if you can stand a little face-to-face with grim existentialism, Dogville has real bite. Oak Street; 309 Oak St. S.E.; Minneapolis (612) 331-3134, mnfilmarts.org. Uptown; 2906 Hennepin Ave.; Minneapolis; (612) 925-6006; landmarktheatres.com
DVD

One thing’s for sure, this’ll be the bloodiest film so far this year not starring Jesus. It’ll certainly be a lot more fun. Word is that the second half of Quentin Tarantino’s revenge thriller is a little heavier on spaghetti-Western homage than Vol. 1 was, but that’s not to say QT’s sheathed the Hong Kong-style swordplay. True, his glibness can be irritating, and the story here’s not exactly Shakespeare (well, maybe Titus Andronicus). Not to mention that delaying a theatrical release by two months often signals a ticking bomb. But we enjoyed the hell out of part one, and not even Go Go Yubari armed with that razorball thing will keep us from finding out how it all ends.

Crossing the river on 35W the other day, we were reminded of the beauty of raptors. There, soaring above the traffic, was a bald eagle in all its unmistakable majesty. Alas, we could only enjoy it for a split second as we had to slam on the brakes to avoid another car, whose driver flashed us an entirely different bird. Thankfully, the Raptor Center opens its doors for its yearly open house, where we can get up close and personal with eagles, owls, hawks, and falcons without endangering our lives or theirs. Expert vets from the U of M will be there to introduce the Center’s winged residents and—bringing in some quadrupedal visitors—also give dog-obedience and horseback-riding demos. Admission is free. 1920 Fitch Ave., St. Paul; (612) 624-4745; www.raptor.cvm.umn.edu

In a world where Dr. Seuss has his own postage stamp and the tales of Lemony Snicket provide some of the best reading for adults, not to mention kids, it only makes sense that the Loft would continue with its Festival of Children’s Literature. The third annual conclave will offer wannabes and already-theres classes and special sessions devoted solely to this burgeoning (and currently most interesting) branch of the publishing world. Meet editors and illustrators, stake out your competition, lift a glass of beer at informal discussions at nearby pubs, and—yes, at a writers’s gathering—actually have fun! 1011 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis; (612) 379-8999; www.openbookmn.org

Let’s face it. One reason you like Byatt is because she’s so formidably smart, so unafraid to indulge her knowledge (or curiosity), that she makes you feel smart. Well, even if you won’t cop to that, we will. “The Stone Woman,” from her new collection, The Little Black Book of Stories (available April 20) had us spellbound when it ran last fall in the New Yorker. It’s a contemporary fairy tale involving a sixtyish Englishwoman whose flesh and insides gradually transform, through some perversion of alchemy, into stone, gems, and minerals; she absconds with a burly sculptor to the wild landscapes of his native Iceland. If Byatt reads like she writes, this promises to be a quietly ravishing evening. 2128 4th St. S., Minneapolis; (612) 624-2345

Prince isn’t alone in taking a certain royal tint to heart. Alice Walker’s first and still most prominent novel, The Color Purple, earned her a well-deserved Pulitzer and a well-meaning film adaptation by Steven Spielberg. Later this year, it’ll debut as a musical in Atlanta before hitting Broadway. Her new novel, Now Is the Time To Open Your Heart, available April 20, has a successful-author protagonist who, in the throes of mid-life crisis, embarks on a spiritual quest involving Earth-motherhood and hallucinogenic-aided shamanism. Walker’s questing metaphysics in the Carlos Casteneda vein is sitting uneasily with the national lit-crit establishment, which seems to think that this time around it’s her prose that’s the color purple. 600 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis, (612) 339-4859, www.bordersstores.com

A mystery writer of too many pen names to count (at least eight), we love Westlake best when he writes under the nom de crime Richard Stark. His series about the amoral and ruthlessly efficient thief named Parker is top of the line. But Westlake’s also a master of lighter stuff, and this month brings two books featuring his best comic creation, the sad-sack burglar John Dortmunder. Thieves’ Dozen collects all the Dortmunder short stories for the first time (all, ahem, eleven of them). Meanwhile, the new novel Road to Ruin has John and his crew out to steal a fleet of automobiles from a corrupt CEO—bringing a new meaning to the term “getaway car.”

Nearing ninety, Herman Wouk is still churning them out. Well, not exactly. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Caine Mutiny, who went onto write such compulsively readable, middlebrow classics as Marjorie Morningstar, Winds of War, and War and Remembrance, apparently was doing his millennial homework during the ten years it took come up with his latest, A Hole in Texas. A brainy look at the intersection of politics, physics, and the mass media, it shows that the old man can still get around on the fastball.

From his Dust Bowl days in Oklahoma to the Columbia River in Washington state, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (1912-1967) rambled a million miles by foot, thumb, boxcar, and in Liberty Ships—freighters hastily constructed for merchant-marine service during World War II. He wrote copiously along the way, “with his guitar hung around his neck like a tire iron on a rusty rim,” as John Steinbeck described him: “This Land Is Your Land,” “Roll On Columbia,” “So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You,” “Hard Traveling”… in 1941, he turned out twenty-six songs during a thirty-day stint along the Columbia. Woody also composed songs for children and a full-length novel, Bound for Glory, before falling victim in 1956 at age forty-three to Huntington’s Disease. This incurable genetic disorder, which causes the victim not only to lose control of his body but also his personality in sometimes violent episodes, silenced Woody’s voice and eventually ended his life. It’s an indication of his passion that long before his death he became, in the words of Studs Terkel, “one of a handful of the world’s greatest all-time balladeers.” To commemorate the release of Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray, the first major biography of Guthrie in almost twenty-five years, we offer our own ramblings, with John Hammond, Lee Hays, Bob Dylan, and Woody Guthrie himself.

Tony Glover, Brooklyn, New York, 1962: In forty-odd years in music, as writer and performer, I’ve met, interviewed, and played with a lot of people who went on to become household names. But there were only two I was in awe of: Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie. Even in 1962, Guthrie already had attained near-mythic status. Early in May that year I took my first trip to New York City to visit my partner Dave Ray, and also hooked up with former Minnesotan Bob Dylan. One day Bob asked if I’d like to go along with him to visit Woody at the Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn. Even though I was heavy into blues at the time, almost to the exclusion of any other music, I jumped at the chance.

We met on Bob’s doorstep on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, and climbed into the car of another blues man, John Hammond. (Hammond was still in college then; it would be a year before he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and recorded the first of twenty-nine albums of classic blues tunes.) Even though Bob couldn’t find the hospital’s address, we headed for the wilds of Brooklyn anyhow; after making several wrong turns and receiving heavily accented, misguided directions, we wound up at a gray stone three- or four-story building. It was set back from the street, the windows covered with heavy wire mesh.

Bob led us in, since his name was on the visitors list. An attendant escorted us through a couple of sets of heavy, locked doors to a second-floor day room. Woody’s name was called and eventually, down the hallway shuffled a short, wiry guy wearing pajamas open to the waist, and worn cowboy boots cracked with age. His hair was a shock of gray Brillo; his skin, weather-beaten and chiseled. His arms jerked spasmodically, and occasional tics contorted his shoulders. It was a struggle for him to talk, but despite his strangled words as Bob introduced us, his eyes were piercingly alert.

Woody led us down the hall to his room. He sat on his bed, we sat on the other. Bob asked how Woody liked the record he’d dropped off on a previous visit (his debut Columbia album Bob Dylan, containing “Song to Woody”). “It’s a good ’un,” Woody replied. Bob borrowed John’s guitar and we all sang a couple of Woody’s songs for him.

After “Hard Traveling,” Woody said, “Should be faster.” I pulled out a harp and played along on a couple more. During “Pretty Boy Floyd,” Woody tried to sing along, but his pitch was wavering. He reached in his boot and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and after much difficulty got one in his mouth. John and I reached for our lighters, but Bob shook his head at us. So we watched for several minutes as Woody fought to control his arms long enough to get a match lit and get the fire up to the cigarette. He finally did. He took a deep drag, with a lightning-bolt look of triumph in his eyes.

Altogether we stayed about an hour, and as we left, Bob promised to be back. We didn’t talk much in the car on the long drive back to the Village. The force of Woody’s presence still hung in the air, and it said more than words could.

Charlie Maguire, Croton-on-Hudson, New York, 1972: Lee Hays was a singer and songwriter with considerable show-business savvy, which he used to mentor young people—this may have been his true calling—whether they were destined for the stage or not. He knew absolutely everybody; his Rolodex ran from Steve Allen to Joan Baez to Olympic gold medalist Mark Spitz. Lee and I used to practice “educated loafing,” as he liked to call it, from cushy chairs at his cottage in Croton-on-Hudson, about thirty miles north of New York City. I was with him the day the UPS man delivered an award for “one million for-profit performances” of “If I Had a Hammer,” which he co-wrote with Pete Seeger during his days on America’s Hit Parade with The Weavers.

Lee had paid his dues, and he knew Woody intimately. Because Guthrie literally wrote the book about being a traveling songwriter, I felt the need, as one of “Woody’s children” (as Lee would later dub me and many others), to check in with Lee from time to time on the status of my “education.” Learning the folk singer/songwriter trade is a lot like learning to be a plumber, except that it pays a whole lot less. You’d start off as an apprentice, then a journeyman; then you learned from the masters on the way to becoming one yourself… maybe. That’s what it means to live in the folk tradition.

When Lee told his Woody stories, he would look straight ahead and take you back with him. He always added a warning, kind of like the labels you see on cigarette packages. Recalling Woody’s performances, he’d tell how the man “rode herd on an audience. He never let them get too far away. He’d cajole them, laugh with them, or insult them, but he never let them stray too much.” On the virtues of being a good houseguest, he recalled the time “Woody stayed at my apartment and read through my entire library in about two weeks. He’d write little reviews of each book and stick them between the pages; I found them for years afterward.” Then the downside: “One day during that same visit he paid me back by passing out drunk on my new couch and wetting himself during the night.”

In describing happier incidents, like the times he, Woody, and folk singer Cisco Houston had a square meal and a full bottle to contemplate, Lee would turn and look at me with a grin: “And do you think Woody and Cisco would just drink a little and save the rest for another day? Hell no! It was the Depression and nobody saved anything. They’d drink it all up in one sitting, all the time singing the same song over and over.” Then came the warning: “Now that’s the way Woody was, but don’t let me hear about you behaving like that!”

Following in the wake of a number of wonderful books, collected works and memoirs on Woody’s ways, Ed Cray’s brand-new Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie is a streamlined, strongly narrated history. Although the book jacket touts Cray’s access to “thousands of letters” in the Guthrie archives and his “interviews with seventy people close to Guthrie,” the book itself bears frustratingly little evidence of new material. Cray seems to draw inspiration from the benchmark, Joe Klein’s 1980 Woody Guthrie: A Life. Now in paperback, Klein’s biography still seems both deeper and wider than Cray’s, offering first-person accounts and even some of Woody’s more obscure writings. Here are some other suggestions for books and recordings from our collections: Woody, Cisco, & Me: Seamen Three in
the Merchant Marine by Jim Longhi. A favorite among those who measure their Woody lore by the shelf-foot, it covers his war years (he survived three ship sinkings in 1943-44).

Hard Travelin’: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie, edited by Robert Santelli and Emily Davidson. Some of the best writers in the field explore Guthrie’s talent as a visual artist, his impact on rock ’n’ roll, and radicalism (personal and political).

Born to Win by Woody Guthrie, 1965. A top-notch collection of prose and poetry edited by New York Times critic Robert Shelton. Read Woody on everything from singing to sex (sometimes both together, as in “My Best Songs”).

This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie by Elizabeth Partridge. This National Book Award finalist for children’s literature has more previously unpublished photos of Woody than Klein and Cray’s biographies put together.

Library of Congress Recordings. From 1940, a good overview of Woody’s life before he went to New York City.

The Asch Recordings. Mostly recorded in 1946, featuring Cisco Houston, Lead Belly, and Sonny Terry.

Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue: Vol. Two. Woody’s daughter Nora encouraged contemporary musicians to comb through unpublished Guthrie lyrics; these collaborations between Billy Bragg and Wilco were one result.