11.10.07: John Waters at Fitzgerald Theater

If there's one thing John Waters has mastered, it's how to capture his audience's attention, both in his films and in person. At the Fitzgerald last night, he immediately connected with the crowd and never let up during his hilarious one-man show and a Q&A with The Current Fakebook host Mary Lucia.

When Waters first appeared onstage, he received one of those incredibly long applauses that verges on being uncomfortably long. His opening line? "Thank you. You make me feel like Johnny Mathis."

Waters then launched into his one-man show, This Filthy World. It's an autobiographical standup routine that he proclaims is not a lecture; it's vaudeville. After asking us to think of him as our "filthy elder," Waters proceeded to crack open the door to his unparalleled mind. He told stories of where he comes from (Maryland), how he learned to make movies on his first camera (an 8 mm), and shared behind-the-scenes anecdotes that added up to a chronological history of his films.

Colorful storyteller that he is, Waters also clued us in to some of his social and political musings. For instance, in order to make reading cool, he says if a person goes home with someone, and they have no books in their apartment, the person should abstain from having sex with them. (Of course, his version was a bit raunchier.)

Another idea of his to better the world: Make a New Year's resolution to only perform oral sex on teachers. In turn, the teachers will be happier and be better able to keep students from being bored. That way, kids won't grow up to kill us.

A risqué declaration for a wholesome Midwestern venue, but can you really argue with his logic?

Waters did tailor his address for his Twin Cities audience, saying we don't deserve a bad rap for hosting the Larry Craig incident at our airport. He also announced that on his way out of town today, he's arranged to have airport security show him the infamous stall.

His nonstop wit pummeled through four decades of filmmaking, from Mondo Trasho to Pink Flamingos to Hairspray (of which he said, "I accidentally made a family movie called Hairspray").

He interjected some humorous punches on hot-button issues:

On drugs: "Ecstasy [is] a drug that makes you love everyone. Sounds like hell to me."

On gays in the military: "I'm for an all-volunteer lesbian army . . . They could find Bin Laden."

On family: "Gay people have more children than Catholics . . . I'd be a good uncle—I'd get you an abortion, I'd get you out of jail . . . "

After his monologue, and a brief intermission with music from the God Damn Doo Wop Band, Waters and Lucia returned to the stage. Q&A sessions often circle back to running themes, and this one was no different in that there was quite a bit of discussion of mental health, in which Waters, fittingly, has a strong interest.

Waters' next film, he said, is a children's Christmas story called Fruitcake, starring Jackass's Johnny Knoxville as the father. From the man who brought dining on excrement to the big screen, I'd expect nothing less.

11.7.07: Alex Ross at Fitzgerald Theater

Alex Ross sure knows how to do a book tour! As classical music writer for The New Yorker, Ross is one of the most erudite commentators on the arts in the country today, and he’s the author of the new culture history, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Not content to just talk about music, he brought along the Turtle Island String Quartet to offer musical examples and made the event a party.

Being a frequent and avid reader of his writing in The New Yorker, I came expecting a challenging and inspired conversation. And until near the end, I was disappointed. Little of what he said had the depth of his writing. His reading of excerpts from the book just pointed out how facile much of the presentation really was.

For example, in talking about the early twentieth century, the two big stories he focused on were the riots inspired by the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Shostakovich’s composing under the oppression Soviet domination. For most of the people familiar with Ross and interested in hearing him, those would be familiar stories. And there was nothing particularly new or revelatory in his retelling.

Part of the problem may have been that the event was being taped for broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio. Fred Childs, host of Performance Today on National Public Radio, was the moderator. Ross could only answer the questions he was asked. And while Childs’ questions might generously be called populist, they were, in reality, rather shallow and superficial. 

The presence of the Turtle Island String Quartet also felt out of place. These were splendid musicians and their performances raised cheers, particularly in a work by Cuban saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera and excerpts from their new CD, A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltrane.

But they seemed to have little connection with the main point of the evening. In fact, Ross had plenty of illustrative musical examples of his own that he played on his computer. Those might have been more extensive had the quartet not been present. And worse, they seemed to be part of the dumbing down of the evening. They followed a discussion of Milton Babbitt, one of the twentieth century’s most challenging and difficult composers, with an excerpt from West Side Story. It’s hard not to be cynical and think that their presence was primarily a marketing decision.

All that said, there were indeed moments of great wit and genuine insight in the discourse. Ross started out rejecting the whole term “classical music,” feeling that it burdened even the most forward-looking compositions with the stigma of music from the distant past. “Awesome music” was his suggested replacement (though he acknowledged that we are probably stuck with classical). He spoke of the 1920s as an era of an “explosion of possibilities” in terms of the synthesis of popular and classical styles and drew some significant parallels with our own age.

In fact, it was in discussing the current the state of music that he became much more absorbing, making a strong case for the interconnectedness of pop and classical genres. He played excerpts of pop singer Björk and of Dawn Upshaw singing a song cycle by Osvaldo Golijov, making a strong case that if you did not know, you might legitimately think that the former was the classical piece and the latter the pop one.

It was in his assessment of the future that Ross became the most passionate—and the most compelling. Far from seeing the fracturing of twentieth-century music as signaling the end of concert music, he sees it leading to a renaissance, a new golden age of infinite possibility. He sees the traditions as not dying, but multiplying, so much so that it’s hard to keep up. In reframing the issue, he offered exciting possibilities, even for the most traditional of symphony orchestras. And he left me wanting to read the book.

10.16.07: Flim Flam Man script reading at the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio

I swear I’m not a snob, but with the exception of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I always like the book more than the movie. Knowing this is a good thing—because when they announce that a famous book is becoming a movie, it forces me to read something I’ve always meant to read. I procrastinate though, so I’m usually rushing out and buying the book the week before the movie comes out. By then, it’s too late. The trailers have ruined it for me, intruding on my in-brained movie camera with Hollywood stunt casting. By the time I finished The Iliad, there was still a month to go before Troy, but Achilles was already Brad Pitt in my head. When I finally committed to In Cold Blood, Philip Seymour Hoffman was visiting prisons in Kansas. I’ve waited so long on No Country for Old Men, I’m pretty sure that Javier Bardem’s bad haircut is going to get a starring role in my imagination.

Last night, I went to the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio for a cast reading of the script to Jennifer Vogel’s memoir. Jennifer’s book, Flim Flam Man, was about growing up with John Vogel, a notorious counterfeiting con-artist who was busted by U.S. Marshals in 1995. Flim Flam Man came out in 2004, and it got great reviews both nationally and locally. As if that wasn’t enough to motivate me, Jen edited a couple of my stories at City Pages back in the day, and she was really great to work with. She’s a talented editor—funny, and thoughtful, and just generally more generous than what I expected from an editor for a freelance assignment. I remember she made me read David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and let me expense it to the paper. I consider her a friend.

Anyway, I never read her book.

But I had to go to this reading. It’s part of the Guthrie’s new ScriptNight Reading Series put on by the Screenwriters Workshop. The Workshop hired twelve local actors to read a Dreamworks SKG–commissioned screenplay adaptation of Flim Flam Man, entitled Flag Day, written by a British screenwriter, Jez Butterworth. Jen was there, with her husband, Mike, another former City Pages writer, and the Hollywood producer who’s still shopping the script around, Bill Horberg. The twelve actors were all sitting on folding chairs with black folio stands in front of them.

The main reason that I like books better than movies is, of course, because I have the time. A book can go into more detail because it demands more of your time. Film only has a couple hours to reach you, so it has to cheat: films rely on exploitive visual symbols loaded with all sorts of cultural associations in order to advance the story quickly. A book can have a whole chapter of mythology on the fall of man; a film has a shot of an apple, then cuts to the shot of a woman, then cuts to the shot of a snake.

One of the problems with attending a reading of a screenplay, then, is that the visuals aren’t there. Sure, they’re described, but they’re described in a kind of technical film-school shorthand that can be powerful if brought to the screen by the right hands, but can sound cliché when you’re sitting in a theater watching a bunch of actors read off their folio stands and sip bottled water.

That said, the screenplay was cast perfectly. They might eventually get somebody like Kevin Costner to play John Vogel, but Stephen Pelinski was perfect as the dashing conman who drives a Cadillac and keeps a nickel-plated .38 in his waistband but doesn’t like to hear his children cuss. The rest of the cast looked and sounded right too: Linda Kelsey as Jennifer’s mom, both Raven Maizy Bellefluer and Tracey Maloney as young Jen and older Jen, respectively. So the cast looked right and sounded right, and there were even some sound effects that helped give the evening a kind of radio-play feel, but a lot of the imagery just whipped by faster than my ears could digest it, and there were a couple hackneyed Lifetime Network scenes that frankly didn’t much sound like Jennifer Vogel.

So I came home and ripped through the first 100 pages of Flim Flam Man. And then I finished it this morning. And yup, I liked the book better. In the book, Stephen Pelinski was starring as John Vogel, but the female characters, Jen’s mom, and especially Jen herself, are much more three-dimensional. Jen’s writing is so clear-eyed and humble and painfully honest in the book that I ended up liking Jen Vogel the character much more than I liked the movie version of Jen Vogel. Maybe it’s because John Vogel as written by Jez Butterworth and read by Stephen Pelinski was so likeable, it was difficult to understand why Jen was so bitter and angry towards him by the third act. The book, with time for a full accounting of both John and Jen’s faults, doesn’t have that problem.

9.26.07: Talking Volumes with Sherman Alexie at the Fitzgerald

Here’s a rarely glimpsed subculture: The Indigerati. But they were out in modest numbers last night—bookish Native Americans with long, well-groomed hair, bespectacled, wearing dark jackets or light cardigans, standing in the rush queue at the Fitz for last-minute tickets to MPR’s Talking Volumes, which opened its eighth season last night with The Most Famous Native American Author in the World, Sherman Alexie.

It wasn’t just the Indigerati who came out to support Alexie. The crowd was mostly that white, upper-middle-class–looking MPR crowd, mostly female actually. The place was packed, and there was that anxious crowd murmur thing going on that always happens in a theater before a big show.

Did I mention this was a book event?

MPR’s Kerri Miller was hosting and her interview with Alexie would be simulcast on air. Alexie came out wearing a gray European-cut suit and horn-rimmed glasses. His jet black hair had that thick, just-cut look; like a newly shorn black sheep. You don’t see Indians like him around either—maybe in some PBS documentary about early American Indian Policy or something, but never in real life. He sat down next to Miller and somebody yelled out, “Native Pride!” He shot back, “Custer had it coming!” and then turned to Miller and said, “We’re going to go through all the indigenous bumper stickers.”

Five minutes after good-naturedly deflating Native pride, Alexie was on a rant about “white, Ivy League educated types with German-designed eyeglasses quoting colonial white elitist crap like Thucydides or Horace.” Over the next hour and a half, he went on several tangents fueled with this kind of lucid rage, aimed at all sorts of targets: vegans, the humorless, humorless vegans, Diaz/Frey/Leroy and the fake memoir, Native American Literature’s overuse of talking animals, John Steinbeck’s misogyny/homophobia/social consciousness, the cult of the film director, and Nike’s new shoe designed for the indigenous foot. All of this with a bewildered Kerri Miller hopelessly along for the ride, her radio laugh losing its tone and sustain as the interview went along. Alexie has a fantastic, dexterous mind, and he can talk interestingly or wickedly about whatever he wants. When he told us that he aspires to be “the lovechild of Emily Dickenson and Richard Pryor,” he was pretty much right on.

But he was here to talk about himself. Alexie was promoting two books, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Flight, both stories about conflicted, wounded Indians—basically both incorporating various versions of himself. Alexie has been fictionalizing different versions of his tragi-heroic “rez to riches” story since his first book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (’93) and his first movie, Smoke Signals (’98). This time, he’s calling his story “an immigrant story” even though his country, the reservation, is inside another country. And while Alexie has taken criticism about being “repetitive” in the past, he acknowledged that these two newest books have received mostly positive attention on their media circuits. Not that Alexie is taking that “repetitive” thing sitting down: “How come when I do it, I’m ‘repetitive’ and not ‘obsessed’?” he asked. “How come Faulkner wrote all his books about four square miles and nobody calls him ‘repetitive,’ even though he was?”

6.24.07: Riot Act Reading Series with Laurie Lindeen at the Turf Club

The Turf Club, near Snelling and University Avenues in St. Paul, is marked by a green horseshoe sign which calls it the “Best Remnant of the '40s,” a claim that contrasts with the decidedly more contemporary patrons smoking in the doorway. Enter the darkened interior and you’ll spot a long bar, strings of lights, darts, pinball, and a photo booth. This classic dark and gritty dive bar is the perfect place for a reading.

Last night, the bar hosted its almost-monthly Riot Act Reading Series, organized by Paul Dickinson and Laura Brandenburg. The series got its start about five years ago at the Loring Pasta Bar (then put on by Dickinson), and recently moved to the Turf Club. Says Brandenburg, “[The series] has a punk rock history.” (Dickinson is the lead singer and guitarist in punk rock band Frances Gumm.)

Underscoring Brandenburg's assertion, Laurie Lindeen read from her new memoir, Petal Pusher, A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story, which chronicles Lindeen’s experiences as a member of Zuzu’s Petals, an all-girl pop-punk band that formed in the late 1980s and made its mark on the music scene in the early 1990s.

Dickinson opened the evening by joking, “I know many of you are here on court order,” as he raised his pint of beer and launched into a series of darkly funny poems punctuated by quips such as “I’ve been thrown to the wolves so many times I’m part of the pack,” and “Air Force laser beams slice government cheese for lunch,” and “Foucault, you rabid Frenchy.” Brandenburg followed with a “poem cycle” on fear, jealousy, and rage delivered partly in a slightly demented-sounding southern accent.

Then Lindeen took the stage, book in hand, her blonde curls and red and white floral print dress lending her a rather angelic aura amid the red glow of the ceiling lights. She looked more like the mom, writing teacher, and published author that she’s become than a rock 'n’ roller. But then, looks can be deceiving.

Lindeen read a few passages, including one about a night spent in an hourly motel—the only place the band could afford—with rather unpleasant traces of former couples left behind on the floor, walls, and bedspread in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, after a gig at NYC’s legendary CBGB club. Needless to say, they sleep with their clothes on. She continued to read from chapters about opening for Adam Ant, singing Jesus Christ Superstar in the van on the way to a gig, and getting busted by an overzealous highway patrolman on the way to an important gig. Reading at the Turf Club instead of her more usual venue—Barnes & Noble—seems a bit more fitting: The stories are funny, insightful, and even a little quixotic. As Lindeen says, “Sometimes you can’t help yourself. Rock 'n’ roll is sexy as hell.”

5.15.07: Theory Slam at Bryant-Lake Bowl

You might, at some point in life, wonder about the social skills of crayfish, lesbianism by association, feline annihilation via buttered toast, or the unique gravitational pull of China—or not. But if you were at last night’s Theory Slam at Bryant-Lake Bowl listening to theories on each, you might start. 

The event, produced by the Bell Museum of Natural History as part of its Café Scientifique series, offers a whimsical take on the conventions of scientific thought modeled after the poetry slam format. Anyone can participate. On this occasion, four individuals and two groups made their way to the stage to articulate and elaborate upon theories that challenged physics, biology, and credulity alike. It’s science, very loosely defined, with a sense of humor.

Their motivation? The glamorous prizes, of course—all from the bins of St. Paul’s Ax Man Surplus—and the possibility of winning the evening’s grand prize, what the evening’s emcee, John Erik Troyer, described as an “official Dungeons & Dragons role-playing fabric thingy.”

First up, Lisa and Eric. Their theory of “Murphyons” started from the basic premise that while toast always lands butter-side down, cats always land right-side up. Put them together and, bam!, sudden and irrevocable annihilation of feline and bread alike.

Next up, Zack, a hipster in a T-shirt that read, “Back off, man. I’m a scientist.” His theory revolved around tiny aliens that long ago took the form of molecules, formed into DNA and RNA, and proceeded to try to dominate one another by evolving, respectively, into complex organisms (e.g. animals and plants) and viruses. His proof? They’ve been locked in mortal combat ever since.

Ashley came after Zack, offering a theory of  “lesbianism by proxy.” Roger, a fifty-something with a pocket protector, offered his take on the variability of truth as demonstrated by the advertising slogan, “tastes great, less filling,” followed by Steve, with his theory of the variability of zipper fortitude. Luke, outfitted in tie-dye, retorted with a theory of the existence of social crayfish (in the Philippines) in ecological peril.

Points given by audience members were averaged; the panel of scientific experts weighed in. Zack and Ashley tied in round one. But by the end of round two, Steve had pulled a stunning upset with a theory that posited a unique gravitational pull of all usable equipment, capital and manpower toward China. Trust me, it was brilliant.

Though Steve was the big winner, no one went home a loser. Troyer’s refrain that no one loses at Theory Slam proved true as prizes were handed out to first, second, third, and “not last.”