Blog

To mark its 50th anniversary, the Nature Conservancy commissioned a group of 12 diverse photographers to document areas which the Conservancy helps to protect and has deemed “The Last Great Places.” The show at the MMAA is a fine selection of about 50 pieces running concurrently to a larger exhibit also touring the country. Hope Sandrow created a breathtaking series of landscapes from the Komodo National Park in Indonesia. These lush photos juxtapose beautifully with the almost uncomfortable emptiness in David Misrach’s images of Pyramid Lake and the Lahontan Valley Wetlands of Nevada. Minneapolis native Lynn Davis is also part of the show with vast images of earth and sky from the Utah desert. Working with the Minnesota chapter of the Conservancy, the MMAA also organized a section “Minnesota’s Great Places,” highlighting regional sites shot by six photographers across state. MMAA, (651) 292-4355, www.mmaa.org

Church, Bierstadt, Kensett. These were the superstars of their era, painters already a part of our budding national mythology from the early 19th century. The 10 men who authored the 90-plus paintings here did as much to create the American sense of self as nearly any writer or political leader of the day. What they saw—and then translated to canvas—was to many nothing less than God’s declaration that this land was the culmination of his creation. An exhibit of a single frontier painting by Albert Bierstadt would have people lined up for blocks in New York. Whatever our attitude today about such grandeur—or grandiosity—these depictions of the landscape were certainly nothing less than inspired. Ironically, it took the Tate Gallery of Britain to pull together a show about America’s gilded age of landscape. Lucky for us, the result is perhaps the best exhibit of its kind in over 50 years. Call the MIA for tickets, but check out the Tate’s super-comprehensive website to learn more about the show. MIA (612) 870-3200

We’re pleased as punch that our friends over at The Loft and Utne Reader are in cahoots to produce this glossy new lit magazine, which premieres on the national newsstand at the end of the month. Actually, this nifty project secretly triangulates with Ruminator; Editor Bart Schneider was the man who put the Hungry Mind Review on the mental screen of anyone who cares about good books and fine reading, and it’s great news that he’s at the top of another winning masthead. Can a literary magazine that caters unapologetically to “readers and writers” survive in the shark-infested waters of glossy monthlies that look more and more like Sharper Image catalogs? It’s a question we ask ourselves all the time. And we look to the Utne as proof positive that there is still hope for the printed word, at home right here in the Twin Cities and abroad. Look for fine writing and razor-sharp wit from the likes of Nick Tosches, Sven Birkerts, Emily Carter, and many other masters of this ignoble art.

In his first memoir, All Over But the Shoutin’, Pulitzer-winning reporter Rick Bragg told of his mother’s triumphant struggle to raise three boys in the face of grinding poverty and an abusive, alcoholic husband. Ava’s Man , new to paperback, takes the story back a generation to chronicle his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, a carpenter and moonshiner who lived a life of stubborn independence and fierce family devotion in the hardscrabble foothills of Alabama and Georgia during the worst years of the Great Depression. Bragg frankly admits that he sees Charlie, who died the year before Bragg was born, as the heroic father figure he never had. But Ava’s Man is no hagiography. It’s a complex portrait of a man of many failings redeemed by his strength, selflessness, and love. He was illiterate but not ignorant, an inveterate drunk who worked hour after backbreaking hour to feed his children, who brawled constantly with the police and faced down a homicidal, shotgun-wielding neighbor. Bragg vividly recreates a backwoods culture now paved under highways and drowned under dams. These are the hillbillies usually parodied as The Simpsons’ Cletus the Slackjawed Yokel or demonized as the crude inbreeds of Deliverance . Bragg doesn’t hide the trash but gives his folk their own rough country dignity. Barnes & Noble in Galleria, Edina, (952) 920-0633

Norah Labiner is in love with language. She writes in a great tidal wave of words, logophilia sometimes cresting into babble as she races to tell her story, then jumps back to pick up a detail dropped in the rush, then joyously forward again. Like her first novel, Our Sometime Sister , Miniatures is a multilayered, digressive rumination on writing as a simultaneous act of confession and obfuscation. It’s narrated by Fern Jacobi, a young expatriate who becomes housecleaner and confidante to Owen and Brigid Lieb, two writers haunted by the apparent suicide of Owen’s first wife, the very Sylvia Plath-like Franny. Labiner uses the crossing strands of narrative to explore the hidden connections between biography and fiction, truth and lies. Stylistically, she’s something of a Gen-X James Joyce, spinning a tale that’s intensely inward-looking and intimate in a roiling, rambling blend of soap-commercial ditties, lovelorn lamentations and literary jokes.

Susan Power is known for her “powerful characters,” but she’s a powerful character herself. She was born in Chicago in 1961 of a mother from Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota and a father from Ithaca, New York. She went through Harvard Law School before entering the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and knocking off her MFA. Married once, Power is now divorced and claims to have set her ex-husband up with the woman he later wedded in a ceremony Power attended. “So I’m a good loser,” she surmises. Humble words from the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and creator of work that has been lauded by major literary critics as “inspiring and unforgettable,” “remarkable,” and “fresh, political, and daring.” In addition to establishing Power as an important literary voice, The Grass Dancer also became a national best-seller. But, says Power, that book was her mother’s story, whereas her latest work of fiction, Roofwalker , belongs to her. Power credits Louise Erdrich for having had a profound influence on her own writing, as shows in the subdued wilderness of her prose, which is straightforward, raw, and authentic. Readings at Ruminator, September 17 and Birch Bark Books, September 21

There’s a new father at the restaurant where I work. I asked about his daughter the other day. “She’s doing great,” Dave said, radiating paternal pride. “I took Maya to her six month appointment this afternoon. The doctor said that out of a hundred babies born that same day, she’s the biggest one. Heaviest and longest,” he added, grinning and holding his hands out in a measure that traditionally indicates a prize-winning Northern from Lake Mille Lacs.

Now I know it’s not about how big she is, or her capacity to eat because my pal Dave wouldn’t be bragging about his daughter being in the top of her weight class if, say, she were a high school sophomore. It’s about extremes.

We’re living in an extreme world. It’s a uvula-searing peppermint, whiplash roller-coaster, super-sized, double-D, Vin Diesel kind of a world and nothing is permitted to be ordinary anymore. Every last element of life must be fuel-injected with bungee-jumping excitement! Poured down your gullet Mountain Dew style, about a foot from your tipped back face, while the entire world screams its approval. Or disapproval. It doesn’t matter; it’s all good, as long as there is screaming.

I don’t have anything against screaming. Screaming is a pretty useful thing. We are designed to scream, in fact, when something exciting or noteworthy takes place. Winning the lottery? Yes. Winning the Green Party nomination? Maybe. Knocking back a soda pop? No.

We’re living in a world where peanut butter logs call themselves Power Bars, where brassieres promise miracles, where dull, plodding gelatin comes in X-Treme Jell-O Gel Tubes, where even pizza crust, the part that you throw away, is stuffed. Three-Alarm Chili is a Gerber’s flavor now. Where’s the Habanero Hell Fire Suicide Sauce? Hot damn! It’s a Spinal Tap world with the volume cranked up to 11. You can’t hear your car stereo anymore unless it makes the body panels vibrate and sets off nearby seismographs.

If you can’t be the biggest, you had better be the smallest, wearing Gap Size 0 jeans and gabbing on a cell phone no bigger than a Sea Monkey. What’s the hottest new car on the market today? The Mini Cooper, a four-passenger runabout roughly the size of a coffin. Given the size of the SUVs roaring around with their body panels vibrating, I can see how that would be useful.

It’s all about the spin, baby. I get it. With so much essentially useless stuff competing for my attention day in and day out, it’s all got to shout. A couple of dynamic adjectives here and there go a long way in making it seem like I’m taking in something of value. That’s how “money guru” Suze Orman can talk for 45 minutes about “creating wealth” and “channeling abundance” before I snap that fool radio off. I wonder how much she gets paid for “channeling” noise and “creating” gibberish? The whole concept of marketing is built on “buzz.” Anybody who’s ever written a resume knows what I’m talking about. Were you a file clerk for the last eight months on that temp job? A mere drone? Or were you in charge of streamlining and organizing mission-critical data for over 1,300 people? That’s what I thought! Way to be pro-active, chief! Shoot me a Mike’s Hard Lemonade! Wooooooo! Awright!

The passion for extremes takes some bizarre turns. The other night at the restaurant, a trendoid jock seriously asked me to get him a Red Bull and vodka. Uppers and downers blended so he could be an energetic drunk. Garnish with Ritalin and serve.

I’ve observed this insatiable urge for instant peak excitement before. Children are hard-wired that way. Kids oscillate between demanding to be entertained right away and needing to be appeased immediately. Now the whole world’s got colic. I don’t know if they need to be burped or spanked. When I told jocko we didn’t serve Red Bull, he had a Def-Con Five fit worthy of Celine Dion being poked by a pin at a costume fitting. He stormed out using X-Treme words like “never” and “no way.” Sorry, Dave. Maya no longer qualifies as the heaviest and longest baby.

Writer, performer, and femme fatale Colleen Kruse is at mscolleenkruse@ hotmail.com.

Uncle Tom. Aunt Jemima. Clarence Thomas. For most white people, these names represent, respectively, a literary figure, a picture on a pancake box, and a conservative African-American Supreme Court justice. For those of us on the darker side, they represent something much more ominous. Being called one of these names is tantamount to being called a racial traitor.

Some years ago in Denver, two African Americans survived the mayoral primary to face each other in the November general election. Popular district attorney Norm Early appeared poised to beat career politician Wellington Webb, until a rumor swept through the black community that Early was an “Uncle Tom,” a “white man’s Negro.” Early’s crime? He lived in a white part of town and had an East Coast education. For many black Denverites, this was enough to prove that Early was not black enough.

In one of life’s supreme ironies, we African Americans often do to each other what we accuse white folks of doing to us: We measure each other through a racially distorted prism. We resent white people sizing up our ability to function and belong in the larger community because of our membership in a particular racial group. “How dare they,” we self-righteously proclaim. “Judge us as individuals,” we demand.

Yet, we often question the motives and choices of individual African Americans, especially if we suspect they are deviating from so-called mainstream African-American thought. For example, for many African Americans, marrying outside the “community” automatically places one’s “brother card” at risk. And, heaven forbid, if one should publicly air dirty laundry, as I have in previous columns discussing trashed neighborhoods or the increased gang activity in the predominantly black Jordan neighborhood, then some readers believe my brother card should be revoked altogether.

According to these self-appointed racial gatekeepers, those of us who address problems within the African-American community are suffering from the “Clarence Thomas Paradox,” an affliction that turns one into a racial Benedict Arnold. Unfortunately, most readers who are critical of me do not dispute the truth of what I’ve written. They simply resort to the same tactics that led to the demise of Norm Early—attacking my blackness. Since I’ve been compared to Clarence Thomas, I decided to read how he himself describes his views, something that I am reasonably certain the racial gatekeepers among us have never done.

In July 1998, Clarence Thomas addressed the National Bar Association, the nation’s oldest and largest group of African-American lawyers and judges. Showing up at all took a lot of guts. Many in the group had publicly called him an Uncle Tom and privately called him much worse. Some NBA members threatened to openly disrupt his remarks. Thomas quoted Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, who said, “If racial loyalty is deemed essentially and morally virtuous, then a black person’s adoption of positions that are deemed racially disloyal will be seen by racial loyalists as a supremely threatening sin, one warranting the harsh punishments that have historically been visited upon traitors.” Thomas goes on to make a very interesting point. “I, for one, have been singled out for particularly bilious and venomous assaults… I have no right to think the way I do because I’m black. Though the ideas and opinions themselves are not necessarily illegitimate if held by non-black individuals, they, and the person enunciating them, are illegitimate if that person happens to be black.”

Sadly, that is the very thing that readers who wish to revoke my “brother card” are doing. They are denying me (and other African Americans) the right to freely discuss issues confronting our world without first passing some sort of racial loyalty test. Such thinking is intellectually indefensible and morally bankrupt.

Now, I usually do not agree with Clarence Thomas the Supreme Court justice. I did not support his elevation to the High Court and believed Anita Hill. However, I wholeheartedly support Clarence Thomas the man. And if the African-American community is to fully reach its potential, we must stop shooting the messengers and allow ourselves to enjoy the same right as other Americans—to speak and write without fear of racial character assassination.

Clinton Collins Jr. is a Minneapolis lawyer and ABC Radio commentator. His email address is ccollins@collinslawfirm.com.