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A reliable biography of French filmmaker Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve does not exist, apparently by his choice, which leaves us unable to verify the rumors that he was born of Mongolian nobility, or explain his choice to rename himself after the Magic Marker beyond its obvious utility as (ahem) a pen name. If you know his name without knowing his films, it’s probably because his short experimental sci-fi La Jetée—a time-travel vision of apocalypse told almost entirely in still photographs—was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys. But most of his work has been in documentaries, which in his hands are not so much reportage as a combination of ruminative essay, radical politics, and visually punning avant-garde poem. Besides La Jetée, this series features five of Marker’s most prominent works, including his ethereal travelogue Sans Soleil and cinematic tributes to his two favorite Russian directors: One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, on Andrei Tarkovsky (of the non-George Clooney Solaris), and The Last Bolshevik, on silent-era pioneer Alexander Medvedkin. Arsenevich and Remembrance of Things to Come also happen to be Marker’s two most recent works, so this is an excellent opportunity to see what he’s been up to lately.
Oak Street; 309 Oak St. S.E., Minneapolis; (612) 331-3134; oakstreetcinema.org

There’s a quintessential dichotomy about the American big city: a place where smart or lucky nobodies strike it rich, and where the unlucky and rootless get swallowed up. Larsen’s Devil In The White City, a finalist for the National Book Award, tells of two men of 1890s Chicago who embodied that split: Daniel Burnham, the architect behind the 1893 World’s Fair, and H.H. Holmes, the nation’s first and perhaps deadliest serial killer. The two men didn’t know each other, but both used the megalopolis to get what they wanted. Burnham and his team created a sparkling city-within-a-city that drew amazed crowds from around the globe—a testament to Chicago’s creative and commercial power. The city also brought Holmes a steady supply of victims who disappeared into the block-long mansion he converted into a secret death factory, a ghastly parody of the slaughterhouses that fueled Chicago’s wealth. Larsen skillfully weaves his factual history together as if it were a thriller. (A minor aside: He also tells us that Holmes’ second wife, a Minnesotan, preferred him to Twin Citian suitors since “in Minneapolis there had been only silence and the inevitable clumsy petitions of potato-fingered men looking for someone, anyone, to share the agony of their days.” Ouch.)

One of Woody Allen’s funniest short stories involves a humanities professor who has a disastrous affair with Emma Bovary by magically transporting himself into Gustave Flaubert’s novel. Welsh writer Fforde takes this concept to a whole new level in his three very witty novels about Thursday Next, a detective who works the mean streets of Western literature. Bibliophiles will find the newest, The Well of Lost Plots, a hoot. Though Fforde’s love for extended tangents makes it occasionally difficult to follow the storyline, the tangents themselves are exceptionally clever. Where else will you find Wuthering Heights characters grumbling and complaining through a court-ordered rage-counseling session?
Bound To Be Read; 870 Grand Ave., St. Paul; (651) 646-2665; www.boundtoberead.com
Barnes & Noble, Galleria; 3225 W. 69th St., Edina; (952) 920-0633; www.bn.com

Amy Tan is out on the lecture circuit in support of her new essay collection, The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. She’d rather be out in support of her fifth novel, but… Well, that’s one of the things she writes about in Fate: her fight against a rather nasty bout of Lyme disease, which has played havoc with her memory and destroyed the timetable for a proper followup to her bestsellers The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife. We hope for a speedy recovery, but until then, Tan’s nonfiction makes a worthwhile tide-me-over. She’s always shaped her fiction from her life story, and if Fate is a little chaotic, it also shows us sides of the author not always at the forefront of her novels. She writes movingly about her illness and her painfully complex relationship with her Chinese-born parents, but also about the mortifying experience of having her work turned into Cliffs Notes. She’s also “rhythm dominatrix” for the celebrity-novelist band Rock Bottom Remainders, which apparently involves buttock-whipping Stephen King, Dave Barry and Matt Groening. That’s show biz.
O’Shaughnessy Auditorium, 2004 Randolph Ave., St. Paul, (651) 690-6700, www.stkate.edu/oshaughnessy

Long before Queer Nation and Niggaz With Attitude adopted the slurs of their oppressors as a show of unapologetic might, seventies country band Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys were giving us Yid Kids up north proof that the goyim were more than people to give your lunch money to. Authentic country, the Texas Jewboys sang that when necessary, some lantsman needed to take out a good old can of kosher whip-ass against the Christers—Kinky’s signature song, “Asshole From El Paso,” was written in response to “Okie from Muskogee,” that noxious paean to redneckism sung by the no doubt foreskin-bearing Merle Haggard. Later the Kinkstah began writing best-selling mystery novels featuring a Lone Star-stater private eye named Kinky Friedman fighting crime and injustice in Gotham. His merry band of pranksters serve as Dr. Watsons for the cigar-chomping, whiskey-swilling shamus. The Texas Jewboy calls upon all his self-dubbed “Village Irregulars” in his just-out, just-great The Prisoner of Vandam Street, in which Kinky is mysteriously stricken with malaria in the heart of Greenwich Village.

Any month that includes a new Block novel has at least one thing going for it. A master of both heavy drama and light comedy, Block’s capable of some powerful writing; at his peak, in a novel like When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, he can stand next to Raymond Chandler and stare him in the eye. His latest, featuring charming gentleman thief Bernie Rhodenbarr, is the tenth in a comic series that’s as inconsequential as a meringue, but just as tasty. Burglar on the Prowl sees Bernie relieving the boredom before an easy heist with some extracurricular nighttime crime. Soon the bodies are piling up, and guess who looks guilty? The protagonist might steal diamonds or hearts, but he’d never kill anybody—after all, Block based Bernie on Cary Grant’s dapper persona; it’s perhaps doubly apt, then, that George Clooney’s working on a film version of the first Rhodenbarr novel.

Now that Danticat, the youngest writer ever nominated for a National Book Award, is about to hit 35, maybe there’ll be less gushing about her age and more about her writing ability, which is considerable. The Haitian expat’s previous novel, The Farming of Bones, was a powerful account of a 1937 massacre in her homeland, and The Dew Breaker continues Danticat’s attempt to come to terms with the island’s terrible legacy of violence. Despite the euphonious name, a “dew breaker” is actually Haitian slang for the torturers employed by the old Duvalier regime—Danticat translated the Creole phrase to sound serene for maximum ironic effect. Her dew breaker is an old man, now living in America, whose history reveals itself in reverse over the course of the book as different characters remember him, usually with haunted eyes, from his days as a pain-wielding thug. Danticat’s too good a writer to leave us with easy answers. And, in fact, a twist toward the end of the book ensures only difficult questions remain in this pungent Carribbean take on the banality of evil.

Malcolm Muggeridge once said that sex is the ersatz religion of the 20th century, and so far I see no reason why the 21st century is any different. From Catholicism to Protestantism to Islam—all the major players in world affairs at the moment—sex still plays a definitive role in culture and politics. Of course, it happens largely in the absence of sex. In other words, the repression of sexuality has made us both great and perverse. And to the extent that our present world dilemma is a clash of civilizations, it is a clash of sexual repressions. It is hard to say which society is more repressed: the one that requires women to wear head-to-toe burkas, or the one that had a collective cow when Janet Jackson flashed the Super Bowl.

I know this is all water under the bridge, but I have to laugh at FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s sophistry on the subject. He’s been working tirelessly for months now to bring the hammer down on broadcasters who step over the line with vulgar language—he wants a 1,000 percent increase in fines for transgressions. He claims this will be a more effective deterrent against the Howard Sterns and Tom Barnards of the world. While I applaud the effort to muzzle morons like those two, I guess I know better than to listen to talk radio in the first place.

There are a lot of things to be more bent out of shape about than sexuality on the airwaves. How about blatantly lying to the public about Weapons of Mass Destruction, and using that as a pretext to institute the most fascist foreign policy of “intervention” since Mussolini? How about generating the single largest federal deficit in the history of the world—under the “conservative” pretext of “less government”? It used to be the Democrats we could accuse of promoting the nanny state. Now it’s the Republicans.

Anyway, I find it mildly hilarious that the appearance of a single, astonishingly saggy breast at a Super Bowl halftime show could set off such fireworks of moral posturing and finger pointing (hardly where I’d look for a touch of class, let’s be honest—have you ever felt edified by a Super Bowl halftime show?) Who doesn’t like boobs, no matter what the size or shape?

We like to think that people are basically devolving—that we as a culture are just getting sicker and more debased with each passing year. But in fact, the only thing that has really changed is the method of delivery. I’ve said before that I am a fan and a consumer of good pornography—or erotica, if you insist on a word that makes you feel morally blameless. I’ve argued before that there is a huge difference between the good, the bad, and the ugly—and that this can only be determined on a case-by-case basis. (Ironically, I’d have to agree with Powell and his federal blowhards that Janet’s exposure was both bad and ugly, because it just wasn’t sexy at all. There is nothing wrong with the breast itself, nor even that silly “nipple ornament” she had premeditated. But the “flash” was ultimately about as sexy as getting mooned by the nerd in math class, and that’s an abuse of her position of power, in my eyes.)

Anyway, what I was saying is that hardcore porn is not harder today than it was a hundred or even a thousand years ago. I have on my coffee table right now a wonderful copy of a new anthology of “Tijuana Bibles,” the pornographic predecessor of comic books.

Now, there is a great deal of misogyny and even bestiality depicted in these crude comics (think Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, neither of whom wear pants). I expected my precious to go ballistic when she saw the thing, but I give her a lot of credit for having both a sense of humor and a healthy libido. She shocked me by saying these extremely explicit and yet juvenile drawings turned her on.

It just made me realize that no matter how hard you work to repress these baser instincts, they will find a release somehow, and I can’t help feeling like it might come out twisted or damaged or otherwise morally suspect. Consider that most of Europe has no such hangup about bare breasts on network television—even in the notoriously priggish UK. And consider the fact that today’s nine- and ten-year-olds not only know every dirty word in the book, but they know how to conjugate them as verb, noun, and adjective.

Just how far are we willing to carry this institutional repression and hypocrisy? Note to Michael Powell: Sex feels good! People like to feel good! People like sex! In fact, one might plausibly argue that without sex, “family values” would have no meaning whatsoever.

My mother’s house wasn’t selling. No one was even looking at it; a total of four open houses had yielded less than a dozen people, most of them curious neighbors with no intention of buying. When she shared her troubles with co-workers at the hospital where she works, a fellow nurse directed her to obtain a miniature statue of St. Joseph, bury it in the back yard, and pray for him to sell the house. My mother’s not a religious person, but she figured she had nothing to lose.

St. Joseph is the Catholic patron saint of home and family, so it makes some sense that he would be the one you’d go to with real-estate troubles. As to who first decided to actually bury St. Joe in the yard, no one is sure. Some sources trace it back to 1896, in Montreal. One theory points to European nuns in the Middle Ages. All are certain, however, that the practice has been going on since at least the late 1980s.

My mother had no idea where to find a small statue of St. Joseph for burial purposes, but her co-worker directed her to St. Patrick’s Guild, a shop on Randolph and Snelling in St. Paul. My mother stopped in a couple of days later, a bit self-conscious, half-expecting the sales clerks to think her a total wacko and call the police.

Then she saw, right beside the cash register, a whole stack of St. Joseph Home Sale kits. “Can’t Sell Home?” the box goaded. “Ask St. Joseph… He’s Helped 1000’s! Faith Can Move Mountains… and Homes!!!” The house pictured on the box had a prominent “SOLD” sign in front of it. The kit was $6.95.

St. Patrick’s Guild sells around a thousand St. Joseph statues every year, the manager said. Some real-estate agents swear by St. Joe, returning every few months to buy a fresh supply of kits to hand out to clients. The store also sells larger, more expensive St. Joseph statues, but the manager couldn’t say how many might be used to sell houses.

Included in the kit is the prayer to offer St. Joseph, along with a tiny fact sheet debunking assorted superstitions that have become associated with the practice. You don’t have to bury the statue upside-down, for instance, and it doesn’t have to be located in any particular spot in the yard, or exactly twelve inches underground. That’s just silly. St. Joseph doesn’t care. What is important, notes the fact sheet, “is that the seller asks St. Joseph for his help, believes that he will intercede, and trusts him.”

My mother was skeptical, but the clerk told her the anecdotal evidence would fill a book. My mother studied the kit dubiously. “Does that mean I can ask for more on the house?”

The clerk’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t push it, lady.” My mom bought the kit. The house sold within days. —Katherine Glover