Arts

Dance, Monkey: Dan Sally

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:11:00 GMT

Is he the father of Clay Aiken’s child?

Still crazy after all these years

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:39:00 GMT

The Force is with Carrie Fisher in her one-woman show Wishful Drinking
Since Dorothy Parker died, in 1967, Carrie Fisher is probably the most hilarious screwed-up person alive.

SURVIVOR: Fisher’s saving grace is her scathing wit.

Since Dorothy Parker died, in 1967, Carrie Fisher is probably the most hilarious screwed-up person alive. Really, she’s as funny as Dame Edna Everage and as screwed-up as Britney Spears crossed with Sylvia Plath. In her one-woman show Wishful Drinking (presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through October 26), this scion of Hollywood royalty lets her pimpled personal history hang out, from a childhood caught in the winds of scandal to an adolescence as a Star Wars icon in hairmuffs to an adulthood spent in the lusty embrace of drugs, alcohol, manic depression, and Paul Simon. Lumpy, candid, and caustic at 52, the artist formerly known as Princess Leia sprinkles wry humor like heavy pixie dust across her cautionary tale of a life that “if it weren’t funny would just be true — and that is unacceptable.”

Not only is Fisher’s on-stage memoir immensely entertaining, it’s been trumped up with multimedia accouterments uncommon in a one-person show. There is a contemporary living-room set backed by roiling orange and a montage of projections. Fisher enters warbling “Happy Days Are Here Again” as newspaper headlines fly behind her chronicling events from the severing of America’s sweethearts — her parents, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds — to her own hospitalizations and bad reviews. (She’s declared “bovine and unappealing” by infamously misogynistic critic John Simon.)

The writer/performer breaks the ice by recalling the moment when she woke up with a dead friend in her bed. (“He not only died in his sleep, he died in mine.”) Then she backtracks to the beginning of an existence that’s been equal parts celebrity and absurdity. The events and relationships revisited in Wishful Drinking may be twisted, but Fisher’s ironic celebration of the success-studded train wreck of her life will keep you doubled over for two hours. It’s only in the aftermath that you worry about this poster girl for bi-polar disorder, who apologizes early on for any memory lapses she may suffer as a result of recent shock therapy — which she heartily recommends. (If Wishful Drinking has a serious purpose, it is to destigmatize mental illness.)

Boys’ life

GREG COOK — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:20:39 GMT

Childhood play becomes macho in Boston galleries
The art features boy toys (no dolls, thank you very much), gadgets, and secret clubhouses.

SAY WHA? Juan Ángel Chávez’s Speaker Project would be more impressive if the acoustics worked.

“Speaker Project: Juan Ángel Chávez” | Massachusetts College Of Art And Design, 621 Huntington Ave, Boston | Through November 22

“Chris Frost: New Work” | Boston Sculptors Gallery, 486 Harrison Ave, Boston | Closed

“Dave Cole: All American” | Judi Rotenberg Gallery, 130 Newbury St, Boston | Through October 12

“Shifting Perspectives: Esteban Pastorino Díaz” | School Of The Museum Of Fine Arts Boston, 230 The Fenway, Boston | Through October 13

A couple years ago, The Dangerous Book for Boys appeared in England and became a hit. Designed to look like a 100-year old primer, it was a compendium of heroic adventure tales, Shakespearean quotes, knot tying, treehouse building, and go-cart mechanics. It was an arch, bookish, hipster-dad salvo against totally scheduled, protected childhoods, against people worrying too much about children skinning their knees, against our era of lawsuits and — dare I say it — feminism.

Art had already occupied this territory, and a spate of recent local exhibits could illustrate chapters from the book. The art features boy toys (no dolls, thank you very much), gadgets, and secret clubhouses. Like The Dangerous Book for Boys, it’s about Y-chromosome nostalgia. The guys embrace their inner adolescent, pursuing whole-hog things you couldn’t when you were a kid because of homework or the sun setting or having to keep the volume down.

At Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s Paine Gallery, Chicago’s Juan Ángel Chávez has erected what looks like a giant stereo speaker, with sound cones at each end, for The Speaker Project. It’s a patchwork shanty cobbled together from scavenged wood, bottles, signs, traffic cones, and foam, all with a romantic worn look. It could be a dream clubhouse for the guys from High Fidelity. It’s the kind of thing that you imagine turning on (if there were actually anything in it to turn on) and having blood explode out of your ears.

On the gallery’s balcony are three listening huts, similarly cobbled together from cast-off materials, with various vents and speaker cones that resemble a basement inventor’s version of Dr. Seuss architecture. (They’re titled Storefront, Down and Out, and Fallen Can.) It all looks rad, but it’s a letdown when you realize that the acoustics in this “laboratory for sound” don’t really work.

Scarlet letters

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:23:03 GMT

The uptight killjoy in us
Sarah Vowell’s fifth book, The Wordy Shipmates (Riverhead) — released on October 7 — examines New England Puritans with a meticulously researched, critical-yet-comical eye.

Dance, Monkey: Nick Prueher

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:59:29 GMT

We put a comic on the hot seat. This week’s victim . . .
I'm wearing Debbie Gibson’s Electric Youth.

I sink, therefore I am

CAROLYN CLAY — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:22:55 GMT

Zeitgeist’s expanded Seascape. Plus Gutenberg! The Musical
Seascape , Edward Albee’s 1975 Pulitzer-winning meditation on evolution and mortality, gets all wet at Zeitgeist Stage Company.

SEASCAPE: The lizards are cute, but less is still more.

Seascape, Edward Albee’s 1975 Pulitzer-winning meditation on evolution and mortality, gets all wet at Zeitgeist Stage Company. The feisty troupe is presenting the American premiere of the playwright’s whimsical existential fantasy in its original three-act form (at the Boston Center for the Arts Plaza through October 25), in which the playwright splices in an episode of The Little Mermaid. Here the play’s at-odds aging couple, having had an energizing if initially terrifying beachfront encounter with a pair of giant lizards just up from the briny, are dragged back into it by their reptilian counterparts. The play, in this initial version, was presented in the Netherlands prior to the sleeker edition’s Broadway premiere. But this is the first time it’s been produced on American soil (well, American sand, four and a half tons of it dragged by Zeitgeist into the BCA) — and for good reason.

Sure, a peek at Albee’s rough draft will prove interesting to theater scholars. It’s interesting to me, less for the gleaming moray-eel eyes and plastic lobsters of the excised act than because it places the final version’s hopeful conclusion at the close of act two and substitutes a tougher ending redolent of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which the human couple are left to make do with each other. But this original Seascape, most of the content of which made it verbatim into the shorter version, both belabors the play and interferes with its inner — not to mention its evolutionary — logic. We can’t, after all, be sure that massive English-speaking lizards won’t appear in Montauk or on Cape Cod, raring for a chat. But we do know that humans shanghai’d to the ocean floor would drown — unless they suddenly grew gills, and wouldn’t that be anti-evolutionary? Just asking.

Zeitgeist honcho David J. Miller is always up for a challenge, but this one seems less an ambitious leap than a stunt — though the director’s reasons for doing the play in the first place are thoughtful enough. In addition to restoring Albee’s journey to the bottom of the sea, Miller’s production addresses the playwright’s displeasure with the 2006 Lincoln Center revival (the work’s first Broadway appearance since its initial two-month run), which focused on Seascape’s comedy of inter-special manners. Miller’s production is more earnest, emphasizing the play’s mordant ruminations on evolution — on whether the knowledge of mortality and the naming of emotions are really preferable to a mindless swim in the primordial soup.

A smoker’s tale

JAMES PARKER — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:28:23 GMT

Will Self’s The Butt
Somehow one is surprised — if one is a semi-conscious literary journalist like me — by the discovery that Will Self has continued to produce books.

SILVER HAZE: The hoaxy, displaced, reality-TV feel is part of the recipe here — as is Henderson the Rain King.

The Butt | By Will Self | Bloomsbury | 368 pages | $26

Somehow one is surprised — if one is a semi-conscious literary journalist like me — by the discovery that Will Self has continued to produce books. So dashing and weird and telegenic a figure did he cut back in the early ’90s, when The Quantity Theory of Insanity and My Idea of Fun were coming out, that it seems he should have broken up by now, like a band, or passed onto some other, fresher phase of notoriety, like a housemate from The Surreal Life. Still, a writer writes, always (as Billy Crystal tells his students in Throw Momma from the Train), and here we are with his seventh novel, The Butt, the surprisingness of which is compounded by the fact that it’s very good indeed.

Tom Brodzinski, vacationing en famille in a Third World tourist trap, flicks his cigarette end off the hotel balcony; it lands with a flesh-creasing hiss upon the scalp of an elderly fellow guest, whereupon Tom is pitched into a netherworld of liability and tribal justice, attorneys and witch doctors. As part of the reparation proceedings, a local medicine man makes a ritual incision in Tom’s thigh: “The makkata closed in on Tom and knelt. He was clickety-clacking with his slack dry purse lips.”

Devout viewers of reality TV will of course be reminded of the Discovery Channel’s 2006 series Going Tribal and the famous “penis inversion” undergone by its host, Bruce Parry, among the Kombai tribesmen of West Papua. “The makkata’s breath was now on the front of his [Tom’s] shorts, and Tom could smell it despite the vegetal rot of the jungle.” The hoaxy, displaced, reality-TV feel is part of the recipe here. Add a dollop of Kafka’s The Trial, one small Joseph Conrad (peeled and sliced), half a Graham Greene, a squirt or two of Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, and simmer it all over a low Flann O’Brien. . . . Mmm, tasty!

Pilgrims’ progress

CHRIS WANGLER — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:24:52 GMT

Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies
India, 1838. The opium business is booming, and drug money fills the British Empire’s coffers, offsetting a trade imbalance created by imports of Chinese tea and silk. But now the emperor wants the drug trade stopped.

AUTHENTIC: This one is worth the trips to the appended glossary.

Sea of Poppies | By Amitav Ghosh | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 528 pages | $26

India, 1838. The opium business is booming, and drug money fills the British Empire’s coffers, offsetting a trade imbalance created by imports of Chinese tea and silk. But now the emperor wants the drug trade stopped.

Along the Gangetic plain northwest of Calcutta, the British East India Company has persuaded peasant farmers to abandon their crops and grow only poppies, which are then processed in the Inferno-esque Sudder Opium Factory. With the first opium war looming, the cash cow seems ready to keel over, leaving famine and poverty for the hapless locals. This is the backdrop of Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh’s eighth novel, the first in a projected trilogy, and his first book to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. (This year’s winner will be announced October 14.)

Deeti, the moral center of the book, tends a poppy field. Her husband is an addict who works in the factory. When he dies, she decides she would rather be burned to death on his sati pyre than submit to her sexually predatory brother-in-law. At the last second she is rescued by a towering untouchable named Kalua. They become lovers and flee, making their way to Calcutta to sign up as girmitiyas, or indentured servants, aboard the Ibis, a schooner bound for Mauritius.

A half-dozen other characters, collected from an array of racial and linguistic backgrounds, also scheme their way on board under the watchful eyes of the British. The most interesting is in shackles. Raja Neel Rattan Halder, a genteel Bengali raja, having failed to pay his debts, has been framed as a forger, stripped of his holdings, and sentenced to a penal colony on Mauritius for seven years. He is reduced to cleaning excrement, lice, and filth off his cellmate, a half-Chinese opium addict whose withdrawal symptoms have rendered him nearly inhuman.

By the time she sets out, the Ibis has been transformed from a battered former slave ship into a fateful “vehicle of transformation,” where rules of caste and empire will be either broken by hopeful exiles or enforced with brutality by the ship’s guards. Although the pilgrims are all in some way victims of the opium trade, the real theme of Sea of Poppies is the alternately terrifying and liberating prospect of migration across the “Black Water” of the Indian Ocean. “On a boat of pilgrims,” says Deeti, “no one can lose caste and everyone is the same.”

Interview: John Hodgman

CLEA SIMON — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:16:20 GMT

One man's operating system
Long before John Hodgman became universally recognized as the systems-challenged PC in Apple’s ads, he was writing fake trivia for such publications as McSweeney’s and the New York TImes Magazine.

Long before John Hodgman became universally recognized as the systems-challenged PC in Apple’s ads, he was writing fake trivia for such publications as McSweeney’s and the New York TImes Magazine. Discussing his new book, More Information Than You Require (Dutton), he explains how a former clarinetist-turned-literary agent could become the face of a reviled computer and, possibly, one of the smarter humorists on the planet.

There’s one phase in your first book, The Areas of My Expertise, that I just love: “the made-up truth.”
I wrote that book and I wrote that phrase, but then Stephen Colbert put it so much better, with the word “truthiness.” When he wrote that, my heart both leapt and sank, which caused me to go to the hospital. It’s such a perfect assessment of the new kind of truth that we are all wrestling with – and that I am profiting by.

Do we live in particularly funny times?
I think these times are possibly hilarious, but it’s a laugh to keep from crying hilarity. But I don’t know if that’s particularly unusual to these times. There have been difficult times throughout history, and that is why there has been humor. There was a lot of great Black Plague humor, for example. I don’t know if that’s true. If they existed, I’d love to read the transcripts of some Black Plague standup comedy.

I think that right now we live in extremely and refreshingly surprising times. I think what made the previous eight years sort of difficult was that they were no longer funny after a while. Unless you were a supporter of the Bush administration, and there are reasonable people who are, you got used to being told that it is raining when many, many people are urinating on you - and no one really questioning that.

For what it’s worth, John McCain is really keeping me guessing with what will happen next.

The New York Times has said he’d provide “a story a day”
Just this idea that he would seek to cancel the debate, or delay the date, that he would suspend his campaign and start it up again, the choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate, extremely risky and exciting for his base. You have to admire a man who is willing to roll the dice that way. Perhaps not admire him for his stable governance but admire him for keeping things interesting.

Ghost writer

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 04:55:20 GMT

The haunted world of Kelly Link
Salted throughout Kelly Link’s stories, you’ll find Buffy , Bust , Doc Martens, IM-ing, Target, Google, Vicks VapoRub, a T-shirt that reads I’M SO GOTH I SHIT TINY VAMPIRES.

FUNNY AND DARK: Aliens, young love, magic, and summer camp — all are grist for Kelly Link’s mill.

Salted throughout Kelly Link’s stories, you’ll find Buffy, Bust, Doc Martens, IM-ing, Target, Google, Vicks VapoRub, a T-shirt that reads I’M SO GOTH I SHIT TINY VAMPIRES. But while Link is not an author who shies away from referencing pop- and commercial-culture, nor is she some glib chronicler of the right-now. Her work — realm-straddling blends of fantasy, science fiction, fairy tale, and capital-L literature — possesses a mythic quality. She’s the rare writer who’s able to mix these of-the-moment items, products, and activities with the eternal, the timeless: quests, coming of age, entering a new world, death, and the day-to-day mysteries of being human.

“I am very, very fond of the kinds of fiction that get sort of stuck off in their own separate pens,” says Link over a smoothie on a sunny September morning this past week at Back Bay’s Trident Café, across the street from her now-shuttered former employer, Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop. “There’s an energy there, and you’re able to break rules in more interesting ways.”

As author of acclaimed short-story collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and, most recently, Pretty Monsters, Link has the ability to pull readers into her universe, and make them believe, even if only for a moment, in ghosts and zombies and haunted hats, in world-holding handbags, underworld visits, alien abductions, sinister rabbits, young love, and magic.

Writing the fantastic has long appealed to her. “The stories I wrote beginning in college” — she went to Columbia — “have always been stories that had ghosts in them, or gods, or stories that I thought of as fantasy or science fiction, and had elements in them that I felt did not belong with realistic or mimetic fiction. I wanted my fiction to read like mimetic fiction” — capturing the texture of real life — “but I wanted to be able to incorporate all the stuff that I really love as a reader.” In other words, her intent is to create stories that hold a mirror up to the world that we know, as well as toss in some fantastic special effects.

Salon’s Laura Miller, an early and ardent champion of Link’s, claims that Link has a voice unlike any writer she can think of. “She’s fearless about incorporating things that writers at that high level of artistry might be fearful of, like pop-culture, like genre,” says Miller over the phone from New York. “She refuses to see the need to corral that stuff off into a sub-literary area. All of it is grist for her mill.”

Dance, Monkey: MC Mr. Napkins

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:48:10 GMT

We put a comic on the hot seat. This week’s victim . . .
Hats off to “snafu,” which allows you to sneak the word “fuck” into polite conversation.

Cry me a river

CAROLYN CLAY — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:19:14 GMT

The Dreams of Antigone; In the Continuum; Show Boat
It would seem that Sophocles has been hanging around for 2500 years waiting to be improved — and the makeover artists have been numerous.

THE DREAMS OF ANTIGONE: Did Sophocles really need to be improved?

It would seem that Sophocles has been hanging around for 2500 years waiting to be improved — and the makeover artists have been numerous. Antigone alone has been given a new look by Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht, Seamus Heaney, A.R Gurney, and Judith Malina, to name a few. Now Trinity Repertory Company’s artistic director, Curt Columbus, gets in on the act with The Dreams of Antigone, an Upstairs, Downstairs update of the tale of Oedipus’s martyred daughter that’s in its world premiere on the company’s home turf (through October 26). It’s easy to understand the motivation: the formality of Greek tragedy can be intimidating, and the device of the Chorus, as it chants its cautionary if sympathetic strophes and antistrophes, is hard to handle. But why not leave well enough — and Sophocles did well enough — alone?

Columbus’s rewrite, undertaken in collaboration with the Trinity acting company, weaves ancient Greece and contemporary America into a script that begins “We the people” before segueing from the US Constitution to Sophocles’s story of heroic defiance in the face of unbending governmental authority. The piece is intended to resonate with a crowd for whom the role of fate and the will of the gods have less pull than they did with the original audience and to examine the roles of myth, the populace, and even theater itself in determining the course of public events. It asks why Antigone’s story has so stubbornly endured and whether there is a point at which it might have gone in another direction.

You remember the basics: Oedipus’s sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, fought a brutal civil war over control of Thebes, at the culmination of which they killed each other. Their uncle, Creon, seeking to restore order and establish his own authority, has declared Eteocles a hero and Polyneices a traitor who deserves to rot where he fell. The new honcho issues an edict — which Antigone disobeys — that anyone who tries to bury him will be executed. In the Greek play, Antigone places her allegiance to a Higher Authority ahead of her allegiance to the State; here it pretty much comes down to “doing the right thing.” And too much of the script has that sort of blunt, simplistic ring — as if it were the result of intense improvisation rather than authorial intent. Columbus’s audaciously Americanized adaptation of The Cherry Orchard brimmed with colloquial vigor; this one, with its shared narration and political speechifying interspersed with family squabbling, ricochets between the obvious and the jarring — as when dead relatives appear in dreams, calling snide attention to their incestuously twisted family tree or, in the case of the brothers, re-enacting the battle for Thebes as a joust played out on high, movable scaffolds. Hey, this is Antigone, not American Gladiators.

Floor show

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:43 GMT

Sara Hook at Harvard
Sara Hook explains the title of her cabaret piece Salad Days as a reference to youth and indiscretion.

PATRIOT ACT UP: Mary Cochran was the perky drum majorette who’s transitioned from football field
to ballet stage.

Sara Hook explains the title of her cabaret piece Salad Days as a reference to youth and indiscretion. At Harvard Dance Center on Saturday night, quite a lot of the evening looked more like grown-up and decadent. Hook’s New York–based group featured former Paul Taylor dancer Mary Cochran and three other women, with David Parker as a guest artist, in five brief portraits choreographed over the past 10 years.

What really held the parts of the evening together for me was Hook’s take on female performers. As distinct characters or anonymous dancer-dancers, they all appeared flawed, flummoxed, but determined to scramble over any choreographic hurdle.

Cochran opened the performance with Patriot Act UP (2004), as the perky drum majorette who’s transitioned from football field to ballet stage in things like George Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes. To a rousing drumbeat and a Sousa march, Cochran ripped through a precision routine, one mechanical move to the beat, an encyclopedia of struts and prances, head tilts, simpering smiles, lifted shoulders and phony salutes. Driven to keep up with the music, she worked feverishly to please, pulling one foolish prop after another out of her jacket as she grew more strained and artificial.

Rue (1998) did have a quality of naïveté, and it most closely suited the ingénue roles Cochran played so memorably in the Taylor repertory. To Schubert’s “Du bist die Ruh” (sung on tape by a sweet soprano), Cochran wafted with a sort of deranged romanticism. Wearing a dilapidated long tutu and a pink Dynel wig, she conveyed the raptures of a lovelorn but slightly unsteady ballerina. In the midst of some breathy advance, she’d fall flat, recover awkwardly, go on again until the next stumble. At the end of the song she staggered out backwards, still pleading with both hands to her invisible lover.

Three vignettes made up The Valeska Trilogy, a homage, or perhaps a satire, invoking the transgressive Weimar cabaret performer Valeska Gert. Cochran first played an adorable but unsteady music-hall entertainer, with banal ballet enchaînements. Then came cheap exhibitionism, as she lashed from kitschy Charlestons to auto-erotic writhings. Finally she subsided into a desperate proto-modern dance.

Hit men

MARK JURKOWITZ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 07:23:17 GMT

George Kimball's Four Kings KO's the last golden era of boxing
At least one passage in Four Kings will get George Kimball cursed out in local bars.

MARVELOUS MARVIN: Hagler’s 1985 bout with Tommy Hearns was one of boxing’s great battles.

Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns and the Last Great Era of Boxing | By George Kimball | MCBooks Press, Inc | 352 pagess | $22.95

At least one passage in Four Kings will get George Kimball cursed out in local bars. The author recounts how he scored the dramatic 1987 fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Brockton’s Marvin Hagler for Leonard, affirming a decision that has gone down in Boston sports history as a miscarriage of justice. (Covering that fight for the Phoenix, I had it for Leonard also.)

However one saw the battle that ended Hagler’s career, it was an unforgettable installment in a series of fights that Kimball says helped “save boxing from itself in the post-Ali era.” The combatants — Hagler, Leonard, Tommy Hearns, and Roberto Durán — all fought one another, in some cases more than once, in a golden era from 1980 to 1989. Hagler-Durán and Leonard-Durán III were nothing special, but Hagler-Leonard and the “No más” Leonard-Durán fight were memorable, and both Leonard’s 14th-round knockout of Hearns in 1981 and Hagler’s third-round stoppage of Hearns in 1985 were among the greatest wars in boxing history.

With boxing in one of its periodic public downturns, Kimball cooks up some compelling nostalgia by recounting an era when great American fighters bestrode the planet. A former Phoenix sportswriter and long-time Boston Herald scribe (and current Phoenix contributor), he knows the game and, more important, the characters who inhabit it.

Unlike, say, Joyce Carol Oates and Norman Mailer — who have brought literary zeal to the “sweet science” — Kimball makes no effort to rhapsodize about boxing’s larger meanings. He offers instead a workmanlike insider’s view of the game that’s meant to comfort us with the thought that though the economic machinations behind the sport are often rancid, the warriors are honorable — at least with fighters of this caliber.

In the meantime, readers get a smorgasbord of fascinating yarns. Kimball recalls how Howard Cosell once had his toupee knocked off in a post-fight interview but soldiered on with the rug replaced backward. In a more serious vein: Boston promoter Sam Silverman, fearful of the more unsavory elements in the sport, used to pay someone to start his car. Then there’s the story of how Hagler and Hearns each got a private jet to fly around the country promoting their 1985 fight. Since one plane was more luxurious than the other, the two men agreed to split time on it. But when Hagler refused to give up his first-class ride, promoter Bob Arum had to get another one exactly like it to keep Hearns from canceling the tour.

Photos: RISD's Chace Center

FLINT BORN — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:35:43 GMT

Images from Rhode Island School of Design's new museum

Photo by Flint Born

Dance, Monkey: Baratunde Thurston

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:06:03 GMT

We put a comic on the hot seat. This week’s victim . . .
I saw Biz Markie in concert. He remixed “Just a Friend” to “Obama, you got what I need. Ooooobama youuu!” This is obviously the next big thing.

Interview: Dennis Lehane

JIM SULLIVAN — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:48:48 GMT

Mystic River author's new The Given Day gets down and dirty in the North End circa WWI
Dennis Lehane’s big new book, The Given Day , is full of bloodshed, mayhem, power, corruption, and lies.

Dennis Lehane’s big new book, The Given Day, is full of bloodshed, mayhem, power, corruption, and lies. It recalls his best-known book, Mystic River, and his series of five Boston-set private-investigator novels. But those books are set in modern times. For the new 700-plus-page historical novel, the Dorchester-raised author wrote about the era when World War I was winding down and a recession was calling.

This one is set mostly in the dense, dirty, immigrant-packed North End, where class and ethnic tensions run high. Anarchists are threatening violent revolt. A flu epidemic breaks out. The underpaid and overworked police threaten a strike. The Given Day has magnitude of size and scope. Which leads to the obvious question . . .

Is this your stab at the great American novel?
I think you’re insane if you try to write the Great American Novel. I think it’s doomed to failure. But I did fall into that trap. About a year into this book, I did get that feeling — I could really be onto something good, the critics will love this. And that’s a recipe for disaster.

What snapped you out of that mindset?
What happened was this writer, who’s a real good buddy, Tom Franklin, we were driving across the Mississippi a couple of years ago on a mini-book tour. I was really hung up on the book, the book was kicking my ass. He said, “Did you write the book you want to read? ’Cause that’s law No. 1.” What he taught was, write the book you want to read. Hopefully that translates to something more, and people say, “Boy, did I enjoy that ride.”

Still, it’s a massive book and covers a vast expanse.
I wanted to make a book that was like the epics I liked when I was growing up, that have star-crossed lovers and huge urgent events. Ultimately, I’m kind of a hybrid writer, the bastard child of pulp and literary fiction.

The Given Day took five years to research and write — a long haul.
If you treat the process with any reverence, I think you write in a consistent state of fear, if not terror. “How the fuck am I gonna finish this? What did I get myself into? This is going to be the one everyone figures out I’m full of shit.”

Literary import

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 03:42:28 GMT

Ploughshares lands a new editor
One of the first things Ladette Randolph tells me is that she’s a fifth-generation Nebraskan, that her great-great grandparents settled there, that the landscape there, particularly in the western part of the state, where her novel is set, is “like being in the middle of the ocean — that kind of erasure.”

More different than alike

MIKE MILIARD — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 03:28:57 GMT

Searching for national identity in State By State: A Panoramic Portrait of America
In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) as part of the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration (WPA).

In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) as part of the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration (WPA). The FWP put the nation’s Depression-era writers back to work by sending more than 6000 journalists, novelists, and poets — including John Cheever, Kenneth Rexroth, and Studs Terkel — out across this great land to describe the country as they saw it. The most important legacy of the FWP were 48 state guides (plus volumes about the Alaska Territory, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia), published between 1937 and 1942.

Now, with the nation poised, perhaps, to plunge into another deep economic chasm, comes a new book directly inspired by those FWP guides. State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (Ecco), is an anthology of 50 essays by 50 writers, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, and a powerful reminder that, despite the intractable antipathy between red and blue, despite the creeping sameness imposed by chains and big boxes, despite the fact that 81 percent of its citizens feel the US has gone off the rails, this is still a wondrously diverse country, with great cause for self-confidence.

The FWP wasn’t extraordinary just because it put a lot of creative people back to work, says Weiland. Rather, he says, its real value came from the way the stories told by those writers, researchers, and archivists — Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Nelson Algren among them — helped “reawaken a sort of raw American patriotism” after the gut-punch of the Depression.

The state guides’ motto was “To describe America to Americans.” And those were the same marching orders Weiland (deputy editor of the Paris Review) and Wilsey (a McSweeney’s editor-at-large) took when they sat down at a New York City watering hole and started compiling a list of contributors.

“From the start, we knew we wanted a mix of different kinds of writers,” says Weiland. “We wanted the book to be as unruly and cacophonous and strange as the country itself.” So, casting a wide net, the pair started assigning states to their favorite writers, including George Packer (Alabama), Rick Moody (Connecticut), Dave Eggers (Illinois), Heidi Julavits (Maine), John Hodgman (Massachusetts), Jonathan Franzen (New York), Susan Orlean (Ohio), and Jhumpa Lahiri (Rhode Island).

The volume also includes thoughtful chapters by two graphic novelists (Joe Sacco and Alison Bechdel draw on their experiences in Oregon and Vermont, respectively), a musician (Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein offers an impressively moving evocation of Washington’s wet verdure), and a chef (Anthony Bourdain pays loving tribute to New Jersey, with wit as caustic as the chemicals hovering over the “Garbage State Parkway”).

Just a little bit

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:19:08 GMT

‘Lossless’ at The Sert Gallery, ‘Overflow’ at Laconia Gallery, Garry Knox Bennett at the Fuller, and String-Theory-inspired art and music at NESAD
Digital-era experimental filmmakers occupy a rich and interesting place in relation to the new technology available to them.

Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, from Lossless #2

“Lossless” at Sert Gallery, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge | October 2–December 7 | 617.496.6617

“Overflow” at Laconia Gallery, 433 Harrison Avenue, Boston | October 3–November 22

“Garry Knox Bennett: Call Me Chairmaker” at Fuller Craft Museum, 455 Oak Street, Brockton | October 4–February 8 | 508.588.6000

“String Theories” at New England School of Art & Design Gallery, 75 Arlington Street, Boston | exhibition on view through October 24; concert October 3 at 7 pm | 617.573.8785

Digital-era experimental filmmakers occupy a rich and interesting place in relation to the new technology available to them, as well as to the access this technology gives them to, yes, the works of their avant-garde forerunners. In “LOSSLESS,” which opens on October 2 in the Sert Gallery at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, filmmaker Rebecca Baron and artist/writer Douglas Goodwin present five works exploring the radical possibilities that arise from the dematerialization of film into bits. The use of high-quality bit torrents not only makes file sharing possible and enables those in the know to share first-run movies and amateur video diaries, it also facilitates a much higher circulation of rare experimental films, creating creative opportunities for a new generation. In “Lossless,” Baron and Goodwin interrupt data streaming and remove basic information that holds digital formats together to create film and video that bring a new viewpoint to such works as Maya Deren’s iconic 1943 trance film Meshes of the Afternoon and John Ford’s mythic 1956 Western The Searchers.

A headlong dash into ideas of wildness and excess, as found in nature as well as in 18th-century interior design, is the driving force behind “OVERFLOW,” which, curated by Resa Blatman, opens at the Laconia Gallery on October 3. The show brings together work by Sara Hairston-Medice, Mary O’Malley, and Blatman herself. Hairston-Medice uses knitted yarn, thread, and fabric to create “paintings” and sculpture that mimic and also embellish the organic growth patterns of nature. O’Malley makes tangled, tightly rendered drawings that form vast topographies. And Blatman paints flora, fauna, berries, birds, and bats with an eye to beauty that is disturbing.

Chairs that pair precious materials like rosewood and yellow satinwood with less fancy plywood, aluminum, plastic, and paint are the signature creations of contemporary studio furniture maker Garry Knox Bennett. Fifty-two examples of Bennett’s skill at making objects you’d probably rather ooh and aah at than sit on are presented in “GARRY KNOX BENNETT: CALL ME CHAIRMAKER,” which opens at the Fuller Craft Museum on October 4. They give new meaning to the phrase “sitting pretty.”