Max "Bunny" Sparber

A SONG ABOUT my obsessive moviegoing habits when I lived in Los Angeles when I lived there in the early 90s. I had moved out in the hopes of finding work as a screenwriter, and, while I did not have much luck with that, I did discover it to be an ideal city in which to be a movie lover. Man of the movie theaters on Hollywood Boulevard were then quite run down, and, as a result, fans of cult cinema often took them over to show really obscure z-grade horror and science fiction films. There was a theater near the corner of Hollywood and Vine where you could buy a ticket for a few bucks and see three second-run movies in a row with the most rambunctious crowd I have ever experienced -- they yelled back at any movie that played. There were multiple revival houses that played classic and art films, and, when you wanted to go to a new release, you weren't going to do better than classic movie palaces like the Chinese Theater or the more 60s-styled Cinerama Dome. Additionally, there was still a Pussycat Theater in East Hollywood that played a constant stream of terrible adult films and an occasional classic, and I stopped in every now and then when they had something that intrigued me, which was always an awkward experience.

Although I loved going to the movies, and still do, I generally went alone when I lived in Los Angeles, and it's strange to think back on my time there as being so solitary.

"THE MOVIEGOER" LYRICS:

Monday night on Fairfax
For a silent retrospective
King Vidor could paint with light
But Pabst was introspective
Tuesday night it's Godard
704 goes to the Nuart
Anna Karina dances now
In Bande a part
Oh, where do you go
When you're the moviegoer?
Oh, where do you go tonight
Oh, the cineplex show
Near Rosewood and Gower
Oh a second run film is all right

Cinerama Dome on Wednesday
To see last weekend's big hit
The reviews for this have not been kind
But you find you kind of like it
Thursday night will find you
At the Sunset Pussycat Theater
To see Pia Snow in Cafe Flesh
And Tantala Ray mistreat her
Oh, where do you go
When you're the moviegoer?
Oh, where do you go tonight
Oh, the cineplex show
Near Rosewood and Gower
Oh a second run film is all right

Bukowski filmed by Schroeder
This Friday at UCLA
At 240 minutes
The movie will take the whole day
On Saturday at the Egyptian
At midnight for those who stay late
Are Starlet and The Space Thing
She-Freak and Nature's Playmates
Oh, where do you go
When you're the moviegoer?
Oh, where do you go tonight
Oh, the cineplex show
Near Rosewood and Gower
Oh a second run film is all right

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A SONG based on the dozens of teenagers I saw pass through the Citrus House homeless shelter in the summer of 1992. While I was there for three months, most of the teens in the program lasted a few weeks or even a few days and then were evicted from the program, sometimes forcefully. The shelter had a lot of rules, and it seemed especially difficult for most of the kids in the shelter to obey them. Sometimes they left on their own, finding housing with a lover or just deciding to leave Los Angeles. All of them had stories of abuse and violence, and we tended to just sit around the television and talk, or go up the street to the Jack in the Box for sodas and to just hang out, so I heard a lot of these stories and they have stayed with me.

"THE SHELTER GANG" LYRICS:

Andrew was just seventeen
When he went into the teen canteen
He only lasted seven days
He tested for AIDS and went away
He was part of the Shelter Gang

And Luis ran away from home
When his father caught him with Jerome
He threatened them with a baseball bat
So Luis left and that was that.
He was part of the Shelter Gang

Marc was born in Hollywood
And stayed with lovers when he could
when he was between boyfriends
He came back to the shelter again
He was part of the Shelter Gang

There was Benny and Juan Ortegas
They just packed up and moved to Vegas
And Sam and Rom and Jim and Jules
Could not obey the shelter rules
And Al and Phil and Jake and Kay
Were all kicked out on their seventh day
And what Became of Anton and Sean
There were there one day and then were gone
They were part of the Shelter Gang

Joe dressed up in skirt and blouse
When he left the citrus house
And liked to kiss straight men in bars
Which accounts for Joe's many scars

Michael would not stay in his bed
But crept into Robert's instead
They were discreet, but as predicted
Both we caught and evicted
They were part of the Shelter Gang

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A SONG from my experiences in Los Angeles in the early 90s. I won't go into any great detail here (they are available elsewhere on this blog), except to say that I was homeless for a while, and stayed in a shelter run by the Gay/Lesbian Community Services Center of Los Angeles. Many of the other homeless kids in the shelter were male prostitutes and made money by malingering on Santa Monica Boulevard, waiting for cars to pick them up. This song is based on those boys, and my experiences seeing them on the street, and hearing their stories in the shelter. Lyrics are not safe for work.

LYRICS TO "SANTA MONICA":

The lads they stand
On the corner of highland
In tight white shorts
Their cocks in their hand
They wait for the cars
To give them a ride
And they do dirty things
To the drivers inside
You're on the wrong side of the law
On Santa Monica

There's nasty little men
On Tamarind
With pockets full of cash
So the boys lean in
To the windows of Porshes
And the doors of Saabs
To take rides to hotels
Or for backseat handjobs
You're on the wrong side of the law
On Santa Monica

It's a fine night for a stroll
Between Wilcox and Cole
There's a cop back on Las Palmas
And he's a fucking asshole
He'll bust you if you loiter
And he'll beat you if you sass
But when he's not on duty
He pays to take it up the ass
You're on the wrong side of the law
On Santa Monica

The lads they stand
On the corner of highland
In tight white shorts
Their cocks in their hand
It's not much of a living
But there's not much else to do
Just walk and smoke and talk
and walk and screw and screw
You're on the wrong side of the law
On Santa Monica

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NUDISM has gone out of style, hasn’t it? When was the last popular record of the phenomenon? David Sedaris’ Naked, wasn’t it, published a half-decade ago, in which he detailed a short and humiliating vacation to a nudist camp filled with oddly shaped, completely clothesless fellow campers who discussed nakedness with an almost metaphysical intensity.

With Sedaris, the long fantasy of nudist camps ended. No longer were nudist camps the sexual utopias of 1960s-era 16mm stag film loops, in which bronzed nymphets cheerily displaying their pulchritude while playing volleyball. Instead they were filled with the middle-age and the corpulent, all espousing a New Agey philosophy of the unnaturalness of clothes, meanwhile placing towels on any seating surface to catch falling body hairs.

It was once different, and, thanks to art publisher Taschen, we can revisit an entirely different world of nudity. With their book Naked as a Jaybird, Taschen presents — with hundreds of black-and-white photographs — a rather unique moment in the history of the human body.

If previous nudist magazines had tried to present a philosophical argument for nudism to mainstream America — with photos — Jaybird, which was published in the late Sixties and early Seventies, was nothing less than a document of a counterculture. The nudists in the magazine Jaybird were not the well-coifed, sexless athletes of previous publications. They were, for one thing, hairy. Very hairy. The men sported shaggy hairstyles and, later, unkempt beards. Further down the body, one entered a thicket.

Additionally the models touched — a lot. Sexuality was very much on display. Models would openly grope each other. It was not pornography, exactly — most of the photos have models that are, well, flaccid. Neither did Jaybird ignore the fact that, for many readers, nudist magazines served the function of pornography. These were libidinous hippies, and Jaybird served them up on a platter for mainstream America. Here was the fantasy of free love made flesh, often in preposterous, Laugh-In inspired tableaux vivants.

And that’s all Taschen’s Naked as a Jaybird is, but for a few brief, introductory essays by the editors.

Page after page of naked hippies frolicking and necking, reprinted from the magazine. Each image is startling — to modern eyes, Jaybird can be jarring. The models found in mainstream magazines nowadays are modified surgically and then modified further via Photoshop, to such an extent that the flab on display in Jaybird — and, more than that, the hair — is positively alien. Contemporary pornography is likewise as stylized, with plastic surgery having created a cartoon of sexuality to such an extent that the models in Jaybird are unexpectedly inadequate — with oversized bellies and undersized bosoms.

That’s the most surprising thing about Naked as a Jaybird. We have moved so far away from the ’60s that looking back on it, the counterculture of the era, which moved briefly into the mainstream, genuinely runs counter to our current culture. Looking on these naked hippies is as jarring to contemporary sensibilities as it must have been when the magazine first came out and was witnessed by a mainstream America that was still a product of the relentlessly conformist 1950s. It has been 40 years since Jaybird was published, and what does it say that unadorned, unmodified, unshaven human bodies are as shocking to us as they would have been to Eisenhower?

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MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of the stylistic decisions that went into Steven Soderbergh's latest film, The Good German. The film, a rather morose morality play masquerading as a thriller, is set in Berlin at the time of the Potsdam Conference. It was during this historic meeting, in the summer of 1945, that the allied forces met to decide -- and divvy up -- the future of Germany. Accordingly, Soderbergh has lensed the movie using the techniques that would have been available to filmmakers of the era, excluding such contemporary innovations as wireless microphones and zoom lenses. The resulting film has a stately, old-fangled quality to it, including a score by Thomas Newman that sounds like it's been lifted directly from a film actually made during the second World War. But Soderbergh has steered clear of simply recreating the formal style of Hollywood during the '40s -- The Good German feels like an art film, especially in its use of light.

Superficially, the story is a mystery: Geroge Clooney plays a military journalist whose search for a German lover he left behind before the war (Cate Blanchette in a hollow-voiced, haunted performance) turns up a corpse, as well as more than a few hidden SS officers, all of whom are harboring ghastly secrets. But, unlike the shadow-draped Hollywood mysteries of the era, this is a film in which secrets are hidden in broad daylight, which is frequently blinding. Clooney ducks into corners in a Berlin that seems to be nothing but enormous, smoking ruins and he is plainly visible to the people he is spying on, but his bad detective work doesn't much matter in this film. Everyone he follows -- and it is an amazing rogue's gallery of cruel-faced Europeans and thick-featured Americans -- knows they are being followed, and do not care. In a city that brought the world unspeakable evil, no crime seems important enough to hide, because, as we are constantly reminded by corpulent, nakedly greedy Army brass, you can't prosecute an entire nation.

Clooney himself isn't particularly interested in justice -- he's just trying to chase down a few pieces of information that will give him enough clout to get his German lover out of Berlin -- and this film's Berlin is so stripped of conscience that even Clooney's motives are suspect. His concern for Blanchette isn't the result of some great romance, unlike, say, in a Bogart film. At most, the film suggests, his interest in Blanchette is more sordid, coming from an unquenched sexual desire. She has her own secrets, and they are ghastly, and she hides them -- not because they would create trouble for her -- she's a comparatively small sinner in a city of big sins -- but instead because they have destroyed her. She is the only character who is repeatedly shot hidden in shadows, her exhausted eyes almost completely lost in darkness.

Soderbergh has made a films whose true stylistic conceit is its overwhelming cynicism, where the only character with a conscience is responsible for the death of tens of thousands, and the lone sympathetic character has committed unfathomable betrayals. It ends with a scene that visually recalls the ending of Casablanca, but, unlike the earlier film, in which a tearful farewell on a rainy tarmac revealed, finally, Bogart's essential morality, the tarmac in "The Good German" is simply a staging ground for revealing the depths of immorality the war drove its characters to. It's a less satisfying ending, but, one suspects, in the ruins of a war-destroyed city, a more honest one.

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IT IS SOMETHING OF A CLICHÉ to describe a film as dreamlike. The adjective is misused in much the way "surreal" is misused, as a generalized term for some artistic strangeness that we don't have a precise descriptive language for. But, to properly discuss the new David Lynch film Inland Empire, we must begin in the world of dreams. And, before we begin the discussion, I must caution readers that this is not to suggest the events of Inland Empire are meant to be interpreted as a dream. There is a great tendency to approach Lynch's most recent film, particularly Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, as though they were baffling but solvable mysteries. Some of this is Lynch's fault, as his films often mimic -- and grotesquely satirize -- the language of crime films, mysteries, and horror tales. And Lynch has made his share of films that follow fairly conventional narrative patterns, albeit idiosyncratically. Most of us got to know Lynch as a result of 1986's Blue Velvet, and, with his other films from the 80s, he seemed a filmmaker who brought art-house techniques to bleak or fantastical cinematic genres. But that wasn't Lynch, not really. Lynch got his start as a visual artist, incorporating filmic images into sculptures, such as 1966's Six Figures Getting Sick, in which animated, distorted, puking creatures were projected onto a sculpted screen.

With his troika of recent noir-based films -- Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire -- Lynch has, step by step, been rejecting formal film conventions, and Empire, in particular, represents perhaps the most radical break from Lynch's work in the 80s and 90s. Although the film begins with a sense of story, in which a film crew sets out to remake a movie whose previous production was interrupted by the brutal murder of its stars, Lynch soon all but abandons that plotline. And as he does so, he also abandons any narrative sensibility, any consistent sense of character, and even abandons chronology. He replaces these with another sort of storytelling, and one that has rarely been successfully attempted onscreen: The film takes on the narrative techniques that our mind uses to tell us stories as we sleep. The movie progresses with the strange logic of a dream, which I will detail in a moment, but first I must introduce the film's main character, around whom the tale unwinds.

Laura Dern, an actress who has often seemed on the periphery of mainstream Hollywood, occasionally providing undistinguished lead performances in films such as Jurassic Park, sometimes providing oddly fragile performances in nonmainstream films (including several by Lynch), is the only ongoing character in this film. It is impossible to overstate Dern's importance to this film, which she coproduced. Lynch began shooting without a completed script, and he fully explored the improvisational possibilities of shooting on digital video, sometimes writing scenes moments before they were to be lensed. It would be easy to get lost in this process, but Dern is not so much a castmember as a co-collaborator. There are tales in medical literature of patients who have lost their identities and created new ones wholecloth, with complex backstories, all improvised on the spot, and Dern seems to have approached this film as a challenge to do something similar. Her character, initially an actress named Nikki Grace who lives in a ornate and outdated Hollywood mansion, spied on her Polish (and perhaps criminal) husband while she makes a seamy gothic film with the title On High in Blue Tomorrows. But, as she begins an affair with her leading man (Justin Theroux, making the most of his expressively oversized, sweeping eyebrows), her identity fractures, as her new lover calls her by the name of her onscreen character.

And that's it, folks. We're perhaps 25 minutes into a three-hour movie, and Laura Dern will never recapture any real sense of place, time, or identity. Instead, just as in a dream, she constantly sheds and takes on identities, often as a Hollywood streetwalker with a retinue of flighty, menacing hookers who are given to impromptu song and dance numbers. The world is taken over by long alleyways and previously unseen back doors, fraught with menace, that seem to telescope endlessly backward, so that Dern might pass through a door in a ramshackle Southern California home (presumably in the Inland Empire of the film's title) and emerge in Prague just in time to witness a murder that took place years earlier. In this way, time is bent as well -- at several key moments, she stumbles into scenes that have already taken place in the film. Dern attacks each of these scenes with gusto, completely immersed in them, in the way that, in a dream, a seemingly innocent image, such as a fish in a fish bowl, might arouse in use a disproportionately profound emotion.

This film will receive a lot of criticism -- it invites it, as there is an element of sadism to Lynch's technique, in which he repeatedly sets in motion what seem to be the makings of a narrative, or even an explanation, and then simply abandons it. His skill at creating scenes of dread is nearly unparalleled, and he repeatedly uses this skill to make an otherwise insipid sequence, such as climbing a staircase, unendurably suspenseful. But, just as Jane Austin did in her gothic satire Northanger Abbey, these scenes are all built up and no payoff. I suspect that on second viewing these scenes will seem prankish -- reports from viewers who have seen the film more than once seem to indicate that the film seems much warmer and funnier on repeated viewing, which is often the case with Lynch. But it must be said that there is some exceptionally poetic writing in the film, particularly in a long monologue Dern offers in her streetwalker persona, delivered to a disinterested man with an oversized, pitted face and lopsided wire-rim glasses. She tells of growing up in a town that had gone mad from noxious fumes produced my a nearby chemical plant, and of repeated scenes of sexual violence that resulted. It's a savage piece of writing, filled with pathos and unexpectedly piquant turns of phrases, all written in a hardscrabble, ill-educated vernacular. Dern tackles it with, as she does everything else in the film, with absolute conviction, and it is her performance that makes the film something more than a fascinatingly unbalanced artistic experiment. She creates the film's emotional center, and, as odd as it may get (and it gets very odd -- check out the in-film sitcom starring nearly immobile actors in rabbit heads!), her reactions to it, at times brassy and headstrong, at time mewling and self-pitying, are enormously moving.

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THE THAI FILM INDUSTRY doesn't have much of a following in the United States, and what a pity. After all, Thai filmmakers have been churning out wildly entertaining genre films for decades now but, outside of the occasional export (such as the terrifyingly frenetic 2003 film Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior), they haven't gotten the level of exposure in America enjoyed by filmmakers from parts of Asia like China and Japan. Some of this might be explained by the fact that, for a long time, Thai cinema consisted mostly of cheaply made actioners and exploitation films, or stately but culturally specific melodramas. But the same can be said of Chinese cinema in the '70s, and that hardly prevented American audiences from enjoying the voluminous output of Hong Kong studios that specialized in martial arts epics.

The Lagoon cinema is currently screening a film bearing the English title Tears of the Black Tiger, although its actual title in Thai, Fah talai jone, literally translates as "the heavens strike the thief," which is just better, frankly. The film was made in 2000 and quickly picked up for American distribution by Miramax, which then got nervous about the whole undertaking and shelved the release, as they did, for years, with Zhang Yimou's Hero, which then became a big hit anyway. It's not likely that Tears of the Black Tiger will find the same sort of audience, as it is a much weirder film, but Magnolia Pictures acquired the rights from Miramax and has been sending the film out to art house theaters, where it probably belongs.

It's not that Tears of the Black Tiger will be all that foreign to American audiences. It is, after all, a cowboy film of a sort, as we discover in a bravura opening scene in which the film's hero, a beatific actor named Chartchai Ngamsan, charges a Thai building. This actor plays the film's title character, the Black Tiger, and he is dressed in black cowboy habiliments, including 10-gallon hat and boots. He quickly dispatches dozens of opponents, in one scene ricocheting a bullet off a half-dozen metal objects and neatly spearing a man hiding behind a post. At this moment, the filmmaker, Wisit Sasanatieng, stops the action, a title card asks "Did you catch that? If not, we'll play it again!" and then the scene is replayed in more detail, just to make clear the Black Tiger's exceptional skills as a gunfighter.

It's an odd moment, at once bravura and campy, and it seems to define the film. Wisit Sasanatieng has used Tears of the Black Tiger to revisit some of the more despised genres of Thai film, which he views with a winking affection. Believe it or not, the Thai film industry made a large number of cowboy films during its golden age, and the director playfully couples this genre with another: an exploitative approach to action films that were dismissively called "raberd poa, khaow pao kratom," which translates as "bomb the mountain, burn the huts." As a result, the director's approach to violence in this film is deliberately excessive -- ridiculously so. Gunshots produce a blowback of thick gore, and cowboys battle police officers with machine guns -- it seems the excessive violence with which Sam Peckinpah ended The Wild Bunch is merely the starting point for Tears of the Black Tiger. It's alarming how often characters spontaneously produce shoulder-mounted rocket launchers to end a fight.

But Wisit Sasanatieng is also borrowing from another genre of Thai filmmaking, the mannered and emotional films of the '50s and '60s that contemporary Thai audiences have dubbed "nam nao," which translates as "stink water." Although Tears of the Black Tiger was shot in 2000, it was processed weirdly, with its filmmakers converting it to digital Betacam and then retransferring it back to film, which gives the colors of the film a luminous, unreal quality. A number of the scenes are staged on obvious sets with painted backdrops, and the acting style is deliberately theatrical, consisting of bold gestures and unnatural pronouncements, which are made even more unnatural by the use of presentational cinematic techniques, such as ending a scene by having the screen iris in on one character before fading to black. It's as though the director wanted to revisit the now reviled genres of Thai cinema by recreating them as a folk art. Although the resulting film is terrifically odd as a result, Wisit Sasanatieng displays his genuine affection for these old films in every frame: He really understands the power of cowboy films, luxuriating in exquisitely composed images of gangs of cowboys on horseback, or the way gunfighters subtly shift their weight in preparation for a duel. The film is as unnatural -- but as exciting and beautiful -- as the hand-painted posters that once accompanied genre films to theaters.

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OF ALL the startling images that came out of the ghastly mass shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, there’s one that is starting to become ubiquitous. Surprisingly, it’s not an image of direct violence, such as the heartbreaking photograph of the hip-shot man being awkwardly carried out of Norris Hall. No, it is instead an image of impending violence, a photograph that shooter Seung-Hui Cho took of himself, part of the strange multimedia packet he sent to NBC, in which he holds a pistol in each hand, perhaps the exact pistols he used to slay 32 people and eventually end his own life.

The photo, which our own Minneapolis daily newspaper splashed across the front page, looks like a still from some bizarre action hero -- and you’ll find many photos just like it with a quick search of Flickr. Gun owners, particularly young men, seem to enjoy preening, like film stars, with their weapons. This despite the fact that cinematic guns, particularly in heroic action films, belong in the realm of fantasy. They never need be reloaded, except, as in the films of Robert Rodriguez, when a dramatic pause is needed in the action. They are easily concealed, never jam, and apparently aim themselves when fired by the hero (when fired by villains, they tend to miss). They rarely hit bystanders, they kill discreetly, and the bodies they create can usually just be left behind for someone else to clean up. As anyone who has ever fired a gun or witnessed a shooting can tell you, this isn’t how it works in the real world.

When Seung-Hui Cho’s package arrived at NBC, after several days of confusion owing to an improper address label, there was some speculation that he had been inspired by films, or, more properly, a film: Oldboy, a South Korean film from 2003 that won the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Two of the pictures Seung-Hui Cho took of himself seemed to echo scenes from the film—one in which Seung-Hui Cho wields a hammer menacingly, and another in which he presses a pistol to his own forehead. Aside from the fact that Seung-Hui Cho’s photographs resemble stills from Oldboy, there is no evidence the young man had ever seen the film, or was particularly inspired by it.

Indeed, at this moment, the likeliest scenario is that Cho suffered from an untreated and growing mental illness. (There are some reports, unconfirmed at the time of this printing, that Cho had been taking antidepressants.) He had previously been detained for a psychiatric assessment, and the attending magistrate determined that Cho presented “an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness.” Interestingly, this decision meant that Cho’s name should have been submitted to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which should have prevented him from purchasing handguns. Somehow, he slipped through the system, despite the fact that those close to him reported that his behavior was deteriorating. His roommate described Cho as transforming from shyness to outright refusal to communicate prior to last week’s massacre.

If the massacre was indeed the result of mental illness (and his rambling communication with NBC certainly shows him, at the very least, as totally incoherent), it’s hard to point to the event and claim it is the result of larger societal factors, such as movies or video games. Violence from mental illness is a bit like lightning from the sky -- when it kills, we don’t question what comic books the lightning has been reading or if the lightning strike was the result of a particularly nasty Quentin Tarantino film. We do ask what we can do to prevent it in the future, though; otherwise, no houses would ever be equipped with lightning rods. It is worth visiting the reason why Cho’s mental illness went unaddressed as it did, and, given his diagnosis, why he had access to guns. (It’s worth noting that even without guns, people experiencing psychotic episodes are capable of disturbing violence. A doorman managed to kill 18 people in Beijing in August of 2004, armed with only a knife; it’s fair to assume he did not watch violent western movies or play amoral western video games.)

That being said, Cho’s rampage is an opportunity to open up a dialogue about the way we use violence in popular entertainment, not because it might cause the mentally ill to become murderous, but because it tends to celebrate a sort of consequence-free, prettified violence that is so divorced from the reality of violence -- as tales and photographs from Virginia Tech make so explicit. It does not speak well of our culture that we celebrate on film so many characters whose behavior -- defined by a strange comfort with bloodletting, and a casual disregard for its consequences -- would seem positively insane if it were enacted in the real world. Do we really want to celebrate onscreen characters that so closely resemble Seung-Hui Cho in their behavior?

Filmic violence can be tremendously sophisticated and subtle -- even a filmmaker as apparently callow as Quentin Tarantino never shies away from the fact that killing is a ghastly affair and that killers are often lunatics. But too often popular film regards consequence-free brutality as worthwhile entertainment, which seems to me less dangerous than simply lazy and immature. Ultimately, the consequences of presenting violence as unsophisticated entertainment might not create real-world killers, but it creates something that’s also worth discussing: bad art.

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IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME since the first Christmas carol. Six centuries, by most reckonings — the world “carol” is a Middle English word describing a sort of round dance, and its origin puts us squarely in the Middle Ages. Any scholar of the period can tell you — well, not much, as our Medieval forebears left precious few records behind. Literacy was limited almost entirely to the Church, and so what documents exist from the era tend to deal with sacred subjects.

The profane experience of the Dark Age everyman is left mostly to conjecture, although we do know they sang carols. Some have been recorded in mystery plays from that time period. In these, shepherds romp through 15th-century English countryside, pause for a while to witness the birth of Jesus (the medieval interpretation of space and time was flexible enough to allow this) and then sing a hearty vernacular number in a folk idiom. Often these were adapted drinking or feasting songs — hearty, joyous, sometimes racy and unexpectedly secular. Think of them as the “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” of their era.

How little things have changed since the 15th century. Our carols may no longer bear titles such as “Coventry Carol” or “Joseph Leiber, Joseph Mein,” but the foremost of them still sound like they would be best sung while tilting off the edge of a bar stool. At least, that’s how I like my Christmas: bawdy, drunken, joyous and secular. After all, according to the Gospels, Jesus was born sometime in autumn, most likely in September, and Christmas was simply placed in December to take the place of various pagan rituals that fell at the same time. The Babylonian feast of the Son of Isis, anyone? Christmas also borrows from the Roman Dies Natalis Invicti Solis, or the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, as well as the European Yule celebration, when drunken Norsemen would celebrate by burning various things — logs, clogs, and pretty much anything made of wood.

We still burn the log, but the rest of it? Not so popular nowadays, but their infectious, joyous spirit lives on in the less sedate elements of Christmas. If you’re looking for some of that old-time religion, a trip to your local record store will provide a bonanza of CDs that seem more infected with pagan lustiness than Christian piety.

Look there’s Juan Garcia Esquivel, the cherub-faced, bespectacled Mexican musical prodigy whose voluptuous, campy, technologically sophisticated musical arrangements have made him a hipster saint to lounge lizards everywhere. He tackled the carol in his CD Merry Xmas from the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (Bar/None). His monotone intro is spoken over a version of “Jingle Bells” in which the lyrics have been replaced by “Zoo zoo dweet, do be wow” and sounds like dialogue from the Playboy mansion. “The mistletoe is right over, …” he begins, then interrupts himself, “Ah! It seems to be occupied right now.”

This same bachelor joie de vivre exhibits itself on Capitol’s Ultra Lounge: Christmas Cocktails, part of their massive Ultra Lounge series, aside from featuring some of history’s campiest singers: Dean Martin drawls “I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm” while Nancy Wilson implores “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve,” both sounding suitably sotted. The folks down at Rhino Records must have been in a similarly intoxicated spirit when they compiled Hipsters’ Holiday, a collection of 18 hysterical jazz carols, many of which recast Santa as a sort of zoot-suited Harlem hepcat. “Dig That Crazy Santa Claus!” Oscar McLollie and His Honey Jumpers cry out, while Pearl Bailey pleads with Saint Nick for a “Five Pound Box of Money.”

For those in a quieter mood, there is Dancing Cat Record’s recently released Hawaiian Slack Key Christmas, consisting primarily of traditional carols performed by modern slack key guitar masters such as Keola Beamer (who tackles “Away in a Manger”) and Ozzie Kotani (with an exquisite version of “The First Noel”). These performances are so mellow that they call to mind the New Age music that drove everyone into cheerful slumbers in the 80s, so it is no surprise to discover that the CD is produced by George Winston. We all know that “Mele Kalikimaka” is Hawaiian to wish somebody a “Merry Christmas,” but it took Winston to teach us that it also meant “Sleep well, my happily bored friends.”

When the sweet strains of the slack key guitar threaten to throw me into a permanent slumber, I reach for a Christmas CD featuring the 20th century’s finest comedy duo to wake me. I speak, of course, of Jim Henson and Frank Oz, featured on A Sesame Street Christmas (Sony). The centerpiece of the CD is a Christmas pageant featuring the much beloved muppets Ernie (voiced by Henson) and Bert (voiced by Oz). In a tradition that owes more to Punch and Judy than childrens’ television, Bert is relentlessly tortured when he volunteers to play a tree in a pageant. He should be glad it ends as well as it does, with singing, as was the tradition in medieval mystery plays. Had this still been a pagan practice, the other muppets might well have set him on fire and danced naked as he burned.

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I WAS LIVING IN NEW ORLEANS just before Hurricane Katrina hit, just over a year ago. Like most residents of the city, I heeded Mayor Ray Nagin's warnings to leave the city and went to Houston to weather the storm. I stayed at a shelter there, and the next day, with the flooding of the city, found myself suddenly homeless, along with the entire population of New Orleans. Even though my apartment in the French Quarter had not been damaged by the storm or the subsequent flooding, it would be more than a month before residents were allowed back into the city. By that time, I had returned to my home state of Minnesota. But that's how fast it can happen -- one day, with little warning, the world turns on you and you don't have a home. You spend the next several weeks, or months, in shelters, or sleeping on friends' sofas, or living in your parents' basement.

I had been homeless before, in my early 20s. It doesn't require a cataclysmic act of nature to put you on the streets, especially if you're young and financially naive. I decided to move to Los Angeles at the age of 21, and simply hadn't saved enough money for the move. I had never moved cross country before and the cost of living in Minneapolis in 1991 was quite a biy lower than it was in Los Angeles. I had saved up enough money to get an apartment in Minneapolis, but Los Angeles was three times as expensive. I tried to find work, but, if just a few weeks, despite extreme frugality, I had worked my way through my resources.

At the time, near the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine, there was an organization called The Teen Canteen, which was set up to deal with the basic needs of homeless teenagers in Los Angeles. At that time, Los Angeles was something of a Mecca for runaway teenagers; I suspect it still is. Aside from providing free lunch every morning, bus passes, free haircuts at a nearby barber school, and some educational programs, the Teen Canteen also offered a shelter referral service. A mustached and well-muscled fellow named Mr. Rambo asked me a series of questions. Although I was in my early 20s, Rambo wanted to send me to a teen shelter, as I was young enough to qualify, 23 being the cut-off age. He made a few phone calls and then came back to inform me that the shelter where he usually sent people was filled, but did I have a problem with homosexuals?

He explained the the Gay/Lesbian Community Services Center of Los Angeles ran their own shelter for gay and lesbian teens, who made up a disproportionately high percentage of runaways, but often had a hard time in usual shelters. They were at risk of violent attacks, and, as a certain percentage of them turned to male prostitution, and some were addicted to drugs, they also were at risk for contracting AIDS. Of course, the shelter could not turn away homeless teenagers who were not gay, but, generally, they didn't have to, as straight teenagers were steered, or steered themselves, to the other shelter. I was desperate, and didn't mind the idea of staying at a shelter for gay and lesbian teens, and so Mr. Rambo drove me down to a little facility near Santa Monica Boulevard called the Citrus House.

The building was small and nondescript, with a high chain-link fence around it (they locked the fence at night, and strictly enforced a curfew). It was divided in half, one side of the building for young men, the other side for young women. The latter was generally pretty empty, for reasons I have never been able to ascertain, but the young men's side of the building was sometimes so full that the staff would take advantage of the times when the women's side was empty to house the spillover of young men there. Of course, on the rare occasion that a young woman would actually show up, all the young men had to be moved back to their side.

The shelter had several rooms per side, each featuring two or three bunk beds. There were chores, including regularly cleaning the building, and there were mandatory educational classes, including several on preventing AIDS. Youths were allowed to stay in the shelter for two months, although their stay could be extended, based on need. I stayed three months. Most stayed several days. It wasn't too hard to get kicked out of the shelter. Regularly violating the curfew would do it. Not finding a job would do it. AIDS testing was mandatory, and, if you tested positive, you were moved to a completely different shelter. I was with a young man when he got a positive test back. We walked around Hollywood for the rest of the afternoon, occasionally stopping into bars to get cocktails, which he treated me to. We didn't talk at all. He didn't want to talk, he just seemed to want company. That afternoon, he packed up his belongings and took a bus to a different shelter. He was obese and alcoholic, and he had a very slow-witted quality to him, and I have often wondered what happened to him from that point on. I told him to feel free to contact me, but he never did. I imagine he's probably dead by now.

There were guards at the Citrus House. They stayed at the shelter all night, armed with stun guns. When youths were kicked out the shelter for violating the rules, the guards accompanied them to their room to collect their belongings. Once a young man got violent. He had been a bad match for the Citrus House anyway, as he was openly homophobic, and spent one evening at dinner making veiled threats toward the other youths in the shelter. For some reason, when he was kicked out, he decided to wrestle with his guard. She was a short, squat, solidly built woman, and she pulled him outside, hit him with the stun gun, and carried his belonging out to him while he was still writhing in the street.

If we didn't have a job, or worked late, several of us in the shelter would go to a nearby In and Out Burger, just across the street from the Klasky Csupo office where they produced The Simpsons. We would each order a soda, but for one especially stingy young man, who would order water and squeeze complimentary lemon wedges into it, adding sugar to make free lemonade. Several of these young men were male prostitutes, and they chatted about malingering on Santa Monica boulevard, looking for clients. Several of them had stories about getting picked up by movie stars in limousines. I never believed them, because they were terrible liars, and you couldn't believe most of what they said, but, in the following years, a number of the celebrities they mentioned were caught in scandals involving cross-dressers and limousines. So perhaps movie stars do prowl Santa Monica Boulevard in long black limousines, looking for teenagers to pay them for sex.

The shelter required that its residents find a job. Many didn't, and were kicked out. They required you stay off drugs and alcohol. Many didn't, and were kicked out. Mind you, they didn't test for drugs, and there was no real problem if you wanted to get a cocktail when away from the shelter, which I often did. But the youths at the shelter frequently showed up drunk or high, and were escorted out of the building. One young man, a redhead with enormous hearing aids, was found with a gun in his locker. He was kicked out. A young couple moved in for a few days, a boy and a girl in their mid-teens. He broke up with her and moved out, and she slashed her wrists in the shelter bathroom. Sometimes a group of teenagers would move in for a few days, and a few days later would be gone, and I had no idea where they went. Once I saw at least five young men from the shelter all piled into an old car. They pulled up to me in the street and informed me they were going to Las Vegas for the weekend. I never heard from them again.

A few people in the shelter just found other places to stay. There was a young man I became friend with who was illustrating a weekly cartoon about his experiences, and the local gay/lesbian newspaper picked it up to run it, and there were nibbles of interest from gay/lesbian newspapers in San Francisco and Sacramento. I believe he got involved with an older man and moved in with him. For three months, all these teens came and, quickly and usually without ceremony, went. I was quiet but friendly, I went to work in the afternoon, came home at night, played table tennis, did my chores, and saved money to get my own apartment. I was an oddity in the shelter. I had a college education, which was rare. I was working, which was rarer. I obeyed the rules, which was beyond rare. I didn't talk about myself that much, but I listened a lot, and, since the other kids in the shelter liked to talk, they enjoyed having me as a listener. I had a counselor at the shelter, a friendly woman who kept my money in a safe for me and helped get me set up to move into a transitional living program, so that when I moved out of the Citrus House my next apartment would have affordable rent. On the day I left the program, she gave me a gift certificate to Target for $50. I used it to buy cleaning supplies and crackers. I was quite hungry. I was a vegetarian, and the only food they had in the shelter for vegetarians was some canned vegetables and macaroni and cheese. I left the shelter weighing 125 pounds. I am 5' 11''.

The day I moved out of the shelter I promised myself I wouldn't be so careless again. I was done with homelessness. It had been an instructive mistake, but one I would not repeat. From that point on, I would never be homeless again. But, you know, you can be as careful as you want, and then, one day, a hurricane whips up in the Gulf Coast, a city floods, and there you are, in a shelter again. We're all precariously perched on the edge of homelessness, just one medical emergency, financial misstep, or weather emergency away from sleeping in a strange bed, getting fed by strangers, and struggling to piece our lives back together.

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O! O! For May Allison!
Poor May! O poor May!
You can offer up your ready pate, --
She won't fracture it today.
Kneed down before her unafraid;
She will not split your head.
Those furrow and wells in poor May's scalp
Mean May Allison is dead,
Men rub their battered, knotted skulls
And speak in mournful tones
And tell grim tales of poor dead May
And the bones, the broken bones.
They recall May's club and recall her axe
And recall her swinging fist.
It's not Ramcat Alley without poor May, --
May Allison will be missed.

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A GRAY-BEARDED, emaciated man in grimy shirtsleeves watches suspiciously from just outside the dimly lit Happy Bar on 16th and California. I have been circling the building, taking notes in a little book, snapping photographs with a disposable camera, and kicking at bottles and battered mattresses that line a red brick alleyway that bisects this block. On one end of the alley stands an old red brick building with faded, handpainted signs offering carpets. On the other end is an empty storefront possessing a strange green turret. Opposite this is bare earth, recently turned over by the massive redevelopment taking place just north of downtown. Whatever building had been there is gone -- this half of the block, like many others in the neighborhood just east of the Creighton campus, is an empty lot. But the alley is still there, and I am glad to see it.

The gray-bearded man approaches. "I see you're writing down everybody's address," he says warily, perhaps nervous that I am a city official. It is not likely the squalid apartments and run-down businesses on this block, where he is, presumably, a tenant, will long be spared the wrecking ball. "I'm not writing down addresses," I tell him. "The alley over there is a historic site. I'm taking notes for a story."

The alley is a historic site, and I suspect, at this moment, that I am the only one on earth who knows the fact. It is Ramcat Alley.

Writing of Ramcat Alley in 1896, the Omaha Herald told this story about a Dane named Larsen, "from East Omaha." The Dane entered one of the alley's several buildings with a valise, whereupon he was set on by a woman, "Amazonian in physique, and a termagant in disposition." They struggled over the valise while the woman's lover, a black man of "abbreviated stature and intellect and abnormally developed cussedness," crept up behind Larson and knocked him insensible with an iron bar. "While unconscious the Dane was robbed and thrown out into the alley" -- this alley, Ramcat Alley.

The woman in question was May Allison, and this little anecdote was printed on the occasion of her death. The abnormally cussed black man in the story was named Bill Grimes, and the two of them were well-known to local police, as was the alley. "The Allison woman," The Herald informs us, "early acquired a reputation for wickedness and pugilism ... No two ordinary men could cope with her in an every day fist fight, and armed with an iron rod or ax, she brooked no opposition."

Ramcat Alley was a saloon-lined strip of cantankerousness. It was here that Baptist minister A.W. Clark attempted to tend to its squalid population in 1892, and was so shocked by the huddled masses of filthy children taking shelter in doorways that he decided to start the Child Saving Institute. Innocent travelers, after disembarking from the nearby Webster Street Station, sometimes made their way down the alley as a shortcut between 15th and 16th streets. There they found themselves suffering the same fate as the Dane, crumpled unconscious in the alley and stripped of their valuables. And in Ramcat Alley, according to the Herald article, Allison "was the queen of Bedlam."

When they weren't attacking strangers, Allison and Grimes "practiced on each other," as the Herald wryly notes. The two argued frequently, and during such a fight Allison cut three-quarters of an inch off Grimes' nose. Grimes refused to testify against Allison when she was arrested for this assault, but a few months later her beat her with a club. Allison, in turn, tried cutting his throat -- twice. The Herald makes scant comment on her death, noting only that the couple was forced out of the alley and moved to 1015 Davenport, "where May Allison's wonderful vitality was broken down at the age of 38, and she died in a miserable place without known kindred or friends."

1015 Davenport is just a few blocks from Ramcat Alley, or, at least, it would be if it were not a patch of gray sand under a massive concrete overpass, sandwiched between the Swanson factory and the still-incomplete Convention Center. A few tractors sit where Allison died -- records of the time list the cause of her death as "apoplexy cerebral," and, again, this does little to suggest what it was that sapped Allison's wonderful vitality. However, the Omaha Bee is more explicit -- she was probably beaten to death by Grimes. "On the afternoon of Thursday Dr. Blythin was called to attend the sick woman," according to the Bee. "He found her suffering from severe pains in her head and observed a number of wells crossing the scalp who had evidently been made by some blunt instrument. She refused to state how they came there and would give no details as to her history."

And so here I stand, on the exact spot where a queen of bedlam came to her bloody end, now a parking spot for dump trucks, blocks from where she made her mayhem, now an empty alley near a lot of bare soil. We can expect the alley itself will be paved over soon, without comment, in this rush to flatten the squalid buildings north of downtown. The gray-bearded old man seems surprised to hear that the alley is a historic site, and perhaps it isn't. After all, if I am the only person who knows its history, can we really even call it history?

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IT'S SUNDAY NIGHT at the Gold Mine Saloon, a former horse stable in the French Quarter that features Jack Daniels whiskey barrels as tables, a pornographic illustration of Popeye and Olive, and an assortment of ancient video games as entertainment. Tetris, for examples, which regularly blurts out its tinny, electronic Cossack theme, even when poets are reading, as they do with some frequency. Dave Brinks, the bar’s proprietor, is also a poet; additionally, he edits and publishes Trembling Pillow Press, and, with Andrei Codrescu, cofounded the New Orleans School of the Imagination.

This last endeavor, an alternative school of the arts, has its aegis upon tonight’s poetry reading: The School’s logo, printed on cardboard, hangs from one of two podiums in the far corner of the bar, behind which Brinks fiddles with a microphone. Brinks is a goateed, solidly built man wearing a black fisherman’s cap backward in his head like a beret, as well as a black leather vest with several pens tucked between the buttons on his chest, and he has cluttered the reading area with several black stands, two holding tall flowerpots, a third displaying the book Back in America by tonight’s headliner, Barry Gifford.

Gifford is probably best known as the author of Wild at Heart, a blowzy, wicked tribute to the sorts of lunatic black and white noir films Gifford has long had a deep affection for — he wrote a terrific series of essays about films with titles such as Detour and Shack Out on 101, originally published as The Devil Thumbs a Ride and recently reprinted as Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir. In Wild at Heart, Gifford created the characters Lula and Sailor, two oversexed vagabonds perpetually on the lam from both the law and Sailor’s own criminal past. Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern limned these characters in David Lynch’s 1990 screen adaptation, and Gifford has continued to essay their misadventures in five more novels of increasingly bizarre titles — the most recent called Bad Day for the Leopard Man. Gifford also cowrote Lost Highway with Lynch, perhaps most notable now for a small, chilling performance by a pre-murder trial, lipsticked Robert Blake.

Gifford is also a poet with 13 collections under his belt, and tonight’s reading is to celebrate his 14th, published by the locally run Light of New Orleans Publishing. Back in America is a collection of tough-voiced musings, and its publisher, Josh Clark, wanders the Gold Mine Saloon, offering cheery greeting as a sizable crowd assembles. He is young with a closely cropped blond beard and his hair cut short but for a single raised strip across the top of his head, a David Beckham-inspired coif that’s come to be dubbed a fauxhawk As is typical in New Orleans, the reading is scheduled for 7:30pm, but it is at least 45 minutes later that things actually get started, with Clark offering a boisterous “Hey, what’s up, y’all?” from one of the podiums.

There are to be four poets reading before Gifford, and Clark introduces them. The first is Dave Brinks, who earnestly reads a small number of his thickly metaphorical poems. “I still think in different mirrors …” he intones, later adding “The year of the monkey is yellow.” His poems are greeted warmly, with light applause. He is followed, in quick succession, by Kay Murphy in a pink Elvis t-shirt (“The more you drink, the more you love it,” she reads to an appreciative audience), Chris Champagne (who rattles off a poetic 9th ward tirade in a thick Yat accent, delivered by memory in a lightning-fast, auctioneer patter, hilariously incomprehensible for but the closing lines, “God don’t sleep. Yeah, you right!”), and Lee Meitzen Grue (also detailing life in the embattled 9th Ward, explaining that “a bullet in the spine adds another wheeled wanderer.”)

Finally, Gifford crosses to the podium. He is a solidly-built man, looking more like an aging boxer or field laborer than an author, with square shoulders and Charles Atlas biceps visible beneath a nondescript t-shirt. He has a long, creased, brooding face capped by a shock of trim gray hair — one could easily imagine him as an inner-city priest in one of those crime films he loves so much. He begins by reciting Chaucer in a thick accent; he almost sounds like a priest chanting in Latin at this moment, and is surprised when the audience laughs in response, recognizing the reference.

“I don’t read poetry aloud very often” Gifford begins. “So it’s new to me.” In fact, he only reads a few pieces. The first, titled “small elegy for Corso,” references Beat poet Gregory Corso, who died a few years ago, and with whom Gifford was an acquaintance. Gifford describes running into Corso a decade or more ago at a San Francisco baseball game: “‘Gregory,” I said, ‘what happened to your teeth?’ ‘They’re gone!’ he said. ‘Who needs teeth after fifty?’”

Gifford also reads a poem titled “adios, chico!,” a very short, nine-line description of a boxer. “He had no real punch,” Gifford reads, “and a face like a frying pan full of sizzling chicken livers.”

Then Gifford moves on to reading a chapter of an unpublished novel titled The Stars Above Vera Cruz. The chapter tells a short, grotesque tale of crime on a small Caribbean island. It is written in the sort of descriptive deadpan favored by noir novelists of the 40s and 50s, a punchy, deliberately plainspoken style borrowed from true-crime magazines, in which the most awful stories were told in the sparest of sentences. Gifford tells the story through the narration of the nephew of one of the island’s few America residents, Uncle Buck. The remainder of the island is made up of the descendants of pirates, all bearing names such as Morgan and Lafitte. Uncle Buck relates how one islander killed another after a mild dispute over cards, and how the island’s sheriff, Prince Albert, refused to prosecute. In elliptical language, Gifford reveals that the deeper origins of the murder, which include a child born of incest. Uncle Buck hears most of the story from a pistol-bearing appliance salesman named Spurgeon Bush, who carries with him a card from a local general giving the salesman permission to kill whoever he pleases. The story’s young narrator quizzes Bush about this card, asking if he mightn’t use this permission to kill someone who had bough a refrigerator from another salesman, and Bush flashes gold teeth as he responds. “You forget,” he says. “I am the only appliance salesman on this island.”

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AT 9:00 PM, the sky already dark, a glass harmonica player attracted a small crowd of tourists outside Jackson Square. He was older, with a long gray beard and a stringy gray ponytail, and he ran wetted fingers along a number of water-filled crystal glasses laid out on a portable table, producing an octave’s worth of eerie, ethereal tones. His table was lit by several candles, and their light, cast through the water glasses, created an appealing, near-ghostly tableaux. He spoke with in an experienced, garrulous comical patter. “I’m a vegetarian,” he told a tourist, who stood a little way from him, watching shyly. Seeing her bewildered expression, he explained further: “That means I’m not going to bite you. You can come closer.”

The crowd, numbering perhaps 10, closed in as his fingers caressed the glasses. “Where are you from, young lady,” he asked a nearby woman, middle aged and broadly smiling, She cupped her hand to her ear. “I asked where you were from,” he repeated, louder. “Although perhaps you wanted me to repeat the ‘young lady’ part.” She laughed appreciatively, and then answered: Indiana.

“Ah, Indiana,” he said, he hands beginning to play a melody: “Back Home Again in Indiana.” A few notes into it, he was interrupted. Two burly young men, one in a bright red football jersey emblazoned with the word “Chicago,” approached, dragging with them a boy. They held him by his black sweatshirt, which was in disarray, and all were out of breath. The young man looked exhausted; he stared at the glass harmonica player dully. The glass harmonica player stopped playing.

“Is this the fellow?” the young man in the red jersey asked. The glass harmonica player nodded. “What do you want to do with him?” the young man in the red jersey asked.

The glass harmonica player produced a cell phone and flipped it open. “Give the money back,” he told the boy. “Give it all back and I won’t call the police.”

“Yes sir,” the boy said in a lifeless monotone. “I lost some of the money running, but I’ll give you back what I got, sir.” While he said this, the young man in the red jersey fumbled through his pockets. “It was just a few dollars, sir,” the boy said, pleading thickly.

“It was a lot more than that,” the glass harmonica player snapped back sharply. “It was twenty dollars!”

“I lost some of it when I was running,” the boy said again.

The young man in the red jersey produced a five dollar bill. He held it out to the glass harmonica player. “Is this your money?” he asked.

“Yes,” the glass harmonica player said. He took the crumpled bill and placed it in an empty bowl before him. He then turned and waved his cell phone at the boy. “If I see you again, this phone, it’s going to be used,” he chastised.

“Yes, sir,” the boy said. “Thank you, sir.”

The two burly young men released their hold on the boy. He turned and walked away from them, unhurried, down Chartres toward Canal, shoulders slumped, dragging his heels. The burly young men and the glass harmonica player watched him leave.

The glass harmonica player leaned toward the young man in the red jersey and grasped his hand, squeezing hard and pulling him close. He leaned in toward the young man, speaking softly, directly into the young man’s ear, still shaking his hand. The young man nodded. “You’re an honest worker,” the young man said. “You don’t deserve that.”

The glass harmonica player stepped away from the young man and pressed his hands together, as though in prayer, and bowed slightly toward the young man. “Thank you again,” he said. “Thank you.”

Then the glass harmonica player turned back to his audience. “There’s so many shootings around here, who knew that he didn’t have a uzi under his shirt,” he said, his voice shaking. He held out his hands above the half-filled water glasses. His hands, too, were shaking.

“My children, now in their thirties, are adrenaline junkies, ever since they were little boys and would go skiing in the Adirondacks of New York,” he said. He touched his heart and exhaled heavily. “I don’t like it. So I’m going to play something calming. A little Johannes Sebastian Bach.”

He smiled at his audience. “This is a style of music called glassical.”

His hands moved across the water glasses, and “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” filled the balmy French Quarter night. When he finished, his audience applauded heartily.

“I made a terrible mistake,” he said, grinning. “I called that glassical. It’s actually Baroque. But I don’t like to say that word.” He leaned toward his audience, whispering conspiratorially. “It makes the glasses nervous.”

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IF SOMETHING IS FUNNY ONCE, it will be funny again--and positively hilarious the third time. It's an elementary theorem of comedy--repetition is inherently funny--and it has firm adherents in the Scrimshaw Brothers, Joshua and Joseph, who are nothing if not dedicated to select themes in comedy. In fact, at a recent performance of their cabaret show Look Ma, No Pants, they passed out a bingo card to keep track of their recurring punch lines. "Certain things keep popping up in our improvs," Joe Scrimshaw explained to the audience. "Mark them off when you see them." My bingo card had the following listed: Bunny Parade, Voice of God, A Baby in Peril, Beer, Squirrels, Zombies, Southern Imbecile, Humping, Talking Animals, and Hellmouth, among others. Over the course of two improvised Scrimshaw sets with their regular improv troupe the Impossibles, I marked off eight of the twenty-four allotted spaces--fully a third of the themes listed. They were scattered in a random pattern across the card, refusing to form the straight line I deserved. And glancing at other cards, I noticed they were blackened even more than mine, leading me to wonder what else might be listed.

I don't know if pantslessness was printed on any of the cards. Perhaps not, as it is a theme so common to the Scrimshaws' act that it is just assumed. Far from being a senseless title for their performances, Look Ma, No Pants is on many nights a literal description of their act. Occasionally, the Scrimshaws will have a performer stationed at the front of the theater, dressed in a tuxedo, sans bottoms, requesting that the audience check their trousers.

"It became something of a pre-show game," Joshua Scrimshaw explains over a late dinner at the Green Mill on Hennepin Avenue. "People were encouraging each other to take off their pants. Guys were trying to get girls to take off their pants." And how many in the audience did? "I don't know," Joshua shrugs. "Thirty people?"

For most sketch comedy-cum-cabaret acts in the Twin Cities, were 30 members of the audience to remove their pants, the entire crowd would be left in their drawers. But in the two years that the Scrimshaws have been producing monthly shows, their audience has swelled to three, sometimes four times that turnout. The brothers filled the Phoenix Playhouse, and now, having moved several blocks north on Nicollet Avenue, they fill the Acadia Café and Cabaret--so completely that the brothers recently doubled the number of shows they perform. Beginning in March, Look Ma, No Pants will appear twice a month.

A recent performance I attended revealed a fully dressed, but nonetheless energized, audience. They shifted in their seats, calling out across the small Acadia performance space to each other, or sat on the stage, glancing at their watches expectantly. The Scrimshaws draw a particular audience, and it's the same crowd who, 10 years ago, would have lined up in front of the Uptown for the midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Evidence of slight social awkwardness abounded prior to the show: ungraceful teasing, which sounded snotty and vaguely unfriendly; laughs that came at the wrong moment, surprising in their volume and pitch; ungainly, mismatched wardrobe choices, such as men in conservative slacks and carefully buttoned white shirts, sporting long, unkempt hair. Most in the audience seemed to be college-age. Some looked as though they had spent much of high school stuffed in a locker. Some looked as though they had just emerged from the locker that afternoon. But if there was a hint of nerdiness to the audience, there was also the usual parallel suggestion of intelligence. Whatever social margin these people lived on, they knew themselves to be marginalized, and congregated around whatever entity might celebrate them.

The brothers, along with the Impossibles (comprising Jill Bernard, Kelvin Hatle, Charlie Horn, and Zvie Razielli), play directly to the brainy nature of their audience. In one sketch written by Bernard, two women who share an identical name, identical threadbare sweaters, and an identical adenoidal voice, show up to the same date with Joseph Scrimshaw. (The pseudo twins are played by Bernard and dancer Adrienne English, who is Joshua Scrimshaw's wife). They bring with them an unopened envelope, addressed to a third woman of the same name, inviting her out to dinner. As long as the envelope remains unopened, they argue, Joseph Scrimshaw has invited not only one of the three out to dinner, but all three at the same time. And when Scrimshaw, in a frustrated rage, tears open the envelope, the two women howl simultaneously that he has disrupted the universe, and begin to spin around each other as though the universe were, indeed, collapsing in on itself. The name of the sketch is "Schroedinger's Date," based on physicist's Erwin Schroedinger's somewhat obtuse paradox of quantum mechanics, involving a cat, a closed steel box containing a radioactive substance that might trigger some murderous device, and the (im)possibility that the cat might be at once dead and alive. This is not exactly sketch comedy that shoots for the lowest common denominator, despite the frequent presence of rubber chickens.

"We use rubber chickens ironically," Joseph Scrimshaw protests. But there they are, rubber chickens, in one form or another, in virtually every act. (The night of "Schroedinger's Date," Joseph wore a tie with a rubber chicken emblazoned on it.) "We like old-time vaudeville," Joshua explains. "We like the spontaneity. In some ways, we are trying to do an old-time vaudeville act but update it."

Indeed, there is a hint of the antique about Scrimshaw Brothers shows. It can be seen in their serialized story "The Adventures of Dave and the Frenchman." The mere existence of this feature has a nostalgic tenor to it--as though this were the Thirties and an audience would return every week to see heroes in peril. Joshua, who constantly seems to be smiling and favors extended bits of silent comedy, plays a creaky caricature of a Parisian: beret, black-and-white striped shirt, impenetrable accent, sexual ambiguity. Joseph, who never seems to smile and is often relentlessly verbal onstage, plays Dave, a creaky caricature of the sort of mullet-topped, backward-baseball-capped, beer-swilling good old boy you might find at a trailer park--but for the fact that Dave is a hairstylist, and gets rather finicky about the fact.

As of this writing, the serial was only up to Act Two, though the show has already featured enough plot twists for a Dickens novel. It opened with the two characters crucified in the lair of a Dragon Lady, played in a tasteful blouse and skirt by Zvie Razielli, whose arms sprout mats of thick black hair. In this episode, the heroes stumble across the Dragon Lady's scheme to render everyone in the world sexually ambiguous via a venereal disease that she will introduce through her stable of androgynous prostitutes. Dave and the Frenchman decide to foil this plan, but the episode ends with a cliffhanger as the Frenchman finds himself giving in to the Dragon Lady's indeterminate charms, possibly exposing himself to her dreaded social disease.

We meet the Dragon Lady's prostitutes during this episode, played in berets and goatees by two more dancers--and what the hell are all these dancers doing onstage?! When they appear in sketches, they are referred to as the No Pants Players, but throughout the performance they take the stage as the No Pants Dancers. Between improv sets and sketch-comedy routines (and the brothers' collection of guest artists, which has included origami artists, comic-book illustrators, and comedian Ari Hoptman) they come out and perform silly, but technically accomplished routines. This evening they brought their boyfriends onstage and acted out Valentine's Day fantasies, which included Megan Nelson-Odell donning rubber elephant ears along with a trunk and tusks, and dancing to Henry Mancini's "Baby Elephant Walk." These performers are actually terpsichorean professionals from a variety of local troupes. They perform new routines at every No Pants production--frequently choreographed by Adrienne English.

She closed the evening's performance by taking the stage dressed in actor Tom Baker's outfit from Dr. Who, feigning enormous embarrassment as she staggered through a little striptease number while Joshua looked on with wide, lust-filled eyes. Eventually, he insisted that she flagellate him with her long, striped scarf. The audience erupted with guffaws; it was, as suggested earlier, an ideal crowd for Dr. Who humor.

“People ask us where we got our name," Joseph Scrimshaw says. "That's a question that's easy for us to answer: We're brothers, and our name is Scrimshaw." Joshua is the older of the two--29 to Joseph's 26 years--but meeting them you would not be able to hazard a guess as to who was born first. "We're insanely similar," Joseph says. "People say we're twins." There is truly a startling physical similarity. Joshua had a long head of hair for years, but during a recent performance he shaved it all off backstage in the middle of a sketch. Now he has a spiky halo of brown hair, and Joseph looks the shaggier of the two, with his long bangs and constant hangdog expression. In performance the two dress alike: white shirts, black ties, black pants--the costume of the bland everyman, a fragile nebbish trapped in a world of violent extremes and erratic behavior. To this end, the brothers, who share a slight build, often take great pains to make themselves appear tiny and helpless onstage.

"We're two scrawny little guys," Joshua says--a dynamic the pair accentuates onstage. In another sketch from the night of "Schroedinger's Date," Joseph acted as a pool boy with a high, self-satisfied voice. He played the scene shirtless, his chest pulled in, sporting a massive pair of goggles that virtually hid his entire face. "Put anyone next to Joe when he's like that, they seem like they are huge, strapping men," Joshua says.

North Minneapolis natives, they have spent their entire lives in the Twin Cities. They currently hack away at jobs by day (Joshua is a temp, while Joe works at Kinkos) and spend their evenings telephoning each other with ideas for comedy sketches. The brothers share an alert, inquisitive temperament: They grow excited in conversation, often simultaneously, and their eyes shift back and forth in their head, darting around the room and locking in on each other as they speak.

The similarities between the brothers has no doubt built on itself--they've got a long history of performing together, which spans most of their lives. (Their Web site, www.scrimshawbrothers.com points to a childhood act that "consisted entirely of Hong Kong Phooey impersonations and John Denver covers.") The brothers put together a sketch comedy act in college, calling themselves the Bally-Hoo Players and performing at the University of Minnesota ("Their genius was soon recognized and many of their fellow students fled at the sight of them," the Web site notes). The Scrimshaws also performed at the inaugural Minnesota Fringe Festival (of which they note, "City Pages called it many things including, 'lowbrow...infantile...and just plain embarrassing.'")

In fact, if you look back on Minneapolis sketch comedy for the past few years, there is very little that does not have the Scrimshaws' imprimatur on it somewhere: They have produced works with Bedlam Theatre, The Fool's Tree Players, True North Theatre, ThreePenny Improv, The National Theater for Children, Clown Time Productions, and Soylent Theater. At the Fringe Festival last summer, besides producing their own show (which drew appreciably better notices from this paper), Joseph Scrimshaw appeared in the festival's most novel production, a staged reading of Ibsen's A Doll's House performed in a tiny four-by-four-foot cubby in the basement of the Acadia. The show was produced by Jill Bernard, who also starred in it, and Joseph played her self-absorbed husband--so self-absorbed, in fact, that he seemed incapable of noticing that their home was so cramped that they were forced to sit on doll's furniture and double over to communicate with each other. Bernard and Joseph Scrimshaw also recently produced and starred in The Comic Sutra for the Absolute Originals festival of one-person shows at Intermedia Arts (which they billed as "a one-man show starring Joseph Scrimshaw and three women.")

In this, Joseph played a half-dozen men, all comics, all deeply neurotic, on a series of dates with Bernard, who was repeatedly chagrined to discover the deep neuroses that frequently fuel comedy. These neuroses should be on full display in two cathartic performances of Look Ma, No Pants in March. To celebrate their second anniversary of the show, the brothers will be presenting a series of performances that they call "The Offense O-Rama." Sounding like carnival barkers shouting into a megaphone, their ads declare the performance "two (yes, two!) nights of crude, tasteless, completely uncalled-for comedy."

"The truth is, it's hard for us to come up with stuff for that," Joshua confesses. "We're pretty offensive anyway." For their Mother's Day show, the brothers offered something called the Mother's Day Smackdown, in which they asked the cast to bring in their moms and encourage them to fistfight. The Scrimshaws' own mother came and distributed obscene novelty candies from an adult gift store. With the two brothers, their mother, and one wife involved, it seems that the Scrimshaws plan to involve the whole family in the act at some point. They have even discussed asking their father, who has dabbled in the whalebone carving from which the family gets its name, to create a scrimshaw logo for the show.

"Oh, that reminds me," Joseph exclaims. "I looked up 'scrimshaw' once, and I found a great definition for it. It said that 'scrimshaw is usually used to alleviate boredom and attract women.'" "That's good," Joshua answers excitedly, eyes quickly shifting to look at his brother. "We should use that in our ads."

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THERE IS NO MISTAKING IT, if you walk into a comic-book store: There are a lot of superheroes in this world. Comic books in America have a long and varied history, with some fascinating genres that involved no capes, no secret identities, and no exceptional power. EC Comics, for example, once devoted a series to the study of psychoanalysis. Archie and his gang from Riverdale High are still going strong, despite the fact that their only obvious superpower seems to be the ability to use 1920s slang and story lines in works set in 2002. But ever since Superman debuted on the cover of Action Comics #1 in June of 1938, sporting his familiar blue suit and red cape and hurtling a green automobile, superheroes have been the dominant characters in American comics. They are the financial backbone of the industry's two giants, DC and Marvel, where they still hurtle cars in scores of new issues every month. They glare singly from comic-book covers, or pair up, or in some instances form entire gangs of heroes. How many X-Men are there now? Thousands? Eventually, one supposes, there might be entire worlds filled with such heroes, and what would that look like?

Gene Ha would know. This 33-year-old, who on a recent afternoon was wearing glasses and a black Guinness T-shirt, demonstrates what this realm might look like by brandishing a recent page of his work. It is drawn on a 10-by-15-inch piece of pre-manufactured art board (Eon Productions makes them in both smooth finish and two-ply Bristol). Ha has neatly divided this surface with lines into a series of long panels. Each contains a meticulously detailed pencil drawing and follows the course of a young man's travels by train through a city of superheroes.

These are the opening images of The 49ers, a graphic novel that is a prequel of sorts to a series called Top 10 (published by America's Best Comics). The original series was an industry favorite, winning an Eisner Award for "Best New Series," the comic industry's highest accolade. Not coincidentally, Top 10 was scripted by one of the most celebrated writers in the comics industry, Alan Moore.

This new miniseries, The 49ers, is set midway through the last century, in a universe where everybody boasts a superpower of one kind or another. Ha has filled each frame with characters from the era, some terribly obscure. In one frame, for example, stands Big Chief Wahoo. This 1936 creation of Allen Saunders debuted in a parody of Western comics, but eventually--almost inexplicably--transformed over the years into Steve Roper and Mike Nomad. (King Features still distributes this daily comic strip of international intrigue to about 50 newspapers, minus Big Chief Wahoo, of course, the times being what they are.) Chief Wahoo lives on in name as the embattled mascot of the Cleveland Indians, a wide-smiled, red-faced, feather-bearing caricature. But Saunders's Wahoo, who sported a beaten ten-gallon cowboy hat, a bandoleer, and pigtails, is long gone--except, of course, in Gene Ha's pencil drawing, superimposed upon a vaguely industrial American city in the 1940s, which is probably where he belongs.

Big Chief Wahoo is not the most interesting character in the frame, however. He is hidden in the background, barely visible in a crowd scene. Instead, the story follows around a tall, somewhat mysterious, handsome-visaged doughboy who looks something like a thin Ben Affleck. "Do you recognize him?" Ha asks.

Of course. The character is the likeness of Zander Cannon, who just now sits opposite Ha. Cannon, who is 29 years old, is also bespectacled, and he wears a blue Giant Robot T-shirt. It is Cannon's downtown Minneapolis office we are in (he shares it with fellow comic-book artist Vincent Stall). Ha often draws the images for his comic-book characters from live models, and for the shady main character in The 49ers, he has chosen Cannon, a sort of a tribute to the fact that the two collaborated on illustrating Top 10.

The two came into the field about the same time--the early Nineties--during an explosion of independent comics. Both had illustrated in college, Ha earning a BFA in illustration from the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, Cannon writing and drawing an oddball cartoon called "Booperman" for the Grinnell College newspaper in Iowa. Ha illustrated comics for independent publishers such as Dark Horse for a few years, collaborating on creating Oktane, a satiric four-issue mini-comic about a nine-foot-tall giant cutting a swath of destruction through Las Vegas. Cannon likewise wrote and illustrated for independent companies, and he self-created the energetic medieval miniseries The Replacement God for Slave Labor Graphics.

"We first met at a comic-book signing in Lafayette, Indiana," Ha says of Cannon. "I'd never heard of him. He was a nice, quiet fellow who gave me some of his comics. I never expect much from the work in these cases. But when I got home and read them, I was deeply impressed. His series Replacement God is clever, energetic, and fun. So when I ended up in Minneapolis and needed an assistant, I looked him up."

Cannon has opened his Web page to show off some details from his own forthcoming project, a kind of sequel to Top 10 called Smax the Barbarian. The differences between his drawing style and Ha's are readily apparent. "My illustrations are more cartoony," Cannon points out, and indeed his Web page identifies him as "Zander Cannon, Cartoonist. "If Gene wants to draw a Gothic church, he will go out and take photographs of a Gothic church." Perhaps matching this visual style, Ha has a somewhat introspective quality to him, while Cannon is garrulous and jocular.

"I only draw one face," Cannon says, laughing. "If I want to make it into a different character, I add a mustache." Indeed, Cannon's illustrations have a smooth-lined generality to them, as though they were made from basic shapes, such as circles and squares. Ha's illustrations, by contrast, look more like portraiture. But Ha avoids composing images on the page. He explains that he isn't particularly fond of figuring out where characters will stand in relation to one another, and where a building or a tree might be in a frame. So for Top 10, Cannon composed the basic layout of the pages, which tell of a team of crime fighters and their adventures in a world where even the mice are superintelligent.

Ha then went in and added fastidious details, turning the landscape into a place of breathtaking complexity. The frames of Top 10 are crowded with images, from parachuting cowboys to wheelchair-using superheroes (including, for some reason, one of Dr. Who's daleks) who carry placards demanding equal access. These characters have no obvious bearing on the story we are reading, but they provide marvelous atmosphere. They peer into the comic book's frames from the background, seemingly living out weird lives that we will never see more than a peek of. In the foreground are Top 10's main characters, which include a semi-invisible lesbian as well as a Doberman pinscher equipped with an android/human body. This crew plays out a gritty series of crime melodramas that borrow as heavily from NYPD Blue as they do from the conventions of the comic book.

It has been a year since Top 10 reached the end of its 12-issue run, closing out with the rather surprising revelation that one of the series' main characters has been in a same-sex relationship since he was 16 years old, back in 1949. Top 10 has since been compiled into two books by its publisher. And Ha is hard at work on the prequel, a graphic novel, tentatively scheduled for release in 2003, which will investigate some of the themes that Top 10's ending alluded to. Cannon's sequel, Smax, is due out in miniseries form sometime next year.

As with Ha's The 49ers illustrations, which are filled with forgotten superheroes, Cannon crowds his frames with images from past fantasies: Characters from nursery rhymes and fairy tales abound. But just as Cannon's images are more cartoonlike than Ha's, his in-jokes are also a bit goofier. His imagined universe is filled with images borrowed from the covers of heavy-metal albums, for example; in the background of one frame, he has Britney Spears riding a unicorn.

Cannon and Ha are only two of the three collaborators on these Top 10-related endeavors. The miniseries was scripted by comic-book legend Alan Moore, a bearded and wild-haired eccentric who lives in his childhood home of Northampton, England. Moore may be best known for having penned a miniseries for DC Comics in 1986 called Watchmen which detailed the fading days of a group of aging superheroes, regrouped to battle one last global crisis. Beyond this, Moore has been responsible for some of the most distinctive comic-book scripts from the past two decades. His grim, heavily annotated retelling of the Jack the Ripper murders (42 pages of notes! In a comic book!), titled From Hell, was recently made into a film starring Johnny Depp.

"How did I meet Alan?" Ha asks. "I was talking on the phone to another comic-book artist who was already working with him. I told him that I wished I was working with Alan Moore too...so he told me to get off my lazy ass and do it. Honestly, I never had thought of just looking for work with him. The first company for which he was working was interested in my work, but they collapsed before I could do anything. But the second company, Wildstorm, is still here. And I'm still working with them..." (There was a fourth collaborator on Top 10 at the start as well, a fellow named Todd Klein, who lettered the early issues, roughed in the page designs, and created the Top 10 logo.)

These are the days in which comics are created over vast distances. The advent of the Internet is a part of this--collaborators often communicate with each other via email--but the evolution of Federal Express and the fax machine are just as important in this case. In fact, without this last, Ha and Cannon's collaboration with Alan Moore would have been impossible. In a typically contrary move, the author refuses to use the Internet. "I don't think he likes change very much," Ha offers by way of explanation. Moore leaves his house very rarely, and has joked with Ha and Cannon that he doesn't even like the other end of the living room. "People have strange customs there," he joked to his illustrators.

And so Moore's scripts, often written in one sitting without any planning, would hop the Atlantic via fax machine and then jump between the artists and a half-dozen editors. This occasionally resulted in scripts that were all but illegible. "He's got a computer," Ha says in mock frustration. "Why can't someone just trick him and set up the Internet for him?"

Once reached by fax, the two young illustrators would begin their painstaking work, Cannon mapping out how the action would fall on the page, and Ha superimposing his exquisitely detailed pencil (and, eventually, ink) drawings of characters and locations. That spirit of collaboration continues to this day, even as Ha and Cannon work on their own separate Top 10-inspired projects. Their offices are next to each other, and Ha, when illustrating the main character in The 49ers, will occasionally wander next door to take a few snapshots of Cannon.

Cannon's office has a messy, lived-in quality to it. His walls are lined with bagged comic books, and a "Slow, Children at Play" sign hangs above his desk. Toys abound, as do pages of notes. In a few weeks, Cannon will pick through the office, packing some of it and throwing the remainder away. He is preparing to move to Japan, where his wife has a job as an English teacher in Utsunomiya, a city about 100 miles north of Tokyo, home to Honda, Aiwa, and Kirin Beer. And so it shall be that, via fax and FedEx, two illustrators, one living in Minneapolis, one in Utsunomiya, will be creating a new world with a comic-book writer in Northampton.

"I'll still be working with Zander," Ha explains. "He told me that if I need any more Zander Cannon references, just send him an e-mail. He'll take a digital photo and send it to me." For the original Superman, of course, such a trivial technological exchange would have taken nothing less than superhero powers.

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REVIEWING TEN THOUSAND THINGS' production of Waiting for Godot this past year, I wrote, "I wasn't alone in passing through the barred doors that lead into the Ramsey County men's correctional facility to see Ten Thousand Things' production of Samuel Beckett's absurdist classic: A pale young woman with a Joan of Arc haircut also attended the play." Curious, I asked the play's director, Matt Sciple, if he knew her. He wasn't sure of her name, but told me that she was a local playwright. "A fan of the company," Sciple said.

Several months later, I saw her again in the audience for 15 Head: A Theatre Lab's production of Cheri. Again I went to the director--in this instance Julia Fischer--with the question of the stranger's identity. This time, success. The pale young woman with the Joan of Arc haircut was indeed a local playwright, by the name of Lisa D'Amour. "I got a phone call from a friend," D'Amour told me upon our introduction. "She said that City Pages had reviewed my hair....I don't even know what a Joan of Arc haircut is," she added.

I am certain Joan of Arc's haircut has a proper name, but for the life of me, I can't track it down. It has, on occasion, been called a dauphin's cut, a tomboy cut, a butch cut, a Buster Brown cut, and a Prince Valiant cut, although D'Amour wears her hair cropped more closely to her head and bleached a straw-colored blond. A little bit more length, though, and she could don cloak, slashed doublet, and lance, and nobody would think twice.

That being said, I mentioned her hair in the Godot review simply as an act of authorial shorthand. In the roulette that is brief, to-the-point descriptions, hair and skin tone came up. Another spin of the wheel, I might just as likely have described her height (tall) or her age (early 30s). In fact, even with her medieval boho coiffure, there is little of the airy-fairy about D'Amour. And this is worth noting because she was raised in New Orleans, was once the queen of a Mardi Gras ball, and currently writes plays that frequently involve supernatural or fairy-tale elements. An easy literary parallel would be Anne Rice, who dresses in black, with long, ironed hair, haunts a mansion in New Orleans that is stuffed with books on cannibalism and porcelain dolls, and will occasionally launch into morbid reminiscences about a child she lost to illness.

Well, so much for easy literary parallels. D'Amour has none of the affected morbidity of Rice, and her plays, while often fantastical, are hardly contemporary works of gothic horror, even when she is rewriting Poe. Her play Red Death: A Thriller in Seven Scenes, running through the end of this weekend at Red Eye, draws its inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe's melancholy short story "The Masque of the Red Death," which tells of revelers trapped in an abbey with a spectral figure that is the embodiment of a deadly plague. Poe's language in the story is never less than purple, such as when he describes the revelers as wearing costumes that showed "much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust."

D'Amour's thriller, by contrast, looks to the bureaucratic paranoia of Franz Kafka as it borrows from Poe ("Everything I took from Poe was tangential," D'Amour says), and her script has stripped away Poe's ornamentation. Scenes take place on mostly bare stages and consist of stripped-down dialogues between characters who sit perched between monochromatic stage properties. These backdrops are meant to represent a different year and city: For example, a set of orange beach chairs, inhabited by a woman in orange beachwear, represents Golden Sands Beach in Florida sometime toward the end of the 20th Century.

D'Amour's play tells of a psychologically deteriorating agent (played with a series of nervous tics by Red Eye cofounder Miriam Must) from a shadowy organization. Her assignment: to track down a childhood friend named Prospero (an imperturbable Tony Papenfuss, best known as one of the brothers named Darryl on Newhart), with whom she witnessed a horrific double suicide. The agent stalks her quarry like Poe's plague, burning his house, poisoning his family members, in the process destroying everything that Prospero hopes to protect. In turn, the agent is pursued by a giggling detective (Sam Rosen), to whom she robotically protests the megalomaniacal grandeur of her mission: She seeks the source of evil.

It is not surprising that D'Amour would be attracted to Poe's story of sinister, masked revelers, as the tale loosely recalls a sequence from D'Amour's own life. Although she was born in St. Paul, the playwright's family is from New Orleans, and they returned to the city when she was still very young. Her grandfather was a member of one of the innumerable social clubs of the city (the Krewe of the Olympians, specifically), all of which have parades and masked balls around Mardi Gras. D'Amour grew up with her grandfather informing her that one day she would be the queen of their annual ball. "It's a debutante tradition," D'Amour explains over a drink at a University of Minnesota bar on a recent Monday evening, adding that for months in advance of Mardi Gras she received instruction in "how to walk, bow, wave your scepter." More than simply being finishing-school-type lessons, these instructions were a necessity of physics, as her gown had a 45-foot velvet train that was specifically tailored for her.

"I was 18 or 19," D'Amour remembers. "I had just gone off to college in Jackson, Mississippi, and I had just taken my first women's studies class." As a result, D'Amour was ambivalent about the whole experience, which culminated in the surreal scene of her being presented to a massive hall filled with masked men in tuxedoes. "I did a performance about it recently at [the women's cabaret] Vulva Riot," D'Amour says. "I showed a video of it. People couldn't believe what they were seeing."

Though D'Amour moved back to the Twin Cities four years ago, she has mostly remained a stranger to local stages. "It has taken me awhile to get a play produced here," D'Amour says. Though her decision to move here came from a connection to the Playwrights' Center, which offered her a Jerome Fellowship and where she currently is a core member, Red Death marks her first full-length production in town. In part, this is because her scripts have been traveling back to Louisiana and Austin, Texas, where she attended graduate school, and where she maintains professional relationships. (She still "calls New Orleans home," according to her artist's résumé at the Playwrights' Center.) D'Amour frequently collaborates with an Austin-based director named Katie Pearl, often co-creating a style of theater that D'Amour calls "site-specific performance work."

An example would be a piece called SLABBER, a solo performance that has appeared at festivals in Austin and New Orleans (D'Amour has also performed the piece at Red Eye and Intermedia Arts). The performance revolves around a woman with an indeterminate and seemingly terminal illness, though D'Amour and Pearl reconstruct the piece for each new location. They pass out maps and cassette tapes to their audience, who must then track down D'Amour, who waits at an undisclosed spot, seated silently on a chair, swathed in plastic and a faux-leopard skin jacket.

Peal also directed a script by D'Amour called Anna Bella Eema. The play was a collaboration between D'Amour and composer Chris Sidorfsky (Ten Thousand Things will produce a new version later this year), and D'Amour describes it as "a play for three women sitting in chairs." Through a mixture of storytelling and a cappella song, Eema tells of a young girl facing homelessness who builds a friend out of mud. A reviewer for the Austin Chronicle was so struck by a recent production as to write that the play's "beauty and its depth are almost beyond language other than its own." A new production was to have opened at a Lower East Side Manhattan theater a few weeks ago, her first full-length play to appear in New York. The production was, however, interrupted by the World Trade Center tragedy.

"We proceeded as best we could," D'Amour said of the production, "but after a while it became clear that one of the performers was not going to be able to continue." Additionally, the company that was to have produced the play was uncertain about funding: Their fundraising letters had gone out on September 11.

The Twin Cities, at least, will see more of D'Amour in the next year. She is developing a play for the Children's Theater, whose recent projects with such distinctive local artists as Kevin Kling, Michael Sommers, Kari Margolis, and Tony Brown have revealed an unexpected daring. The production follows a short D'Amour script called Dreams of a West Texas Marsupial Girl. "There is always some sort of a creature in my plays," she says. "There's always a little bit of a fairy-tale feel to them, or a children's story."

Such a preference seems fitting to a playwright who traces her interest in writing for the theater back to her own childhood. "I remember putting up a full passion play when I was in second grade," she says. "I had it set up in different places in our backyard, so you had to move from one scene to another"--a dramatic conceit that recalls the peripatetic drama of SLABBER. Though, presumably, the Savior never wears any faux leopard skin.

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ASKED TO DESCRIBE playwright Kira Obolensky, her friend and former teacher Bill Corbett fumbles for an answer. "She's thin, blond, um, glasses. Energetic. She has a quicksilver mind. She's very imaginative." Corbett pauses. "Well, I'm not sure if I'm describing her or her work now." Finally he adds, "She's a pretty woman. Make sure she knows I said that."

Sweet talk from a man who once sent Obolensky, via e-mail and fax, a notable series of caustic letters, urging her to respond in kind. In one letter Corbett wrote, "It is my fervent hope that at the end of these three days, I will miss you. Right now, I believe you are a horrible shrew." Withering words, and just a few of the thousands of similarly bilious sentiments Corbett directed at Obolensky over a six-month period in 1995. Obolensky was delighted by the letters. "I couldn't wait to go to my fax and see what Bill had written," she recalls. "The challenge was to write back to him and to try and be equally petty and trivial."

The letters were a lark, of course; Corbett, a fellow playwright and actor who's probably best known for his work on the locally produced Mystery Science Theater 3000, had attended a production of A.R. Gurney's cloying (but seemingly eternally popular) Love Letters, an epistolary series of monologues between two lonely pen pals. Struck by a perversely comic inspiration of the sort that seems to strike him with alarming frequency, he sat down and composed a letter complaining about the purchase of an imagined snow globe. He faxed the letter to Obolensky, who'd been a student of his at the Playwrights' Center. "Certainly, I recognize the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty," he wrote, "but this diorama implies that these two structures are in fact the same height." The series of bitter letters that ensued formed the basis for a collaborative effort entitled Hate Mail, which debuted at Minneapolis's the Eye of the Storm Theatre in 1996 and will return in February along with a second Corbett play, Heckler.

In the intervening half-decade, Obolensky has risen to national prominence--most notably with Lobster Alice, which debuted at the Jungle Theater a year before opening at the Playwrights' Horizons in Manhattan, and The Adventures of Herculina, which the Frank Theatre company opened last week at the Southern Theater.

Corbett credits the 38-year-old playwright's ascendant national reputation to "the premises she comes up with." Lobster Alice, for example, was a romantic fantasia based on the true story of Salvador Dali's brief tenure as a designer for Walt Disney Studios, while Herculina tells the semifictionalized story of a young romantic of indeterminate gender whose search for love leads to corrupting, byzantine adventures in Victorian Paris.

"Other playwrights would die for that imagination," says Corbett. "She pulls [her premises] off in a great combination of poetry and silliness."

While Corbett might fumble in trying to describe Obolensky, he is quick to note her love of pierogi. In fact Wendy Knox of the Frank Theatre, who is directing Herculina, also brings up the Eastern European dumplings. "Sometimes she takes me to a church in northeastern Minneapolis where they serve pierogis every Friday," Knox says.

Obolensky sighs when she hears this. "I indulge in pierogis," she confesses. Some years ago, she explains, she was asked to help create a small exhibit about the Ukrainian Catholic Church, and she has been returning for the church's weekly lunch ever since. She even volunteered for a while, assisting in making the delicacies. "The ladies who make pierogis line up around long tables with handkerchiefs around their head," Obolensky remembers. "I would go on Fridays and sit with the ladies and learn how to pinch the pierogis shut."

This anecdote would be interesting but incidental, were it not for the fact that so much about Obolensky seems likewise interesting but incidental. There is, for example, her coauthorship with architect Sarah Susanka of the bestseller The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live, a fully illustrated coffee-table hardback offering decorating tips for people who live in homes that are more modest than those found in glossy architectural magazines. While Obolensky says Susanka "was really the source of the ideas in the book," the project has spun off into a new book that seems, well, more essentially Obolenskyesque: a coffee-table book on garages, "with many beautiful photographs," Obolensky notes, laughing. "It's about interesting things that happen in garages. Garage bands. Inventions in garages--you know that the Apple computer was invented in a garage. Disney started in a garage. There are chapters on murder-suicides and sexual peccadilloes in garages."

Then there's the story of Obolensky's decision to be a playwright, which seems almost too good to be true: After moving to the Twin Cities in the mid-Eighties (having spent her childhood in New York and Dallas), she spontaneously enrolled in classes at the Playwrights' Center in 1989, after seeing JoAnne Akalaitis's production of Jean Genet's The Screens at the Guthrie Theater. Three years later she was a Jerome Fellow at the center. Two years after that she was a playwright-in-residence at the Juilliard School in New York City. Despite a lifetime interest in the arts--she'd played violin in school and got a degree in visual arts from Williams College--her only prior experience as a playwright had been limited to writing the family's Christmas plays when she was a little girl. ("They weren't so exciting," she recalls, "although one year we wrapped the dog up in a box.")

So how is it that a woman sees a single play at age 27 and is so inspired that she spends the next decade forging a career in the field?

The play itself certainly deserves some of the credit. Akalaitis's direction of Genet's script was a sprawling, unconfined, five-hour eruption of theatrical imagination that calls to mind the famous myth of the Velvet Underground--only a thousand people ever saw them play, but every one of them went out and formed a band. As is typical of Akalaitis, she crowded the stage with ideas and dazzling visuals, creating a production thick with atmosphere: Incense burned, Middle Eastern music played from a live band of men holding ouds and hiding their faces under shawls, and performers whose characters had died in the play skittered above the audience on a giant net. This was an immense vision of the possibilities of theater, and to somebody like Obolensky, who herself possesses an unconfined imagination, it was irresistible.

But beyond that, as evidenced by Obolensky's wildly varied résumé, this is a woman who develops sudden passions and pursues them with enormous energy, whether they be anecdotal histories of American garages, five-hour plays, or pierogi. And while Obolensky's plays are not autobiographical, a hint of this same spirit echoes through her work. In Lobster Alice the protagonist's life is utterly transformed, without his willing it, by his exposure to the limitless creativity of Salvador Dali. In reviewing the play for City Pages last fall, Peter Ritter wrote that the "floodgates of imagination and desire have burst"--a neat summation of Obolensky's own explosive creativity.

And that brings us to The Adventures of Herculina, a play about a young girl in a French convent who dreams of South America, and whose own life is transformed forever by a sudden, unexpected love, as well as by the revelation that she may in fact be a young man.

"The seeds of this play were sown in a weekend workshop with Paula Vogel," Obolensky explains. Vogel, a playwright known for wild, off-kilter comedies about incest (How I Learned to Drive) and AIDS (The Baltimore Waltz), had instructed participants to write a monologue from the point of view of a character of indeterminate gender. Afterward Obolensky looked into writing a fuller script based on the suggestion. "I was fascinated by this idea," she says. At first she looked into the life of an obscure doctor who performed sex-change operations in the 1940s, but her research eventually led her to the diaries of Herculine Barbin, a hermaphrodite who was declared female at her birth in France in 1838 but who, doctors later determined, was actually male. ("Apparently there was some confusion," Obolensky wryly notes in the introduction to her script.) "Reading this diary was so dramatic and theatrical," the playwright declares. "Plays start with questions, and this made me think about a lot of them."

Obolensky fictionalized the story, setting it in the Victorian period. "It was an era of classification, and ends of centuries are so interesting and perilous," she explains. "History gives you a wonderful window; I find it an interesting lens to examine many questions." Primary among these, she says, is this: "How do you love someone forever when you're constantly changing and your partner is constantly changing?"

Herculina, which had its premiere at Chicago's Next Theater last year, raises its questions in a manner reminiscent of a children's story: The script is filled with sullen boys, stern abbesses, and violent jugglers (not to mention a cameo appearance by Dame Sarah Bernhardt), in settings such as railroad yards and carnivals. The play is neither strident nor preachy. Instead it simply allows its narrative to grow curious--the characters often seem utterly bewildered by one another--and to encourage the curiosity of its audience. "It's a messy whirlwind," Obolensky sums up. "That whirling kind of innocence that gets corrupted quite terribly, and twists quite suddenly."

Obolensky describes an early production of the work, directed by the illustrious Christopher Durang, in which several of the female roles were played by a transgender performer who had previously been a man. "There is a scene where the performer played Sarah Bernhardt and had to teach Herculina how to kiss like a man, and the role of Herculina was also played by a man," she recounts. She's quiet for a moment, obviously deep in thought. "Think about how many questions that raised!" she says at last.

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I ADORE the vast, alien landscape that is public-access television. Flashing from channel to channel on the upper end of the dial presents one with a barrage of unfamiliar images. Click: A smiling Somali woman singing East African pop music. Click: Two doctors in surgical scrubs taking chisels to a bent knee, from which they have cut away the skin and muscle, in order to shave away chunks of the exposed bone, sending fragments flying across the operating theater like ice chips. Click: Grainy, murky images from the Phoenix Playhouse production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show--specifically, an all but inaudible rendition of "The Time Warp." So little of what fills the public-access airwaves seems intended for an audience. Instead, with its garish lighting, flattened perspective, muddy sounds, and incomprehensible story lines, public-access programming often provides its viewers with the peculiar sense that they are peering into the dreams of a stranger.

In this landscape, we probably shouldn't be surprised to stumble across a naked abdomen gyrating to the striptease bassline from Davenport and Cooley's "Fever." After all, public access in Manhattan includes a weekly show from Screw magazine editor Al Goldstein in which he regularly disrobes his corpulent body and does perfectly horrible things to far-more-shapely coquettes. But cable in the Twin Cities is not like cable in Manhattan, where such things hardly raise an eyebrow. Instead, our public-access television is usually bone-dry, consisting of well-intentioned (although often impenetrable) political jeremiads, little comic skits from unfunny sketch-comedy troupes, and an amazing quantity of polka music. The oddly named Thomasina.com (Thursdays at 11:00 p.m. on MTN's channel 33) is the exception to Minnesota's usual decency; flesh is bared here. One notable episode, titled "Beyond Burlesque," consisted entirely of stripteases.

In a segment from that episode, three scantily clad women perform a complex bump-and-grind routine on a darkened set, surrounded by velvet curtains. They eventually congregate around a balding man dealing blackjack at a card table. Two of the women--now dressed in two-piece suits, suspenders, and wide-brimmed hats--battle each other for the affections of the third, their dapper outfits flying from them. The balding man looks on, a hint of a smirk playing around the corners of his mouth.

As the song ends, applause erupts from off-camera--apparently this performance had an audience, and from the enthusiastic, vocal response (including a sustained "whoooo!"), that audience must have been sizable. An animated spaceship flashes across the screen, taking the striptease away with it and revealing a plush sofa containing one of the dancers. This is the host of the show, as well as its namesake: Thomasina Kundalini. She smiles--a broad, Cheshire-cat grin that seems to take up much of her face--and addresses the camera. "Hi," she says in an enthusiastic, girlish voice. "Welcome back to Thomasina.com. We're in the studio interviewing Mr. Quigley and Maya."

She then turns and asks, "Is it all right if I call you Mr. Quigley?" On two soft-looking chairs to her right sit another of the dancers and the balding man. The dancer sports a massive purple hairdo and a fluffy blue boa, while the balding man wears a leopard-spotted smoking jacket and holds a martini in his left hand. "Please do," he says, still smirking. The scene is rather incredible: For some reason, somebody has let strippers take over the television, and they happily use their time to show videos of themselves peeling off their clothes, then interview each other about the experience. "You have some shows coming up, don't you?" Thomasina asks her purple-haired guest, who looks at the ground and responds haltingly. "Well," she answers, "there's Erotic City Resurrection."

* * *

"There are two Thomasinas"--this according to Thomasina, who by crowning herself with this stage name hints at the presence of still other personas inhabiting the body of the woman across the room from me. "My friends can't figure it out," she continues. "Because there is the part of me that is very outgoing and dresses up in costumes to go out dancing. But then there is another side to me that is completely different." And she is right, to an extent: In person, Thomasina scarcely resembles her televised image. She has the same high, enthusiastic voice and the same broad, surprising smile. Those aspects remain the same.

But two-dimensional images necessarily flatten out her features, and garish lights and low-resolution videotape further blur her face. On her television show, with her shock of short red hair, smallish nose, wide eyes, and a wider smile, Thomasina looks to be an image from hentai, the erotic cartoons of Japan. Every time she turns to the camera and flashes her teeth, it seems likely that she'll girlishly declare, "Tokyo de himo no seikatsu o shite'ru," and then cover her mouth with her hand and giggle delicately. Meanwhile, bright-yellow subtitles would translate: "He's working as a pimp in Tokyo."

So that's the first Thomasina--but what of the second? There is, as you might imagine, a Web page to go with Thomasina.com. But viewers who turn to their computers--perhaps hoping for more explicit evidence of her pulchritude--will be surprised. While Thomasina has filled her Web page with photographs of herself in feather boas and spacegirl outfits, the images are pure cheesecake, and surprisingly tame for someone who televises self-choreographed burlesque revues--there's not a nipple among them. Instead of frank sexual talk (in Japanese or otherwise), the site hosts dozens of samples of earnest poetry. "My ancestors dealt with fine fabrics in Ireland," she writes. "I weave threads of binary strings into glorious tapestries of me."

There is a strange plasticity to the Thomasina of the Web page. Of the dozens of photographs of herself that she has posted, few seem to be of the same woman. She wears a variety of wigs and costumes, like a glam version of Cindy Sherman. But there is something disconcerting about the photographs. It is not simply that Thomasina has a certain facial anonymity, as does Sherman, that allows her to disappear into invented characters. Instead, two photographs of Thomasina wearing exactly the same outfit seem to be photographs of two different women altogether. It is as if, through some miracle of genetics, Thomasina can physically transform herself with just a shift of her head.

When she claims that she is, in fact, two women, Thomasina is not doing herself justice. She may be hundreds. It is possible to suspect that, like Ellery Queen, the name "Thomasina Kundalini" is simply an elaborate fabrication used by dozens of people. How else to explain her seemingly endless variety of cottage industries, all meticulously documented on her Web page. Here is the short list: self-published poet, Web designer, photographer, singer/songwriter (with a forthcoming, and eminently danceable, CD), fashion designer, editor, painter, dancer, video artist. And, as might be expected from a woman whose name comes from a type of meditation, elsewhere on the Web page Thomasina writes that she "work[s] with energies, chakra balancing, reiki, and healing, hypnosis, channeling, tarot cards, rune stones, and aura readings."

Thomasina is reluctant to give away the details that might connect her personalities. She's protective of her privacy. Her Web page gives precious few details of her life, and she refuses to reveal such basic details as her age and her real name, even in conversation. There is an element of exhibitionism on the page, as we might expect from having seen her show--but not in a typically lascivious way.

For a few months this fall, the first image on Thomasina.com has been a startling one: Thomasina's eyes, one strangely dilated, surrounded by a wicked-looking bruise, the result of an auto accident. On a rainy night this past summer, her car slid into a median, inflating the driver's-side airbag, which promptly knocked her unconscious. Her car then strayed into the next lane and oncoming traffic. She woke with several teeth missing, her automobile destroyed, and her left pupil twice as large as her right. Thomasina went in to work the next day, nonetheless. "Currently, I earn a living as the Editor in Chief of the Metropolitan Forum, a weekly adult publication with a circulation of about 6000," she declares proudly on her Web site. The newspaper is owned by Sexworld impresario Dennis Buchanan and is edited out of his house.

"Dennis wanted to just put out an old issue while I recovered," Thomasina explains in conversation, but she insisted on editing the paper in a 17-hour marathon session, despite losing consciousness twice during the process.

"I would wake up on the sofa," she says. "Then I'd get up and go back to work. There was one point I was kneeling next to the couch with my head in a huge metal pot, puking walnuts out my nose and crying, 'Someone take me to vote! I have to get to the polls! The election is turning out all wrong, and it's all my fault!' But my concussion was so bad I could hardly walk."

Metropolitan Forum is an odd little paper. Independently published for nearly a quarter-century, it is one of the oldest free weekly newspapers in Minnesota. Asked to label it, Thomasina frowns. "How do the girls at work describe it? They have a polite word for it," she says, thinking for a minute. Then shrugs, and gives up--the best she can come up with is an ugly pairing of words: whore rag. In other words, Metropolitan Forum is a shopper for the local adult-entertainment industry--the Minnesota equivalent of a newspaper like California's L.A. Xpress, which features hundreds of postage-stamp-sized photographs of unrobed models accompanied by suggestive phrases and telephone numbers.

Indeed, the back page of the Forum is filled with little ads reading "Young Hot Busty Babes" and "Sexy Sensuous Sara." At the entrance to Sexworld it is possible to set up such an ad at an automated computer station: Just walk in the door, type in the necessary information, and leave--no human contact necessary. But that's just the advertising end of the Forum. The editorial end, which Thomasina is responsible for, is wholly unexpected.

Tom Bartel, the former publisher of City Pages, once told me that a newspaper necessarily takes on the personality of its editor. So it follows logically that if Thomasina is actually two Thomasinas, then Metropolitan Forum must necessarily be two Metropolitan Forums. Alongside ads for strip clubs and escort services, and comical adult material culled from Internet resources (short articles with titles like "Why Cucumbers Are Better Than Men" and "How Is Sex Like Riding a Bicycle?") is an ambitious mission statement: "I hereby beseech all writers and artists to submit their materials to the Forum for publication," Thomasina wrote in a recent issue. "If you have an article you'd like to submit, an event you would like to review, a poem you'd like to release, art you would like to show, or something to say about whatever...this is the place to do it."

Indeed, hidden among the more banal adult-themed articles ("What Those Men Advertising in Personals Really Mean When They Say...") are small personal essays and short poems, such as an impassioned autobiographical article on transgenderism. "I know there are not many women today that would date or even marry a man that crossdresses, but my wife did," the author, Billie Ashton, writes. "We even took that one extra step further and were both brides. Yes, and we even have pictures to prove it!" Hardly the sort of fare you would expect a businessman to thumb through on a lonely weekend in Minneapolis. L.A. Xpress, by comparison, publishes interviews with porn stars and short pornographic stories.

(Full disclosure: Metropolitan Forum has intermittently published my own light verse. While I've received no payment, I find the venue irresistible. After all, precious few respectable poetry magazines would print an original selection like the following, which ran in the Forum last spring: "Our founding father, Benjamin Franklin/Was celebrated for his love of spanklin'.")

Thomasina's connection to publisher Dennis Buchanan predates her position as editor of the Forum. She worked at various odd jobs at Sexworld, such as designing strippers' costumes for retail at the store, before Buchanan asked her to manage the short-lived Sex Art Gallery in 1997. Thomasina discusses Buchanan in glowing terms: "He's a genius," she will occasionally exclaim, or "He's like a father to me." While his multi-story, neon-lit, self-declared "adult superstore" is a fixture of Minneapolis's Warehouse District, Buchanan's aspirations for the venture have occasionally seemed ill-considered. A few years back, a newspaper reported that he wanted to build a coffee shop inside the structure. While there are undoubtedly fetishists who would not mind sipping foamy beverages while glancing through the pages of Kinky Nun magazine, they must be small in number. I imagine had Buchanan actually opened a café, it would have been the emptiest spot in Minneapolis.

But the Sex Art Gallery seems like a more noble failure, lasting just over a year. Thomasina designed the space, which ended up cluttered with little penis-shaped, Groucho Marx-mustachioed figures and framed pictures fashioned by painting women's breasts and then pressing them against a canvas. "There's something remarkably healing in this place," John Townsend wrote in Lavender on the opening of the Sex Art Gallery, vocally impressed by the unapologetic homoeroticism of some of the work. In an interview, Thomasina explained that "lots of respected artists have erotic art that goes unseen and unbought. Our gallery is a venue for work that other galleries are afraid to touch."

Thomasina found artists and she programmed weekly performances, which often consisted of a self-declared erotic artist named Brad Calhoon splashing paint onto women in various stages of undress, usually assisted by Thomasina in a lab coat. Having studied video production in college, Thomasina was not able to resist taping each of these performances, even though she appeared in most of them. "I would give the video camera to whoever was around," she explains, "and just tell them to start taping."

These video shorts wound up forming the basis for the Thomasina.com television show. One afternoon a man named Jim O'Connell wandered into the erotic-art gallery and saw Thomasina modeling clothes for a photo shoot. O'Connell hosted a public-access cable television show called Search Party, which featured local bands, and O'Connell had a video camera with him. He handed a microphone to Thomasina and asked her to record an intro for his show, requesting that she say, "Hi. I'm Thomasina down at Sexworld--c'mon down and see me some time. You're watching Search Party."

Thomasina, who has a degree in Speech/Communication from the University of Minnesota, could not get the words out of her mouth. She stared blankly at the camera and fumbled repeatedly. Footage of Thomasina's bungled Search Party intro appears at the end of one episode of Thomasina.com, and then fades to a title card reading, "In memory of Jim O'Connell. Rest in peace big guy." Shortly after Thomasina became friends with O'Connell, appearing on his show and enlisting his help in editing video footage into the first few episodes of Thomasina.com, he suddenly died.

Thomasina was devastated and briefly considered abandoning the cable-access show, which MTN was playing only grudgingly, worried that callers would complain about the show's mild nudity. "But one night I heard Jim's voice," Thomasina explains. "He said, 'Thomasina, what are you doing?' He kicked my ass, so I decided to continue with the show."

* * *

With O'Connell's death, some of the original footage for Thomasina.com disappeared, leaving Thomasina somewhat blurry VHS copies and one episode that could not be played on television because its tracking was ruined. That episode promised to be among the show's most sexually charged, featuring material from the bacchanal-like XXX Ball that Sexworld cosponsored at the Gay 90's in 1997. Among Thomasina's seemingly endless series of ventures has been the production of adult-themed club shows at venues such as the Lounge and First Avenue. The XXX Ball was, by all accounts, outrageous. Held in honor of National Coming Out Day and cosponsored by local businesses such as the Lava Lounge and XTC Leather, it was hosted by Chi-Chi LaRue. Formerly a shy, heavyset boy from rural Minnesota, LaRue moved to Minneapolis in the Eighties and reinvented himself as an oversize, wickedly funny drag queen. He then further reinvented himself by moving to Los Angeles and becoming a successful director of (and occasional comical character in) both gay and straight porn.

But rather than images of LaRue singing bawdy songs to the delighted XXX Ball audience, the videotape shows only brightly colored snow. Thomasina has been attempting to recover the footage using a sophisticated editing suite owned by her friend Bill Bruce, an amiable man who has filled his small studio space with hundreds of knickknacks, from Beatles memorabilia to ancient pinball machines. Together, Thomasina and Bruce have managed to salvage most of the footage from the lost episode for future broadcast. Such technical competence is typical of Thomasina: She regularly shoots, processes, and uploads digital pictures for friends in the industry through her Web business Muse Designs.) The rescued images of the XXX Ball look fabulous, in the way that an evening that included porn stars and showcases of erotic fashion is necessarily fabulous. In the video, go-go dancers strap on large rubber sex toys, which they then fellate.

"People still insist that much more was going on onstage," Thomasina says delightedly. "There wasn't. It was all just clever staging."

Alongside the XXX Ball episode, Thomasina has been editing footage for a future episode detailing a trip she took to Las Vegas for an annual convention of the adult-entertainment industry. The footage depicts her running around the city, watching the light show downtown, and getting her ass signed by porn star Ron Jeremy, who signed his name backward. "So that you can read it in the mirror," he explains in the footage, leering.

Thomasina also videotaped a dour woman who, on request, bent over and slapped her own bare rear end repeatedly. Her buttocks were already quite red, so evidently she had been spanking herself for much of the convention. Her hands beat out a staccato rhythm, and her face remained locked in a slight frown. "I don't know what she's doing," Thomasina says. "I saw her doing that, and ran over to videotape her." Thinking about this for a moment, Thomasina grins, then adds, "If I knew you could make a living doing that, I might have had a very different career."

While this comment might seem entirely appropriate for the Thomasina of the television show, it is surprisingly out of character for the real-world Thomasina, who often betrays a noticeable discomfiture with the more graphic elements of the adult-entertainment world. For example, Thomasina demonstrates the way she used to walk through Sexworld, passing banks of television sets displaying loops of hardcore pornography. She would hold her hands up to the sides of her face, shielding her eyes. "Sex is wonderful," she says. "Without sex, none of us would be here. But I don't want to look at that."

Similarly, although Thomasina dresses up as Fifties pinup fave Bettie Page in one Thomasina.com episode, she displays less nudity in a half-hour than the original Page generally would in 25 seconds, the approximate amount of time it must have taken her to snap off her bikini for her photographers. Her word of choice, burlesque, seems apt. For someone affiliated with Sexworld, which provides uninterrupted access to alarmingly graphic material, the sexuality of Thomasina's various endeavors has a wistful, oldfangled feel to it, as though she were reproducing old stag videos of fan dancers cheerfully teasing balding men in gray flannel suits at go-go clubs.

Appropriately, Thomasina herself worked as a go-go dancer for several years after college. It's a strange-sounding word now, go-go dancer, calling to mind visions of girls in bikinis and vinyl boots dancing the watusi to instrumental R&B numbers with names like "Let Me Play Wit' Yo' Poodle." It is hard to imagine that in the age of pay-per-view television and lap dances it is still possible for go-go dancers to find work. The survival of that curious craft relies on cities that have legislated against nudity in clubs that serve alcohol. As a result, a handful of clubs feature women dancing in bikinis, like some American Pictures beach movie, but with a stage and pole replacing the beach and bonfire. And so a circuit of sorts does exist, and, after some initial uncertainty, Thomasina joined it.

"I had a lot of friends in college who were dancers," she says. "They would always ask me if I wanted to work with them, and I always said no. But then I had a financial crisis."

Facing possible eviction, Thomasina called one of her friends and "begged her to set up a job for me," Thomasina says. "It took about half an hour to convince her I was serious." Thomasina rode a Greyhound bus to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. "I froze at the door to the club," she says. "I told my friend, 'I can't do it.'"

"Sleep on it," her friend responded, and they retired to a hotel. The next day, Thomasina climbed up on the stage of the club and danced for a while but could not bring herself to take her clothes off. "My friend crossed to the bar, poured me a shot of alcohol, and watched as I drank it. 'Good,' she said. 'Now strip.'"

Thomasina placed every keepsake from the Fond du Lac experience in an envelope--check stubs, hotel receipts, and her bus ticket--intending to destroy them when she returned to Minneapolis. "Somehow, I couldn't throw the envelope away," she says.

One of the real pleasures of Thomasina.com is that the television show reveals all of these surprising, contradictory qualities: the self-seriousness, the earnestness, the vaguely outdated notions about what constitutes adult entertainment. Even Thomasina's ambivalence about the rougher edges of pornography comes through: In the Las Vegas episode, Thomasina moves to give Ron Jeremy a hug goodbye. Jeremy wraps his meaty arms around her and presses his mouth to her neck, pawing her. Thomasina wriggles out of his grip, and then flashes an astonished, flabbergasted look at the camera, which is entirely unanticipated. What was she expecting of Jeremy? The man had, after all, signed his name to her ass.

Despite the exposed, gyrating midsections of Thomasina.com, the show has a charming, near-campy feel, as though this was not intended for adults at all. Instead, one gets the sense of watching children playing dress-up, although in this instance they're dressing as strippers. There is a constant sense of fun in the show, from the smirk that plays around the corners of Mr. Quigley's mouth to the outrageousness of the costumes that Thomasina's guests choose for themselves. In one remarkable episode, Thomasina sits opposite a man dressed in a foppish leather outfit, looking exactly like a Musketeer.

The Musketeer is Brad Calhoon, the self-proclaimed erotic artist from the Sex Art Gallery, whom Thomasina has captured in several clips, then collected for an episode of her show. My favorite starts with Calhoon dressed as a topless woman in an outfit that looked very much like a fetishized version of the Borg uniform from Star Trek: The Next Generation--including a long, mechanical arm with an enormous silver dildo at its end. When Calhoon finishes strapping on and plugging in his costume, his topless woman goes into something like a grand-mal seizure and then collapses on the floor.

Interviewing Calhoon on camera, Thomasina fumbles for questions before asking about his influences and the intentions of his art. Calhoon shrugs, smiling, and refers back to the collapsed topless woman. "Unfortunately, her delicate female psyche couldn't handle it," he says, "and she short-circuited."

"People, take not that this woman is being exploited," Thomasina interjects at one point. "She's there of her own free will."

"Yes," Calhoon responds, "and the roofies I gave her beforehand have nothing to do with this."

Before Calhoon finishes his sentence, Thomasina explodes into laughter, turning to flash her enormous smile directly at the camera. Thomasina is on a fabulous joke, her smile suggests. Are you?

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THEATER PEOPLE must go to bed every night cursing the law of averages. No matter how carefully they have prepared, no matter how much they think they are in control of their material, theater is a live medium, and--statistically speaking--this means sooner or later there will be a catastrophe. Kevin Kling, who appears in this year's Fringe Festival performing his one-man show 21A, recently described a production he was in at the Mixed Blood Theatre in the late Seventies--a stage adaptation of Rebel Without a Cause. He dubbed it Rebel Without Applause, and explains, "The reviewer from the newspaper wrote about the play, 'If one thing goes right on stage during this production, it won't be worth seeing. But right now, with nothing going right at all, you must go see it. It's the funniest thing I have ever seen on stage.'"

It was the early years of the ordinarily competent Mixed Blood Theatre, and Kling relayed how, in the Sal Mineo role, he was expected to move a dead cat across the stage. In fact, the cat was very much alive, and put up a mighty fight every night, scratching him badly. He describes how, during the script's deadly cliffside game of chicken, the production had simply shown footage from the film with cast members' faces superimposed over those of the film actors. "And during the switchblade fights," Kling adds, "we used switchblade combs, because real switchblades are illegal. But we didn't even bother to tape them over. We just painted them silver, so when the characters would fight each other, they would just click open silver-colored combs."

Worse still, during scenes where the characters were on motorcycles, the director placed plastic figurines on miniature remote-control motorcycles and sent them whizzing across the stage. "But they kept breaking," Kling says of the minibikes, "so we just piled them all up on whatever motorcycles were still working. And the cue for the motorcycles was the same as one of the lighting cues, which got confusing. And so once in a while, without explanation, these little motorcycles covered with figures like the Flying Wallendas would race across the stage in the middle of a scene."

Because the worst experiences often make for the best stories, we asked members of the local theater community for their favorite anecdotes of past mishaps and missed cues. What follows is a chilling peek into a world held hostage by the law of averages, where actors can be menaced by everything from murderous audience members to poisonous Jell-O.

Cats: Now and Forever

In 1980 Mixed Blood was producing Bloody Bess, a woman's pirate play--sort of Patty Hearst on the high seas. To get the out-at-sea feel, I set oyster shells and humidifiers with salt water around the theater. At intermission on opening night, as the audience stepped outside to smoke, 50 cats charged into the theater!

One fall, Mixed Blood produced Accidental Death of an Anarchist. In one scene an actor snuck into the seats and started borrowing pieces of clothing from audience members. Well, on the night of a Halloween promotion in which people got in for free if they came in costume, the actor asked to borrow a woman's mask for his onstage disguise. She declined, but he persisted. Finally she blurted, "It's a cast!!" It seems she had a broken head and it was the only night in months that she'd been able to leave home incognito.

The Ordway presented a touring production of I'm Not Rappaport immediately before Mixed Blood's production opened in 1988. In a marketing ploy, we compared our database with that of the Ordway. Our patrons who had gone to see the show at the Ordway got a letter offering a free ticket so that they could compare. The letter started out "I noticed you've been unfaithful..." One livid audience member didn't read closely and chewed us out for spying on her. It seems she'd gone to the Ordway with a man other than her husband and felt busted!

Jack Reuler

Mixed Blood

The Energy Crisis

As a theater company that loves to push the physical boundaries of performance, Margolis Brown ensemble members pride themselves on their well-trained bodies. Preparation for the rigors of performance are taken seriously by the company, with an actors call at least three hours before every show. Therefore no one took much notice the night that one young company member decided to forgo dinner, replacing needed nutrition with four energy bars. As we all know, energy produces energy--and energy has to go somewhere.

Tony Brown and I first knew something was wrong in the middle of a scene when most of the actors who were supposed to enter stage right entered from stage left instead. It wasn't until we exited to change costumes that we were confronted with the backstage reality of this evening's performance. All the actors were furiously waving their hands in front of their faces while trying to prepare for the next scene. Backstage smelled worse than a men's room in the New York subway. It was close to the smell we once encountered at an outhouse in Yugoslavia!

Backstage was a madhouse of actors running around, hands over noses, moving costumes from stage left to right, quickly redesigning the show to avoid the culprit actor at all costs. To this day I can honestly say that I have never been backstage with a more dedicated group of artists than the group that was willing toward the end of the show to submit themselves to getting under a thick black piece of fabric with the notorious energy-bar consumer. What generosity, what bravery, what artistry!

Kari Margolis

Margolis Brown



Out of the Pan, Into the Fire

I was doing Escape From Happiness with the Bald Alice Theater Company, and I was onstage playing this crazy mother. Dale Pfeilsticker was onstage, tied to a chair--I don't think I had gagged him yet. Another character was threatening him angrily. She picked up a frying pan to threaten him further, while I was standing there, just wiping down the table.

Meanwhile, Dale's father was in the audience, and he cried out, "Jesus! Dale, look out! She's got a frying pan!" Fortunately, my character was able to turn upstage, so that the audience couldn't see me laughing.

Jodi Kellogg

actor


Choked With Emotion

The best story I can give you is about the time that one of our audience members tried to strangle one of our actors. It was during a run of our interactive show Success! Now It's Your Turn, which was at Patrick's Cabaret in January and February of 2000. Audience members were part of a corporation called IHT (International Hoses and Tubes). They had to unravel a mystery which involved an insane CEO (played by actor Tim Jopek) who went around confiding to his stapler about his plans to blow up headquarters. Audience participants had to find out what was going on, disengage the four bombs, and bring the CEO to justice.

Unfortunately, one of our audience members had had too much to drink before he came, and at the moment of truth actually leapt up onto Tim's back and wrapped his arms around his throat. Now, Tim is no shrimp--sort of a John Goodman type--and the audience member was a short, wiry man in his 60s. Tim's eyes bulged with surprise and he turned around a few times, with this little guy hanging fire off of his back. All the performers were sort of nonplussed for a split second at the bizarre behavior, until we realized that Tim could be in actual danger. We all moved in on them at once and managed to disengage him. Somehow we worked it into the plot. I still feel like we haven't bought Tim enough beers to make up for that evening.

Anne Sawyer

Galumph Performance Troupe


Love's Labors Lost

A short story from Tony 'n Tina's Wedding: A couple was "in the act" on a stack of chairs on the theater's lower level when the show was over. Cast member Greta Grosch went over to them and said "Zip it up, kids. You can't do that here."

Sandy Hey

Hey City Theater



One Hundred Beautiful Actors and Three Ugly Ones

When the theater opened, we had a huge indoor parade to mark the event, featuring belly dancers, puppets, stilt walkers, indoor fireworks, the whole nine yards. One of the "acts" was a live appaloosa horse, and in Minneapolis you have to get a permit to have a horse inside the city limits.

So I trekked off north of downtown to the dog pound to get the permit from a kind man who had come here from Hawaii, so he obviously had a sense of humor. He, however, had to call another office to get permission, saying in a booming voice, "I need to get a live horse permit for Theatre de la Jeune Lune. They need it to open their theater in the Warehouse District."

A long pause.

Then, "No, not Déjà Vu! Theatre de la Jeune Lune!"

So much for name recognition....

Bethany Gladhill

Theatre de la Jeune Lune



The White Man's Burden

Three years ago I drove out-of-town actors to and from rehearsals and performances at the Lab in the Guthrie van. One day, an actress climbed into the front seat of the van, slammed the door, pointed a finger in my face and said, "You do not know how lucky you are to be white and male and living in this country!" I proceeded to shut up and drive while she vented (not diva-style; she just needed to vent) and when we arrived at the Lab, she opened the door, stepped out, turned back to me and said, "And just remember: The best person never gets the part!" She paused, then added, "Nine times out of ten!" slammed the door again and walked into the Lab.

Andrew R. Cleveland
actor


Where the Hell Art Thou?

Two years ago I was part of a production of Romeo and Juliet at the old Phoenix Black Box space. The actor playing Lord Montague doubled as the Apothecary in Act V. In between, he would take a nap backstage underneath the props table and snore. Despite the best efforts of the stage manager and other cast members to wake this guy, Romeo could never be absolutely sure he would be there when he called "Apothecary!"

One night, this actor proceeded to take a nap at home before the show and was awakened by a phone call from our frantic stage manager approximately fifteen minutes before curtain. He arrived at intermission. Our Friar Laurence played Montague in Act I and then Lady Montague entered in his place in the final scene to announce to the Prince, "Alas, my liege, my lord is dead to-night; grief of our son's exile hath stopp'd his breath." Within a week, this became a permanent change, and the actress who played Mercutio took over the Apothecary.

During a rehearsal of this same production, the director instructed me to "snatch the fan from the nurse's hand." As he walked back to his chair he called over his shoulder for us to "take it from the snatch!" He turned around, red-faced, to see his actors rolling on the floor, convulsing in laughter.

Andrew R. Cleveland


Character Assassination

Hotdish! was touring in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1994. We were doing a one-hour cabaret show at a restaurant/theater called Cappuccinos. One of the sketches we did that summer was one of our most popular, "The Jackie-Oh's"--a tribute to those Sixties girl groups like the Supremes or the Shirelles. It involved three of us dressed in Jackie drag (think pink Chanel, flip wigs, and pillbox hats) singing a medley of utterly tasteless and wholly inappropriate songs relating to the JFK assassination and Jackie's true feelings on the subject.

Keep in mind that not only did we do this in Cape Cod, but we did it only a month after Jackie had died--though the sketch had actually been written in early 1993.

As we began the sketch, in the middle of the show, a group of four audience members, who had until then been thoroughly enjoying the performance and eating their dinner, stopped whatever they were doing and sat dumbfounded at the spectacle before them. Without consulting one another, they simultaneously put their forks down on the table, turned their chairs around and sat with their backs to the stage for the rest of the sketch. They made no noise. They made no disparaging remarks. No boos. No hisses. No nothing.

When the sketch was over, they turned around, picked up their forks, resumed eating and enjoyed they rest of the show.

It was such a strong, strange, and evenhanded reaction to something that obviously offended them--make no mistake, we knew the sketch pushed some people's buttons--I had no choice but to respect their response. They simply chose not to participate in that sketch and to allow themselves to enjoy everything else we had to offer on its own terms.

Jon Mikkelsen

Hotdish!



Hazy Shade of Winter

I've had the experience more than a few times of an audience member flipping out during the performance while I've been onstage as an actor. It happened when I was acting in The Winter's Tale at the Guthrie nearly ten years ago. (I was playing one of those court guys who smiles and nods a lot and occasionally dispenses needed information--though I fancied that I was doing so with an extra pizzazz: "The part of Cleomenes has never stood out before, but actor Bill Corbett provides a certain clarity and passion that..." etc.).

Anyway, during the opening scene, which was basically a big party at the court, all is well--the stuff hasn't hit the fan yet, and there is lots of general jocularity. I was in the middle of a very charming laugh at the king's joke, but because of where I was standing onstage, I noticed that one of the doors to the house was opening, and light was streaming in. Since we'd been running it for a few weeks already, I knew that this was not the standard "seating the latecomers" time. A woman emerged from the light and started down the aisle. Nervy of her, thought I, in the midst of my courtly onstage smile, but she'll sit down in a second. Nuh-uh. She kept coming down the aisle. Wow, she must be sitting close up!

Very close--she kept coming, and coming--and I watched with disbelief as she stepped up on the stage! Needless to say, by this time other actors were noticing. It was scary, a violent break of that fourth wall--the poor woman looked disturbed, and wasn't wearing any shoes. She just looked at us.

Actor Steven Yoakam, who was playing the king, took charge of the matter brilliantly and compassionately, taking the poor woman aside and gently asking if she was all right, leading her to the ushers. Then after she was led away, he addressed the audience and told them we'd be resuming from where we left off. Seamless. (Stuff like that is how a man becomes king, I suppose.) Apparently the woman had stopped her car right in the middle of Hennepin, and just kept walking from the street to the stage. This was the fourth time an audience member had decisively interrupted a show while I was acting. Is it me?

Bill Corbett

actor/playwright


Jell-O Shots

Years ago, while studying theater at the University of Minnesota, I performed in their summer theater programs at the Peppermint Tent and the Showboat. The Showboat offering was an old melodrama centering on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Moriarty.

In one scene, Moriarty is having dinner in his apartment, planning to kill his unsuspecting dinner guest. The actor playing Moriarty gets up from the table and casually strolls over to a sideboard and opens a drawer. The prop gun usually sitting in the drawer is gone. Someone forgot to set it for that performance. Moriarty has to kill his guest before the scene ends, and it must be done quickly. What will he do?

Moriarty picks up the prop food from his plate, yells, "Poison Jell-O!" and mashes it into his victim's face. Luckily, the actor playing the victim knew a cue when he heard one. He immediately expired and slumped forward, lifeless, onto the table.

Michael Dahl

Hotdish!


The Littlest Cast Member

We opened the Bryant-Lake Bowl. We were there for the first three months. Danny Schmidt thought it would be funny to open the show with a little girl--this little bouffanted Ethel Merman freak child with a huge-ass voice.

I thought this was too weird for the show. I mean, she would sing "Lipstick on Your Collar"--this really adult material. She would lap-dance on senior citizens. She'd always end with the "Star-Spangled Banner," and she'd have a little banter with the audience.

One night she came up to us and said, "I've got some new material," and she said that she wanted to introduce our show by saying, "If you like music from the Seventies, you'll love Martini and Olive. And if you don't love music from the Seventies, you'll still love Martini and Olive." And I thought, okay, at least she's plugging the show.

That night she was really nervous, her voice was quavering the whole time, and I thought, oh, this little robot child, it's the new material, it's making her nervous. So she gets to the point where she has to introduce us, and she says, "If you like music from the Seventies, you'll like Martini and Olive. And if you don't like music from the Seventies, you'll still like...COCK." And I'm sitting backstage thinking, did that little girl just say cock?

The sad thing is, her mother always took her to the show, and when I went backstage afterward she was spanking the little girl: "Don't ever say 'cock' onstage again!"

Grant Ritchie

Martini and Olive

Baro Biao (World Wide Wedding) | Fanfare Ciocatrlia
Piranha

EMIR KUSUTRICA'S 1995 film Underground opens in a frenzy. A horse-drawn wagon hurtles through the streets of Belgrade with a Gypsy brass band chasing behind it, blowing their instruments at a breakneck pace as a gangster aboard the wagon fires a pistol at them. The gangster is Petar Popara Crni, who has just joined the Communist Party in protest of the impending Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia. The Gypsy brass band will follow him throughout the three-hour film (cut down by two hours from its original release), providing an ongoing soundtrack and commentary for his wild misadventures.

The band is not Fanfare Ciocarlia (“Just actors,” the band’s representation sadly told me), but the music is. Repeatedly during the film, these actors mime playing a rendition of “Kalashnikow” recorded by Fanfare Ciocarlia. In a film as famous for its hyperkinetic style as for its controversial take on the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, this propulsive wedding song provides the tempo for almost every scene. The results feel like a we’re watching a home movie of a drunken, endless party in which one of the guests has gone mad with liquor and has begun to attack his best friends. Additionally, the camera operator has likewise gone mad and decided to play the film back at twice its usual speed. Horns blare, violence erupts and a city burns three times in Underground, all with terrifying alacrity.

While “Kalashnikow” does not appear on Fanfare Ciocarlia’s newest album Baro Biao (World Wide Wedding), fans of Underground’s frenetic soundtrack will not be disappointed. The 18 tracks on this CD present a dizzying, virtuoso display of a style of music that is on the fast track to extinction in east Romania, the band’s home. A mixture of Gypsy melodies and military marches, the music remain alarmingly fast, the volume startlingly loud, seeming to posses enough muscle to meet any challenge. Unfortunately, this sort of large-band brass ensemble is growing scarce as younger musicians form smaller, more portable groups. The sounds Fanfare Ciocarlia produce require real labor, as them must drag their heavy instruments from place to place, where they hoist the heavy brass into the air and force sounds out of them with powerful blasts of air. One grows exhausted just listening to it, imaging the effort required to produce these noises, and it is no surprise that new players for this style of music are scarce. This is a thrilling, robust music, and even when nobody is left to play it, the echoes produced by Fanfare Ciocarlia will linger in the air, still bouncing off the walls, a memory of an amazing party that has ended.

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THEIR WEB PAGE does not have very good things to say about joy. "Anyone who has seen a winning contestant on The Price Is Right—jumping up and down in place with ample flesh jiggling, smiling mouth starting to evidence flecks of foam … knows in his or her heart that Joy is an ugly spectacle indeed," they write. Nonetheless, lurking behind their smart-ass, sharp-tongued observations and their oddly proportioned, stick-figure-with-giant-hands logo is the wicked giggle that can only signify--well, if not joy, then something very close to it. Delight, perhaps. At the very least, it is obvious that the men who produce TimmyBigHands.com take great pleasure in each other's company.

By name, they are Patrick Brantseg, Paul Chaplin, Bill Corbett, Kevin Murphy and Mike Nelson--names immediately familiar to viewers of the Peabody Award-winning Mystery Science Theater 3000. Even if their names are not familiar, their voices immediately are. Corbett, Murphy and Nelson, in silhouette, riffed relentlessly while watching the some notably awful B-movies. After the cancellation of their show, they turned to the Internet, creating a Web site where they could continue their famous sardonic commentary. Corbett describes them as sharing similar, skewed comic sensibilities, to which Nelson adds that their tastes in comedy are distinctly old-fashioned. Murphy points to Punch Magazine and some of the early writers from the New Yorker. There are no tricks or traps to our humor, they say; if it is not funny, they feel an urge to apologize.

They add new contents to their Web site every weekday. Currently, the site includes an obsessive series of letters from a man who has such an affection for his leafblower that he uses it to keep his American flag waving, much to the outrage of his neighbors. The Web page also includes a Socratic dialogue with a piece of luncheon meat, in which a clever philosophical argument is used to convince the scrap of flesh that it originated inside an animal. TimmyBigHands.com offers up a surprising range of humor--especially surprising when you consider how much material had to be generated every week for Mystery Science Theater, which was famous for its rapid-fire approach to jokes. One would not imagine that the creative spark in these men would have burned out long ago, just from the sheer demands the show demanded of them. Instead, it seems they have stretched themselves even further with the Web site. Fans of the show will recognize the same gentle, goofy comic sensibility, but the humorous pieces that show up on the site are, more often than not, unlike anything that ever appeared on MST3K. There is a thoughtfulness to their written material that was not possible in the assembly line of comedy that the television show required. With virtually unlimited space to fill, these writers can really fill out a comic concept. The pieces on the site are, as a result, simultaneously fuller stories (including several collectively written serial novels) and more abstract, meditative pieces. The only requirement for a piece to appear on TimmyBigHands.com is that it be funny, and so the writers pass their ideas on to each other to gauge the reaction.

There is something touching about this: It is so rare to hear of creative people who, after having worked together for years, decide that they wish to continue working together. Ordinarily these stories end in such an ugly manner, with embittered ex-friends lobbing recriminations at each other through the press. He was barely comprehensible for the last season, they will say. Every day we discussed firing him. He locked himself in his office with his freebasing equipment, and only came out--shirtless and filthy--to steal sandwiches from the craft services table.

No such stories come out of this group. Instead, they rented an office together in Minneapolis, uncertain even what they would do there but knowing they wanted to continue their creative relationship. Mike Nelson worked on a book of film reviews. The group developed some ideas for television projects and flew to Los Angeles to pitch them, but discovered that they were too late; There is a good time to pitch television programs, and they had missed it.

When they decided to do the Web page, it was not intended to be their full-time job. They explain that they have not really thought about how they are going to make money on the site, and the question hasn't concerned them. They began the site because it allowed them to continue to work together, to continue to have a presence somewhere in the media, and because they wanted to keep writing. They have, of necessity, kept the project modest; the office they share is not even capable of connecting to the Internet via cable jack, so whatever they produce must painstakingly be uploaded through the telephone lines.

In many ways, this ramshackle, very personal project recalls the origins of Mystery Science Theater. Creator Joel Hodgson began the program on a Minneapolis UHF station with several students from a class he taught on stand-up comedy. Hodgson has returned to Minneapolis after his comedy act had enjoyed a stunning, almost-literally overnight success in Los Angeles and New York, and Hodgeson had fled that success. MST3K was a product of his fertile imagination, a television show cobbled together out of a good sense of humor, a few gadgets, and a simple technological trick placing him and his friends in front of whatever movie they wanted to mock. It was the sort of high-concept, oddball television stunt originated by Ernie Kovacks and abandoned immediately afterwards. Kovacks was one of Hodgson's heroes (after leaving Mystery Science Theater, Hodgson worked with Kovacks' widow to help develop a new audience for her husband's groundbreaking work), and the show Hodgson created would have delighted Kovacks.

And now Hodgson's show has fathered this new project, likewise cobbled together out of a good sense of humor, a few gadgets, and a simple technological trick--computers and the Internet, specifically. And TimmyBigHands.com is refreshing now in the way that Mystery Science Theater was refreshing when it first appeared on the air, as so much of what passes for humor nowadays is the sort of mechanical, thoughtless gag writing that dominates sitcoms. It is so rare to see comedy that it produced by people for no reason other than they enjoy being funny, and their active imaginations continuously keep them wanting to create new forms of comedy, that stumbling across something like TimmyBigHands.com on the Internet creates the same startled, delighted reactions that Mystery Science Theater used to create. It is a reaction that is very much like joy.

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ONE DECEMBER 7, 1975, Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review rolled into the Correctional Institution at Clinton, New Jersey, the night before they were to play at Madison Square Garden. They played in front of several hundred prisoners, who remained unmoved throughout performances by Dylan, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell; a Rolling Stone story from the time has Mitchell scolding the inmates when they hooted her. “We came here to give you love,” she complained petulantly, “if you can’t handle it that’s your problem.”

The performance was an act of ill-conceived liberalism, the sort of thing that must have seemed awfully nice in its planning stages but turned out “piss poor” in reality, according to one of the musicians. The forthcoming Madison Square Garden performance was intended as a benefit for Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, an African-American man who had been wrongfully imprisoned for three murders in a Patterson, N.J., bar; the Rolling Thunder Review had thought it would be nice to play the same performance for Carter and his fellow prisoners.

But the prisoners were unmoved. They responded with enthusiasm only to singer Roberta Flack (whose songs the prisoners knew) and poet Allen Ginsberg, who read to them a short poem called “Kiss Ass,” which included the line, “Whites will have to kissass Blacks, for Peace and Pleasure.” Even Carter seemed strangely uninterested in the production, listening intently and tapping his feet only when Dylan sang “Hurricane,” which retold the story of Carter’s imprisonment.

Ten years later Carter was still in prison, the benefit at Madison Square Garden lost in his past, along with the well-meaning liberals who organized it. Carter’s case had been sexy once -- a perfect blend of prison issues, charismatic celebrities, clear injustice and racism, but by 1985 these causes were no longer sexy and Carter was no longer a celebrity. The living death that is prison had swallowed him up, burying him in his tiny cell. This is an occasional failure of liberalism: it pretends to seek justice, but in the end it seeks its own rewards. There was no reward in the endless appeals process the American justice system made Carter go through. Hope faded, the celebrities disappeared, and Carter was left alone.

Perhaps they grow their liberals different in Canada, because Carter was eventually exonerated and freed after five years of tireless efforts by 13 Canadians who devoted themselves to the case; it is the work of another Canadian liberal, director Norman Jewison, that produced a film version of Carter’s life called The Hurricane. The 13 Canadian do-gooders, reduced to three in the film, betray not a whiff of the sort of condescension and selfish motivation that too frequently mar liberal activism; these are genuine Samaritans, eagerly pursuing justice for no reason other than the desire to do good.

Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said for the film itself, which indulges its liberalism at the expense of the story. Jewison has always been a well-known but shallow filmmaker, producing a stream of unremarkable but popular films that espouse humanitarian values like tolerance and compassion. Unfortunately, biographies often make pegs on which to hang simple values, and unlike Fiddler on the Roof or In the Heat of the Night, the story of Rubin Carter does not hold up well when turned into a morality tale. Carter’s case was complex, involving the sort of collusion between press, police and witnesses that would allow an innocent man to go to jail. Racism was omnipresent in the proceedings, linked to public disgust at Carter’s outspoken support of civil rights, but that racism was rarely overt. Jewison simplifies all this into one fictional character, a cruel police detective who has made it his life’s work to see Carter in jail. While this literary device might have worked for Victor Hugo, The Hurricane’s version of Inspector Javert cannot help but subvert history. When Denzel Washington, as Carter, complains late in the film that he has been made a prison because there has been a conspiracy against him, he winds up sounding paranoid. There is no conspiracy, there is only Dan Hedaya making cruel plans from beneath his badge.

Likewise, the film trips over its most important theme: that prison life is so brutal that the only way to endure it is to destroy your own humanity. Carter made much of this fact in his book The Sixteenth Round, and as a result Washington discusses this dehumanization in great detail in the film, but Jewison flinches in showing it. The prison life to which we are privy does not seem so bad; it seems rather monk-like, with Carter idling away time in his prison cell reading Krishnamurti and dispensing wisdom. Jewison even gives up a sympathetic prison guard, played by Clancy Brown (apparently trying to make up for the sadistic prison guard he played in The Shawshank Redemption). Brown curries all sorts of favors for Washington, hand-delivering mail to the prisoner and allowing him to wear comfortable pajamas and lounge around in his cell all day. Carter’s cinematic prison doesn’t resemble unceasing brutality of that shown in harsher movies like Penitentiary; neither does it resemble the waking hell Carter wrote about in his memoirs. Prison officials refused Carter medical treatment, and a botched surgical procedure left Carter blind in one eye, but Hurricane ignores even this in favor of a prison in which black men sit around watching disco dancing on television and talking like children about why white people aren’t so bad after all.

The resulting film is exactly like Dylan’s 1975 Clinton prison performance, except in one regard: Both are convenient acts of liberalism, ignoring the real experiences of racism and prison in favor of choleric moralizing and inappropriate showmanship, but unlike the Rolling Thunder Review concert, The Hurricane is drawing applause from its audiences. But then, most of those who go to see this film will be closer to the audiences for a Madison Square Garden concert than a prisonhouse performance, and it is to these audiences that liberalism addresses itself. To quote the same musician who described the night of January 15, 1975 as “piss poor”: “We were uncomfortable, didn’t know what to expect. After all, we’ve played to nothing but white middle-class audiences on our tour.” Failed liberal activism can make these audiences very happy, even when it allows Rubin “Hurricane” Carter to languish in jail for an additional decade and does not care to understand his experiences.

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The Bartôk Album
Muzsikás (Hannibal/Rykodisk)

FOLK MUSIC seems to have such integrity. Steadfastly rooted in history, sung in foreign tongues and played on ancient instruments, it has always presented itself as an inflexible ode to the roots of human experience. These are the songs our mothers sang to us in our cradles and our fathers sang at their weddings, they claim wordlessly, and they should be preserved forever like some fragile wax cylinder recording.

Muzsikás’ The Bartôk Album includes several such ancient recordings, made by Hungarian composer Bela Bartôk during his many travels around Eastern Europe. The album couples these with new recordings of similar songs from Bartôk’s voluminous collection of field recordings, featuring the now internationally famous singing voice of Márta Sebestyén and the virtuoso violin playing of Alexander Balanescu. The Bartôk Album purports to be a musical exploration of the musical roots of Bartôk’s own, Hungarian-based classical compositions, and what the album discovers is profound: folk music becomes revealed as a thing of extraordinary flexibility, an idiom that shifts national and political identities with alarming frequencies. Bartôk’s interest in the folk music of Hungary coincided with the rise of nationalism — it was, in fact, the composer’s own nationalistic urges that inspired him to seek out the folk songs of his native land. In the hands of petty tyrants, this burgeoning nationalism would become part of the essential blueprint for fascism, and folk songs would become the soundtrack (it is worth noting that Bartôk has come under fire from some scholars recently, who argue that he was an anti-Semite).

But Bartôk quickly discovered that there is no purity in folk music. Just as Flamenco in Spain has incorporated musical themes from sources as diverse as Cuba and North Africa, so too the music of Hungary turned out to be a melange of sounds — including Jewish and Gypsy influence. Whatever his politics, Bartôk was scholar enough to respect this weird cosmopolitanism of folk music, and his pioneering studies created modern ethnomusicology.

How fitting that Muzsikás should turn their attention toward Bartôk. Musically, they have trod similar ground, relentlessly studying Eastern European folk idioms (with Sebestyén’s solo records extending to encompass Arabic and Celtic sources); they have always recognized the essentially international quality of folk music. Their musical history also reflects the shifting political meaning of indigenous music. Simultaneously useful for the right and left wings of politics, Muzsikás itself developed from the tanchez (“dance house”) movement in 1970s Hungary. This left-leaning movement played Hungarian folk music as a form of protest against Soviet occupation, which discouraged native Hungarians from asserting any independent, Hungarian-based culture. Additionally, filmmaker Anthony Minghella used Sebestyén’s voice extensively in The English Patient, a film that likewise explored the fluid nature of national and cultural identity.

All this would amount to nothing more than a musical curiosity — a cultural studies footnote in CD form — but for the fact that the resulting album is grand. Hungarian music, even with its influences, is unique: these songs have a swirling, rhythmically complex quality that charms modern ears as completely as it must have charmed Bartôk when he heard a Transylvanian girl singing “The red apple has fallen in the mud.” Bartôk instantly fell in love with the music, and it consumed the rest of his life. Listeners beware: This music has lost none of its beauty, and our lives are not so fixed that a snippet of The Bartôk Album might not similarly send us hurrying into the Hungarian mountainside with a microphone and tape recorder. “The time I spent on this work was the happiest part of my life,” Bartôk said; it might wind up being the happiest of ours as well.

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PAULA MAXA was murdered more than 10,000 times. She was the subject of endless brutality, a long parade of rape and torture. The location of her suffering was a former convent hidden between brothels and saloons in the notorious Pigalle district of Paris, and it is rumored that the fervent prayers of nuns could be heard rising out of dusty confessionals as Maxa was butchered.

Maxa’s murderers took special delight in cruelty. They carved into her with razors, or sprayed her face with vitriol, or went after her eyes with spoons, carving them out of her face and letting them fall to the ground with an audible thump. Observers of Maxa’s torment — and there were many, ranging from pimps and pickpockets to visiting royalty — responded by swooning or fleeing the theater. Whatever their horror, the observers returned again and again, making this nightly spectacle of savagery one of France’s most popular attractions, listed in guidebooks alongside the Eiffel Tower.

Maxa was an actress at the Theater du Grand Guignol, a peculiar company whose remarkable 60-year story has been widely ignored by most theater historians; it is mostly thanks to the pioneering work of Mel Gordon, a theater professor at U.C. Berkeley, that this peculiar and violent dramatic tradition has begun to develop modern adherents. Gordon published The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror in 1988, and since then several small companies have sprung up that claim the Grand Guignol as inspiration. Perhaps the most successful has been San Francisco’s Thrillpeddlers, who in the early ’90s debuted several short plays that focused on horrifying subject matter; these included Walk on the Wild Side starring Warhol superstar and internationally famous drag queen Holly Woodlawn, as well as producing the American debut of Clive Barker’s Frankenstein in Love.

Le Theatre de Grand Guignol (whose name literally translates as “the theater of the big puppet show”) began its life in 1897, and was an offshoot of — oddly enough — the burgeoning theatrical tradition of naturalism. Because naturalist theater insistently attempted to re-create real life onstage (some theaters refused to use sets unless they found them on the streets), it is hard to imagine how it produced Grand Guignol, which was famous for its wild declamation and elaborate special effects. But naturalism, which often drew its short one-acts from daily papers, produced a number of dramatic pieces called rosse plays; the name comes from the argot of the Parisian underworld, and refers to “crass” theater. These were plays that attempted to place onstage the violence found in the everyday life of society’s poor and forgotten. Radical artistic movements have had a long history of celebrating the criminal life; the rosse plays undermined long-established theatrical traditions by presenting the experiences of society’s refuse without benefit of moralizing. By the end of a rosse one-act, evil never received its punishment and good never triumphed. Instead, the squalor and desperation of the play’s characters continued, interrupted only briefly by an inevitable act of violence. entertainment for the Grand Guignol. The theater was founded by Oscar Méténier, a former secretary to the Police Commissioner of Paris and writer for tabloid-style journals. Méténier had cofounded the Théâtre Libre in 1887, a naturalist theater of sizable acclaim, and with his background Méténier quickly came to be widely regarded as a master of rosse writing. His plays were brief, usually less than 15 minutes, and unflinching; he had an ear for realistic dialogue and created a series of indelible characterizations of Parisian criminals. He named his new theater after the puppet stage to suggest that the brutality seen in children’s performances (such as in Punch and Judy plays, where the characters regularly attack each other) would be heightened for an adult audience. The location of the theater was ideal; it was claustrophobic and filled with weird ornaments from its days as a convent, include mad-looking cherubs with cruel faces that peered down from the rafters. The acoustics were muffled, the lighting terrible — and where better to stage criminal acts?

Soon butchers were bringing the remains of animals up to the theater each morning, leaving behind boxes filled with cow intestines or sheep eyes to be used as props. Inside, stage hands brewed up huge vats of false blood, while actors and actresses rehearsed committing the unspeakable upon each other. Its playwrights thrilled at their ability to terrify audiences; André de Lorde, for example, idolized Edgar Allan Poe and wanted to fulfill one of Poe’s dreams. According to Gordon, Lorde wanted to “write a play so terrifying and unbearable that several minutes after the curtain rises, the entire audience would flee from the theater en masse.” These playwrights began to look outside the tabloids for inspiration, basing the plays on classics of horror literature or wild flights of fancy. In one instance, the theater adapted Octave Mirbeau’s classic of decadent literature, The Garden of Torture, which told of two lovers who are trapped in a Chinese garden where all manner of elaborate tortures are practiced. Gordon lists dozens of plays at the Grand Guignol in his book, neatly categorized by theme; these include “Helplessness",” “Infanticide” and “Mutilation,” and the plays boast titles like The Final Torture and The Dead Child.

The Grand Guignol developed an enormous, near-fanatic following, and the theater’s cast and crew entertained themselves by counting how many audiences collapsed into unconsciousness from fear. On most nights one or two people (most often men) would faint, but a really good show could boast as many as 15 casualties, causing the theater to station a doctor in its lobby during every performance to assist the ailing.

The theater continued like this until the late ’50s, but by then the theatrical conventions of the Grand Guignol had deteriorated into a campy vaudeville of carnage. Audiences, which were half tourists, cheered the onstage butchers and reacted to violent episodes with joy rather than horror. Charles Nonon, the theater’s manager, lamented that real-life horrors had outstripped anything the theater could produce. “We could never equal Buchenwald,” he said. Additionally, horror cinema (many of whose masters openly admitted their debt to the Grand Guignol) reached a wider audience with a greater intensity than was possible on stage. They offered better special effects, and a greater separation between audience and performer. In the Grand Guignol, actors were so close to the audience that the front rows could reach out and prod fallen characters on the stage. It took a leap of faith to believe that the mutilated corpses in front of them weren’t simply actors in makeup; ultimately, audiences refused to believe. The Grand Guignol closed its doors November of 1962.

Like many forms of popular entertainment, the Grand Guignol came to be viewed with embarrassment. It was theater of spectacle and its redeeming elements were not instantly apparent; it pretended to say nothing important about the human condition, not to explore any great philosophical questions. The theater’s plays were often unlikely or outrageous, and existed only to inspire extreme emotions in their viewers. Critics rarely value this sort of art, preferring intellectually rigorous drama to one-acts designed to frighten audiences out of their wits. As a result, the name Grand Guignol has come down to use only as a sort of critical shorthand, applied to anything that includes extremes of horror and violence; Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus has been described as Grand Guignol lately, even though the play preceded the theater by hundreds of years.

The makers of Grand Guignol explained their function simply, pointing to the Aristotelean concept of catharsis. Indeed, the theater proved a popular evening activity for French soldiers recuperating from injuries during World War I — an unusual choice for men who had witnessed the savagery of trench warfare and the horrors of mustard gas. There must have been something appealing to these men, perhaps even necessary, about confronting horror. As Jonathan Gonzalez wrote in the Daily Star, “Grand Guignol gives us a link through the keyhole of normal society into the forbidden psychological world of the taboo subconscious.”

Beyond that, the Grand Guignol was simply thrilling. It was “everything we love,” according to the Institute for Arts Training’s Bob McGrath, “ — terror and blood and sex and sordidness, in a theatrical convention.” The Grand Guignol was — and, with the development of new plays in the tradition of rosse theater, threatens to become again — a pungent alternative to dry, living room dramas and slight musical comedies. If Paula Maxa died 10,000 times onstage, it can’t compete with the millions of performances of “To Dream the Impossible Dream” that echo forth from community theaters and high school stages every year — in the long run, the latter is more frightening.

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FANNY PRICE, the main character in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, is something of a dullard. Meek and easily exhausted, she mopes around her cousin’s mansion like the poor relation she is, scrupulously avoiding detection and pining away for the affections of a bland young man. Austen’s famous wit is muffled in this novel, buried under Price’s quiet suffering, and as a result even Austen fans describe Mansfield Park as a “difficult” novel. Translation: Compared to the sprightly, proto-feminist characters in books like Emma and Northanger Abbey, Price is a snooze.

Writer/director Patricia Rozema has solved this problem in her film adaptation of Mansfield Park; she has neatly snipped Price out of her own story and replaced her with a more entertaining lookalike. Rozema, whose previous features (including I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing and When Night is Falling) have focused on daffy lesbian characters, obviously preferred a charming lead in her movie — and poor, dour Price simply wouldn’t do. So out Price came, and in her place Rozema has glued Jane Austen.

Although star Frances O’Connor looks like Price and waddles like Price, she quacks like Austen — much of her dialogue is drawn verbatim from Austen’s own letters, and some of it is spoken directly to the camera. Rozema’s reinvention of Price has made her a woman who adores novels, although Rozema never makes it clear that in the late 1700s this was tantamount to adoring romance literature. Instead, Price seems like a budding young intellectual with a taste for piquant commentary and social flirtation — again, very much like Austen, of whom one of her contemporaries once said that she was “the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly” she ever remembered.

The results almost sabotage the film. This Austin-in-Price’s-clothing no longer mopes around her cousin’s mansion — she positively stalks it, quietly condemning her wealthier but empty-headed relatives for their many failings. While Rozema has cast Jonny Lee Miller (who has a talent for playing vain and foppish wags, as demonstrated in Trainspotting and Plunkett & Macleane) as the object of Price’s affections, he’s still the most boring male in the story, and it is curious that such a sparkling young woman should fall for such a tedious young man. Her romantic decision is particularly puzzling given the presence of the Crawford siblings, a slightly amoral brother-and-sister team who apparently both take a fancy to Price. Certainly the historical Austen wouldn’t have whooped it up and had a threesome with the Crawfords, but Rozema has already tinkered with the narrative to allow such modern elements as criticisms of class and slavery; once you’ve opened the door to modernity, there is no point slamming it shut again when it comes to issues of sex.

As a result, our desires are split. We know the film wants us to yearn for romance between Price and her bore; however, we can’t help but be dazzled by the Crawfords, particularly when the dashing brother engages in a delightful campaign to woo Price. “I can’t trust you,” she tells him, explaining her aversion to his affection, but this seems a puny complaint. We don’t care if Price trusts Crawford — we want her to bed him, further opening her eyes to an adult world that England, which was already plunging toward the Victorian era, would reject. Certainly in her voracious reading Price must have come across the idea of sex, but whenever it raises its loathsome head she scowls and flees it. This is perfectly in keeping with the Price of Austen’s novel, but comes off as shockingly naïve from the Price of the film. When Rozema’s Mansfield Park closes with a series of tableaus explaining that Price got her gentleman, but the Crawfords became involved with what seems like a wild foursome, it is impossible not to read this as Price’s loss and the Crawford’s victory.

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As Time Goes By
Bryan Ferry (Virgin Records)

FORMER ROXY MUSIC FRONTMAN Bryan Ferry has used the songs of the ’30s as a springboard for his puzzling notions about romance in As Time Goes By. In an interview with Robert Everett-Green of The Globe and Mail, Ferry cautiously asked his interviewer, “Do you think the romanticism of these songs is refreshing now, or do you think it’s too — weird?”

Weird, yes, but unsurprising from Ferry. Roxy Music distinguished themselves in glam London as much by their outrageous personal style (which one reviewer called “cabaret futura”) as by their music (lush, intellectual art-school pop). As Time Goes By is a logical progression for a man who throughout his career has turned to the past and presented it as the future, from his immaculate white tuxedos to his album titles (The Bride Stripped Bare, for example, borrows its name from a work of art by Marcel Duchamp).

Former fiancée Jerry Hall wrote about Ferry in Tall Tales, describing a complex man who adored both the cynical camp of affected homosexuals and the never say die stiffness of the British gentility; at every moment in Hall’s story Ferry seems to be flouncing with the lower half of his body while keeping his upper lip properly stiff. Whatever his contradictions, they are hardly contemporary contradictions, but stem from his desire to impersonate the most mannered aspects of the past. He has succeeded perfectly with As Time Goes By; his wavering, unadorned vocals and elegant, acoustic arrangements of songs like Kurt Weill’s “September Song” and Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets” sound borrowed from older phonograph records. These are gorgeous songs, even when they have been recorded so often that they have turned into clichés. The title song, for example, must rank among the best known of the 20th century as a result of its place as the unofficial theme song of Casablanca. But the lyrics and music, by Herman Hupfield, have never lost their power. “You must remember this,” Ferry sings at the start of the album, “a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh. The fundamental things apply as time goes by.” Briefly, caught up in Ferry’s perfectly reproduced fantasy of lost elegance, the lyrics seem possible; they become, momentarily, poignant again.

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SIXTEEN YEARS after Andy Kaufman’s death, one of his noxious alter egos was still making trouble. At a press junket for the film Man on the Moon, a man disguised as Tony Clifton — an abusive Vegas lounge singer Kaufman played throughout his career — picked a fight with Jim Carrey; the Clifton impersonator sprayed graffiti on a door and waved a prosthetic penis at horrified members of the press until security guards dragged him away.

This is Kaufman’s legacy: the comedian delighted in a sadistic sort of confrontational theater that alienated audiences more often than it delighted them, and the fact that Kaufman’s most hostile creation should survive him for so long and still dish out abuse is fitting. True to Kaufman’s lifelong insistence that Clifton was a real person, the credits at the end of Man on the Moon list Tony Clifton as playing himself, alongside such notable cameos as Lorne Michaels and David Letterman.

If star Jim Carrey deserved an Academy Award in 1999, it was for his seething performance as Clifton in this film. He didin't win it for playing Kaufman, although he certainly behaved as though he deserved to, engaging in a campaign of self-promotion that has become ridiculous, with Carrey claiming that he somehow channeled Kaufman’s dead soul for inspiration. “Andy just showed up,” Carrey told USA Today. “And if people wanted to talk to the person acting in the film, they figured out they had to call him Andy, because I wasn’t answering to Jim.”

Method acting pomposity aside, Carrey’s performance as Kaufman is mesmerizing; always an actor with a supreme gift for vocal and physical mimicry, Carrey does an astonishing job of re-creating Kaufman the performer in Moon’s many scenes set at television studios and comedy stages. These sequences act as, essentially, abridged versions of Kaufman’s greatest hits — a kind of cinematic retrospective, similar to the Little David Years CD anthology George Carlin put out earlier in 1999. Often Moon’s reconstructed performances work better than Kaufman’s actual act, as the performer steadfastly refused to let audiences in on his pranks, leaving them bewildered and infuriated. In Man on the Moon, we’re all co-conspirators in Kaufman’s pranking, looking on gleefully as he baffles audiences with readings from The Great Gatsby and wildly sexist intergender wrestling matches. Despite Kaufman’s occasional protestations that he was simply an entertainer (in a moment of pure absurdity he once described himself as a “song and dance man”), Kaufman was something else altogether. His performances still leave critics floundering for comparisons, from Anne Beatts’ comment that “he twitches!” to Robert Smigel’s insistence that Kaufman was “the modern art version of comedy.” Marty Feldman, who directed Kaufman in the film In God We Tru$t, might have come closest to the truth when he described Kaufman’s performances as having “a sense of danger, a kind of general anger.”

Kaufman’s comedy seemed fueled by a smoldering rage; it expressed itself in his performances as ongoing cruelty, although his biography is empty of the sort of temper tantrums so common to angry performers (a longtime practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, Kaufman often affected a peculiarly blissed-out attitude), but if there is one theme common to all of Kaufman’s work it is rage. He was particularly adept in inspiring it in others; it leered on the faces of infuriated audiences at his wrestling matches (audiences he taunted mercilessly), it appeared in his interactions with other performers (Taxi co-stars Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza and Jeff Conaway couldn’t stand him; a furious Conaway struck Kaufman in the face at the 1979 Golden Globes Awards ceremony), and it found its purest form in the abusive Clifton.

Man on the Moon refuses to address, or even acknowledge, this rage. Carrey’s offstage Kaufman appears to be, at worst, mildly autistic; onstage he’s a lovable prankster who rarely received the accolades his genius deserved. We shouldn’t be surprised that director Milos Forman and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski would approach the Kaufman story from this angle — they trod similar ground in Ed Wood and The People vs. Larry Flint. Alexander and Karaszewski are good storytellers, but they are terrible biographers, in every instance altering or manufacturing details in their subjects’ lives to support the story they want to tell. This is the third time they’ve taken a marginal or cult figure from American popular culture and turned him into a heroic, misunderstood rebel, and their simplistic narrative grows thin and frays at the edges in Moon. Kaufman simply was too great an enigma to be trapped in a simple story (Jay Leno summed up the Kaufman experience by saying that he was “basically confusing to spend any time around”).

Just as the screenwriters smoothed the rough edges of Ed Wood’s life by ignoring his final, pathetic years of alcoholism, so they try to clean up the Andy Kaufman story. Alexander and Karaszewski hint at Kaufman’s predatory sexual habits, but fail to examine them; despite setting a long scene at a college campus, the film never mentions the fact that Kaufman used tours of the college comedy circuit to troll for coeds. His youthful obsession with Elvis Presley likewise goes unexplored, as does his career failures (the film Heartbeeps and several unpublished novels, for example). Moon juggles the narrative so that one of Kaufman’s greatest triumphs, his Carnegie Hall concert, comes at the end of his life as a response to the news that he has developed fatal cancer. In reality, the concert occurred in 1979, five years before Kaufman’s death.

The trouble here is that Kaufman’s life, like his career, was nothing but rough edges; smoothed away, a tremendous mystery lies at the center, and even with Carrey channeling Kaufman, Moon does nothing to unravel the mystery. We are not even given the origins of many of his famous routines, even though they are widely known (Tony Clifton, for example, was loosely based on comedian Richard Belzer), so even Kaufman’s performances retain an distinctly otherworldly feel, as though it isn’t comedy we are watching but instead a transmission from Venus.

While Ed Wood and Larry Flynt were also guilty of botching their subjects’ biographies, they made for good movies because they centered around several tremendously compelling characters; Moon cannot offer anything comparable. With Kaufman remaining a cipher, his relationships never become developed. Danny DeVito, Courtney Love and Paul Giammati (as Kaufman’s producer, girlfriend and writing partner, respectively) are all excellent in the film, but the script gives them so little with which to work that they hardly register as performers. A pity, because the characters they play are fascinating in their own right. For example, Lynn Margulies (played by Love) directed the documentary I’m from Hollywood, which contains a fuller examination of Kaufman’s obsession with professional wrestling than Moon could have dared to attempt. In Moon, however, there is little for Love to do but cheerlead Kaufman’s theater of brutality and shed bitter tears when he dies.

And Kaufman dies in Moon; the filmmakers take great pains to make his death as poignant as possible. Interestingly, a sizable contingent of Kaufman’s fans don’t believe the comic died at all, but that he faked his own burial as a final, terrible prank. Many speculated that Kaufman would appear at the premiere of his own cinematic biography just as Clifton appeared at the press junket, lurking in the audience like Tom Sawyer at his own funeral and laughing at his marvelous stunt. If Kaufman did appear, he did so unnoticed. Perhaps he had planned take the stage at the Academy Awards to steal the Oscar out of Jim Carrey’s hands and dash it to the ground, but the Oscars bested him by not awarding Carrey at all.

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DIRECTOR Miyazaki Hayao may never be a hugely successful import into the United States, despite being one of Japan’s most respected and successful animators (when Princess Mononoke opened it quickly replaced E.T. as the highest grossing film of all time in Japan). While there is a growing body of fans for manga (Japanese comic books) and manga-inspired feature films (such as the mind-blowing Akira), Miyazaki’s gorgeous animation falls well outside the world of giant robots and psychic children that American audiences crave.

Animators who have influenced Miyazaki include Yuri Norstein, a Russian, and Frédéric Back, a French Canadian; like them, Miyazaki runs the risk of laboring in obscurity, creating 90-minute cartoon epics defined by their fantastic visuals and literary depth. Princess Mononoke must rank among his finest films (which include Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind and My Neighbor Totoro), but will undoubtedly be forced to scramble to find American viewers, beyond a dedicated cult that includes the creators of Pixar's movies. Mononoke's story, telling of a war between humans and forest gods in prehistoric Japan, juggles dozens of characters and plots; the inattentive viewer at Mononoke can easily become lost. The film contains shockingly casual violent episodes, including multiple decapitations, and sometimes plays these scenes for comedy; audiences for animated film in the United States are usually too young for sequences such as these. Mononoke explores Hayao’s many ambivalences: about the encroachment of humanity into nature; about war and weapons of war; about heroism and villainy. None of this makes for easy viewing. Like the jagged cartoons of the Fleischer brothers, who also influenced Miyazaki, Mononoke’s images are often more shocking than entertaining.

Miyazaki may never find more than a relatively small cult following, but so far they have proved to be dedicated, and with good cause. Miyazaki's vision of a vast forest god wandering delicately through overgrown, ancient woodlands as millions of spectral figures look on in awe represents as pure a vision of the possibilities of cinema as we’re likely to get this year, and Mononoke is crowded with such visions. It is a great, beautiful dream of a film and should inspire great, beautiful dreams in its viewers, few though they may be.

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BRIEFLY, the role of Joan of Arc was the most hotly contested in Hollywood, with a half-dozen studios competing to complete their separate scripts about the Maid of Orleans and actresses from Winona Ryder to Sinead O’Conner lobbying for the part. It feels somehow fair that the film version was made by director Luc Besson, who is French, but the fact that his previous film efforts have included La Femme Nikita and The Fifth Element raises the same uncomfortable question that also applies to Dogma’s Kevin Smith: How can we trust a filmmaker with so resolutely juvenile a vision to tackle a story about a crisis of faith?

Besson is on firmer ground than Smith, who created in Dogma an action film with no action in it. Unlike Smith, Besson has a flair for noisy action scenes and an extraordinary mastery of visual shorthand. Where Smith would sit his characters down and fill their mouths with extended exposition, Besson uses tiny chunks of dialogue and sweeping, breathtaking images. The story of Joan of Arc grants Besson unlimited opportunities for staging action, as Joan’s miraculous victories over the English came mostly from her ability to inspire her soldiers into massive, suicidal rushes toward the English fortresses. Besson has filled these fortresses with a startling array of murderous medieval contraptions, and as Besson pits the battle-scarred but noble French against the monstrous but better-armed English, he achieves a sort of ecstatic pop sensibility. These scenes are as muscular and brutal as any ever filmed, a tornado of gore swirling around the shimmering, possessed figure of Joan of Arc.

Unfortunately, when Besson exits the battles and enters the world of faith, he becomes lost. Joan’s visions, which haunt her throughout the film, seem like outtakes from ’60s-era gospel musicals, consisting of gusting winds and an ugly, scowling Jesus (who is as dissimilar as possible from the beatific “buddy Jesus” of Dogma). In prison for heresy, Joan of Arc has endless, meandering arguments about faith with Dustin Hoffman, who is listed in the credits as “the conscience.” The Messenger strives to create a crisis of faith in these scenes, but the only crisis the audience feels is frustration that all the good characters are gone (including John Malkovich in a witty, simpering performance as Charles VII). The movie rambles along to its destination and when it arrives discovers it has little to say. We watch Joan of Arc burning at the stake, her clothes flying off her body like scorched paper, and feel neither the pity nor the horror that the scene should provoke. Almost three hours after the film began we’ve grown exhausted beyond caring. The burning figure of St. Joan seems to be little more than another firework in a film filled to busting with fireworks, and after so many extraordinary battles this little fire is disappointing.

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IN THE 1930S a pulp magazine titled Dime Mysteries pioneered a strange genre of crime story; they called it the “Weird Menace,” and it frequently featured a crimefighter who was disabled or in some way horrifically deformed. Writers Garry Hoppenstand and Ray B. Brown dubbed these “defective detectives” and reprinted a small selection of such stories in their book The Defective Detective in the Pulps, which opened with their hilariously titled essay on the genre, “I’d Kiss You Sweetheart, But My Lips Are Missing.”

Novelist Jeffrey Deaver must share with Hoppenstand and Brown a fascination for these bizarre old pulps, because he sprinkled elements of them through his novel The Bone Collector. Many of these elements have translated directly to the screen: There is a crippled forensic investigator who surrounds himself with an array of high-tech devices and peculiar assistants to suss out crime; there is a mad genius killer who arranges evidence around his brutal murders in order to instigate a cat-and-mouse game with the police; there is even a perky teen model-turned-investigator who comes face-to-face with a madness beyond her comprehension. All of these elements could have come out of old serials like “The Shadow” or “I Love a Mystery;” in fact, musty pulp crime novels turn out to be an essential piece of evidence in this film, much as the writings of Dante served an essential plot function in Seven.

These pulp elements have a frightening, almost hallucinogenic vividness when well used (think of the character of Kaiser Solze in The Usual Suspects), but in The Bone Collector they serve simply to spice up an otherwise bland outing into the already overcrowded psycho killer film genre. Author Deaver has a near obsession with police procedure, and that translates into plotting that is very much by-the-book. The film’s plot points tick by like a slowly read and badly written police report, never really gaining steam until the climax, in which our defective detective, who has only the use of his mouth and one finger, must defend himself against a murderous monster. The resulting battle is an impressive, imaginative scene; unfortunately, it comes at the end of two hours worth of mangled corpses and dead-end confrontations, draining it of its ability to thrill.

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NOVEMBER 16

I'M ALONE. Completely alone on earth.

I don't know where everybody else is. This morning I woke up and they were just gone. My apartment building was empty. The Somali-run grocery store across the street was open but empty. I spent the day wandering downtown Minneapolis. There was no traffic, although I saw cars stopped in the middle of the street, doors open, and though the driver and passengers had stopped suddenly and simply fled their cars. The entirety of downtown evidenced similar scenes of sudden abandonment. At a bookstore, books lay open the floors as though they had simply been dropped. A cash register was open and money lay on the counter. Movies played at the movie theater, and popcorn and half-drunk cups of soda lay spilled in the aisles.

I staggered through the streets, stunned and disbelieving, calling out occasionally. My voice echoed back to me. Sometimes I would hear other noises. Once I thought I heard talking, but, on investigation, proved to be narration from a video game playing from a screen in an electronics shop. The video game was trapped in a loop, thanks to its loss of a player. It was some sort of a fantasy game, and two men in armor stood before a bridge that crossed a canyon. "Shall we go forth to Cimmerdon?" asked one of the armored men. He waited for a response, and after a few seconds, asked again, and then again, and then again.

I went home and made phone calls. My family. My friends. The police. Random numbers. I got hold of answering machines and left pleading messages. Sometimes, the phone just rang. I tried calling numbers in other cities and in other states. Nothing.

Internet chat rooms were likewise empty of action. As far as I could tell, the last online discussion had happened at 8:15, the moment I woke up.

I remained up until late at night, watching television. There were no live broadcasts, only repeats of old shows and movies. When the news was supposed to come on, instead the screen went blue, and did not resume broadcasting for half an hour, until repeats of Seinfeld came on. I watched the television, and I prayed this was only a dream, and I would wake up tomorrow and all would be normal again.

NOVEMBER 17

I did not sleep well. I dreamed of other people, and woke, and went to the phone and tried to call them, and got their answering machines. I thought I heard traffic in the street and ran out, almost naked but for a long coat I threw on, but there was no traffic. Nothing but abandoned cars. I managed a few hours of fitful rest, and then decided to take a walk through the empty city.

I wandered seven or eight blocks, trying to imagine what might have happened. It did not seem possible that the city might have been evacuated and I somehow missed it, but perhaps that was the case. And why would anyone evacuate the city? I dreaded to think about it. Perhaps there was some some of radioactive leak, or odorless gas, or something equally dreadful. Maybe some cataclysm was on its way, and Minneapolis was in its path, and I had been forgotten in the confusion. But how?

And why were nationally broadcast shows also off the air? Why couldn't I reach anybody in Los Angeles, or Omaha, or New York, or any of the other cities I had tried? I did not merely seem alone in Minneapolis. I seem to be the last one alive on earth, but for birds and squirrels and the like, who went about their business as though nothing had happened.

Was this something like the Rapture? Was this some event that had taken everybody but me? If so, why was I left behind.

As I pondered my situation, I passed a bank of newspaper racks near the Hennepin County Medical Center. I fished out fifty cents and bought a copy of the Star-Tribune, thinking perhaps there might be some clue there. But there wasn't. Just your usual stories of crimes and politics and human interests. There was nothing in the paper to explain why all of humanity might suddenly go missing.

I was about to throw the paper out when I noticed its date. November 17. Today.

This was printed last night. All of the events it detailed happened yesterday, when I was wandering around an empty city. But, according to the Star-Tribune, the city had not been empty at all. Meetings had happened, sporting events had occurred, plays had been reviewed, and people had lived and died, just like any other day.

I was just a few blocks from the Star-Tribune building. I ran.

The building was empty. There were no receptionists. I wandered through its unfamiliar halls, looking for any evidence of life.

I found the newsroom. It was filled with empty cubicles. Computer monitors still glowed. I looked at one. A partially completed story filled the screen, abandoned mid-sentence. The dateline for the story was today. Next to the desk was a thermos of half-drunk coffee. It was still hot.

I remembered the ash tray in the front of the building. I hurried out. There were butts in the ash tray that were still smoldering.

I called out, desperate and terrified. Nobody answered my pleading hallos.

I ran downtown in a panic. I went into the bookstore and crossed to the cash register. There was no longer money on the counter, and the register was closed.

What's going on?

NOVEMBER 20

Every morning, I check the Internet. Sure enough, there is an entire previous day's worth of activity -- on chat rooms, on blogs, on online news sources. There are new newspapers on their racks every day. The Somali grocery store increased their inventory of candy bars yesterday. They had been out of Snickers and Baby Ruths. Now they have both.

Yesterday I went to to diner down the street and marked the position of all the plates and silver wear and cups. I circled them with a grease pen. This morning, everything has changed position, and the grease marks are gone.

I decided to experiment. I went behind the counter and took out a can of Coke. I opened it and drank about a third. Then I set it on the counter.

When I returned a half-hour later, the Coke can was gone.

I am not alone in this world. Instead, I am living in a world where, wherever I go, everyone has just left. And, from the way I will see coffee spilled, or groceries dumped on the ground, or bicycles left on their side, they left in a hurry.

At the diner, I grabbed a bottle of ketchup and used it to write a message on the counter in oversized letters. "MY NAME IS BUNNY WHERE IS EVERYBODY?" I wrote. I left the diner and walked around the block. When I returned to the diner, my message was gone. I went behind the counter and found a garbage can. At the top of the garbage can were a half-dozen paper towels, stained with ketchup.

I picked up the ketchup and wrote another message. SCREW YOU.

I spent the rest of the day sitting on the sidewalk in front of the diner, staring at it. Nobody entered the diner, nobody left it. Finally, I got too cold to remain outside and I went back into the diner. My message was still there.

NOVEMBER 21

When I returned to the diner this morning, my message was gone. I rewrote it.

I have been leaving angry messages on chat rooms. Nobody responds to them. When I am on a chat room, there is no activity at all. But the moment I leave for a moment, my message is deleted. I have tried to sign on to a few online forums only to discover that I have been banned.

I break into a neighbor's apartment and trash it. Then I spend the day on their phone, randomly dialing international numbers. Nobody answers. Hours later, I return to the apartment. The books are back on the shelves, the kitchen has been cleaned, and a new bolt sits by the door, waiting to be installed. Screws and a power screwdriver lie on the floor, scattered about, as though dropped.

I am not alone. Not at all. For a while, I considered the possibility that I had somehow slipped into another dimension. Everybody else on earth was going about their business, and I was in a dimension where I would not see them, and so, instead, it would seem to me that the earth had been abandoned. But the more I thought about this, the less sense it made. Why would the people in the real universe erase my messages from the alternate universe? Why would cars seem abandoned? Wherever I go, it seems as though people were just there moments ago, and then fled when they heard I was coming, dropping whatever was in their hands. What sort of alternate universe would create this illusion?

There is another possibility, but I dread to consider it. I have not slipped into another universe. I am in the same universe as everybody else on earth, and they are shunning me.

I don't know how they are doing it, but wherever I go, they flee. If I go to an online forum, they abandon it. If I make a call, they somehow know it is me and refuse to pick up the phone. I suspect that live television is still being broadcast, but, the moment I try to watch, they go off the air.

How did they get everybody in the world to agree to this? How do they know I am coming? Where do they go to get away from me?

And why? I'm no great shakes as a person, but, at the same time, I'm not so bad. What have I done that is so terrible that I have alienated every person on earth? What have I done that has caused my friends and family to sever contact with me? What have I done that has so repulsed humanity that even strangers have agreed to flee if I come near?

What did I do?

MAY 30

In the past six months, I think I have seen someone on two occasions. Once, I thought I saw a man on a roof, staring at me through binoculars. I ran to the roof, but, of course, by the time I arrived, he was gone.

Sometimes I feel I have gotten used to being alone. I don't want for anything. I can just take what I need. I spent three months driving around America. I did it on a whim. I just climbed into a car that had been abandoned in the street. When it ran out of gas, I switched cars. When I got hungry, I simply took food from a grocery store or gas station, as I always do. I take whatever I want. Who is going to stop me.

I drove through an empty America. Chicago had been abandoned before I arrived. New York was likewise empty. I stood at Chelsea Pier and briefly considered taking one of the yachts, heading across the Atlantic to see what the rest of the world was like. But I don't know anything about boats and suspected I would die at sea if I tried to navigate to Europe. I considered doing it anyway.

Instead, I drove back to Minneapolis, back to my apartment. I spend a lot of my time watching DVDs and listening to music. I have a lot of time. I don't work, of course, and I don't have any social obligations to distract me.

I have been teaching myself how to cook Indian food. A few times a week, I go to the Indian restaurant on Lake Street and use their supplies and kitchen. I make a hell of a masala , if I do say so myself. I mostly spend my nights at local bars, mixing myself cocktails. Sometimes I worry I might be turning into an alcoholic. I need to watch my drinking. I need to take care of my health in general. If I get sick with anything that can't be treated with pills, I'm in trouble. Pills I can get.

Worse still, the alcohol makes me maudlin. A few days ago, I got quite depressed and wrote long, accusatory letters to all my friends. I drove around the Twin Cities, sliding the letters under their door. I suppose I might have mailed them, but I suspect the mailman would simply throw out any letter from me. I don't know that my friends will read these letters, or if my anguished words will mean anything to them. But I miss them. I miss everybody.

Yesterday, as I was passing an apartment building, for a moment I thought I saw someone staring at me through a window. I only saw it for an instant, as I passed, and when I returned to the window there was nobody there. It was not somebody I recognized. It was an old man, and he looked at me with wide eyes. He trembled slightly when he saw me and turned away. At least, that's what I think I saw. Maybe it was just a funny reflection.

Maybe I just saw myself.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

THE OMEGA CODE, a Christian-financed film about the end of the world, has raised eyebrows throughout Hollywood. In its opening weekend it made the largest per-screen profit in the United States, besting both Fight Club and The Story of Us, and was the 10th-highest grossing film. The film flew under Hollywood’s radar, financed independently and advertised by a grassroots campaign that targeted Christian bookstores and television shows. Despite this, and its producer’s publicly stated hopes that The Omega Code would be a sleeper crossover hit, the film was been dogged by bad reviews and accusations of subtle anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic content. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the film is nevertheless fascinating.

The Omega Code had already, essentially, been made once. In 1979 Hal Lindsey’s speculative interpretation of the Book of Revelation, The Late, Great Planet Earth, was adapted into a pseudo-documentary narrated by Orson Welles. It insisted that its audiences would live to see the end of the world, brought about by current events that (according to Lindsey) the Bible had foretold. Lindsey’s apocalyptic vision has been profitable for him; his 13 books have sold over 35 million copies worldwide.

The Late, Great Planet Earth was not an action film, as The Omega Code is. While the latter ended with a digitally-created rain of fire burning throughout the world, the best scenes of apocalypse that Earth could muster were a few stock footage scenes of war, but otherwise it settled for veiled accusations that Jimmy Carter might lead to the Antichrist. The Omega Code, perhaps learning from its predecessor, points no fingers; the film’s characters are entirely fictional, the events shown are intended merely as dramatizations of the final battle between good and evil. Except for a few audience members who cheered and gasped throughout the picture, it is a hard film for anyone to take seriously; after all, it tells of the battle between a blandly handsome demon (Michael York) and a blandly charismatic motivational speaker (Casper Van Dien). It is a timid vision of apocalypse, hardly matching the savage tenor of the revelations of St. John the Divine in the New Testament. Timid, but familiar, the scenario that plays out over the course of the film, involving a worldwide conspiracy emerging out of Rome, is the same as that in Planet Earth. If we look to the credits, we find the same name: Hal Lindsey is listed as the film’s sole consultant.

In 1999 we stood at the height of millennial fervor, with a sizable portion of the population holding their breath in anticipation of the return of the Messiah. It was perhaps the last strange gasp of the 20th Century that this dizzying, fervent religious desire — one to which Christians have clung with a fierce passion — was being marketed as popular culture. Two months prior to the year 2000, even the end of the world had become another bad movie.

PRODUCER Joel Silver wanted a promotional campaign for his remake of House on Haunted Hill that would recall the ballyhoo of the film’s original creator, William Castle. Silver’s bland gimmick was to give film-goers cards which might allow them to win 300,000 free Blockbuster movie rentals or $100,000 in cash — the same sort of promotion that can be found at any fast food restaurant. Castle himself had a genius for inventive attention-getting schemes, and his autobiography, Step Right Up, I’m Going to Scare the Pants Off of America, detailed everything from his insurance policy against death from fright (for Macabre) to “Percepto,” an electric buzzer that shocked terrified screams from unwitting audience members (from The Tingler). Castle’s gimmick for the original House on Haunted Hill was likewise ingenious — he created a hidden skeleton that flew out over astonished viewers at the film’s climax, a sight gag he called “Emergo.”

Castle’s P.T. Barnum-styled antics weren’t simply playful; they were magnificent ploys to attract viewers to his low-budget horror films. He produced a marvelous collection of ghoulishly funny movies, many starring Vincent Price, before eventually winning an Academy Award for Rosemary’s Baby in 1968. His films were only occasionally great cinema, but they were always great showmanship.

“I want louder screams, more horror, more excitement,” Castle famously declared, and the remake of Haunted Hill seems to have taken Castle’s words to heart. It is a gee-whiz contraption, overstuffed with inventive visual effects and spooky atmosphere; its titular house, for example, was modeled on old Nazi designs, giving it an unusually sinister quality. The madness at the heart of this house is first hinted at by Saturday Night Live alumnus Chris Kattan, who gibbers in terror as he pours alcohol down his throat and insists that the house will have everyone dead by morning. Soon ghastly figures in hospital gowns crawl through the basement, and for a short while Haunted Hill seems to be accomplishing everything The Haunting tried for, but failed to achieve: fear. Unfortunately, the film suffers from the same lapse in imagination that plagued its promotional campaign, eventually abandoning its chilling madhouse imagery in favor of a thick black cloud that chases the film’s screaming victims. The cloud is a nifty computer graphic, but won’t cause anyone to collect their Lloyd’s of London fright insurance. House on Haunted Hill reaches for imaginative thrills, but eventually its imagination fails in favor of special effects; a pity, because the last thing William Castle would ever have been accused of is a failure of the imagination.

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THREE TO TANGO is a slight but charming feature about the horrors of being a straight man who is believed by the public to be a homosexual — apparently a greater problem than I had realized, as this was the second time Hollywood has addressed it in the 90s. In the first film, In and Out, it turned out that Kevin Kline was a homosexual after all, so perhaps Omaha-born screenwriter Rodney Patrick Vaccaro has decided to redress a wrong in his film. After all, despite the success of In and Out, the American population still doesn’t know the indignities of being thought gay when you aren’t. It is, he points out, hard to get dates with girls and a little embarrassing to be hit on by men. If this seems like precious little framework on which to hang a comedy — well, it is, but Vaccaro squeezes this cinematic turnip until it produces blood. While Three to Tango was never going to make homophobes apologize to gays for his hateful rhetoric, the film serves a minor social purpose. It helps make homosexuality less alien, and more sympathetic, although I would guess we’re still decades away from Matthew Perry growing out a handlebar mustache, carefully knotting a handkerchief and cruising a leather bar. One day he might want to, onscreen or off, and Three to Tango helps, in a tiny way, to make that possible.

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AT THE OUTSET it seems strange that director David Lynch, famous for his savagely odd vision of cinema (such as the films Eraserhead and Blue Velvet) would direct a G-rated film for Disney. That the story concerns a 73-year-old man who drove a John Deere lawn mower 240 miles to visit his ailing brother, dispensing homely wisdom to strangers and happily munching on hot dogs, seems odder still. But there has always been a streak of stubborn conservatism in Lynch that makes The Straight Story a logical, if eccentric, choice of projects. His films, in a perverse way, have always celebrated small-town living and simple values. His characters are frequently rubes who get caught up in a wash of nightmarish violence when they stray too far from home and church — think of Laura Palmer’s brutal end in Twin Peaks. Lynch carefully charted the last hours in Palmer’s life in the movie Fire Walk With Me, detailing her trips to drug dealers and whorehouses with the casual ruthlessness of a public defender demanding a rape victim’s sexual history in order to prove that she had “asked for it.” Lynch’s neo-noir often comes across as a stern lecture about the dangers of temptation, as though he was more a fundamentalist minister than a filmmaker. Like the best ministers, he wishes to move his audience away from Hell by first taking us, step-by-step, into it; it is not enough to warn about the wages of sin, so Lynch must show us the blood-soaked rooms and shattered bodies sin produces.

It is a disturbing, moralizing universe Lynch gives us, which might explain why papers like The Christian Science Monitor have always championed him. He is on firmer footing with The Straight Story, as rather than bully us with images of inhumanity he instead grasps for images of compassion. The idealized heartland of this film is populated with well-wishing strangers who will hurry out of their way to give an ailing man a hand, who drink beer with each other and confess their heartbreaks, and whose stubborn and often bewildering behavior is hailed as heroic. Lynch lenses his film in long, sweeping shots of threshing machines and cornfields, relying on hackneyed cinematic conventions such as his frequent uses of fades (in which our hero’s grizzled, beatific face is superimposed atop waving fields of grain). The result resembles an American Primitivist painting of Jean-Luc Goddard’s film Weekend, in which a simple holiday road trip turns into a surreal adventure. Lynch has turned to Weekend before — he drew from it extensively for the travel sequences in Wild at Heart — but now the adventure is less surreal than it is homespun. Lynch-like flourishes abound, such as an encounter with a woman who constantly, and accidentally, crashes her car into deer, but these flourishes never detract from the essential plainness of the story. Lynch has stated openly that he wanted to create a family film, and in The Straight Story he has done so. He has manufactured something that would be as welcome in any American home as a brass doorknob or a good hammer, and we can well imagine Lynch holding these items up for inspection and declaring them beautiful. In The Straight Story he makes his case eloquently; we are convinced for two hours that the most commonplace thing can be extraordinary. As a result, The Straight Story is among Lynch’s most mature film, and his most heartfelt.

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HORROR FILMS sometimes seem like nasty 10-year-old boys, sneaking up behind us to toss crickets in our hair. They’ll scrounge around in the dirt for hours, looking for any critter that might make us jump: worms, spiders, frogs, even (in a notably awful film called Night of the Lupus) rabbits. But there is only so long we can be chased around the playground by a little bully waving a long millipede in his hands before it becomes tiresome; certainly the 50-some-odd years Hollywood has been churning out this sort of movie must be enough.

The creators of Bats have tried to up the ante by using the same trick as that in Deep Blue Sea: the ghastly flying monsters in this film are the products of a hideously conceived science experiment, just as Sea’s sharks were. They are bigger, smarter and deadlier, which begs the question: how are these experiments finding funding? In the case of Bats it is the military, apparently having decided that simply being able to blow things up isn’t fun enough; instead, they’ve decided to genetically engineer swarms of killer bats that descend from the skies to chew on shotgun-carrying Texans. Briefly, it is fun; any producer worth his salt would be happy to put his money behind a movie that promises to show an entire town in Texas consumed by vicious flying rats. This 20-minute sequence, the film’s centerpiece, is a hoot; unfortunately, the remainder of the movie can’t keep pace with it, tripping over its own nonsensical plot points and trying to explain itself with the sort of panicked earnestness it would if a grade school principal grasped its collar, pulled it into the office and demanded an explanation.

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DRIVE ME CRAZY is notable only for the offscreen promotional antics of its star, Melissa Joan Hart. Hart, the star of Sabrina on the Warner Brothers network, stripped down to her skivvies for photo shoots for tell-all men’s magazines such as Maxim, confessing to torrid sexual experiences and binge drinking (she delightedly told both Maxim and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show about a college drinking game fixated around Sabrina: every time the cat talks, you take a drink). Her behavior has so infuriated Archie Comics chairman Michael Silberkleit, whose company publishes the Sabrina the Teenage Witch comics, that he immediately demanded she be dismissed from the show.

Nothing stirs the kettle better than gossip and controversy, and with a film that was once titled Girl Gives Birth to Prom Date and costars Adrian Grenier, who was slated to star in John Waters’ next trash opus, it was possible to imagine that Drive Me Crazy would have more to offer than the usual teen fare. Instead, we are given a rather by-the-numbers story of star-crossed teen romance. Why is it that Hollywood is so desperate for teenagers to fall in love with each other, particularly high school seniors (on prom night, no less)? Don’t they know that these kids are just going to go off to college and have their hearts broken when their high school beaus don’t call for several weeks, then write terse letters explaining how they think they need to be free to see other people? “Who are we making jealous?” the heroic teenagers ask at the end of the film, and then answer their own question: “Everybody.” Everybody except me. I sat in the theater and remembered my own high school crush, who married a foreign exchange student and moved to a village outside Helsinki several years after graduation. Where was she now, milking cows? Churning butter? Archie Comics be damned, Melissa Joan Hart owes me an apology, as my old flame isn’t likely to show up in her panties in the pages of a men’s magazine anytime soon. My memories of high school romance are painful, and Drive Me Crazy doesn’t do them justice.

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I HAVE NEVER been more frightened than at this moment.

I was asleep. The noise woke me. I don't usually wake at noises, but, then, this wasn't a typical noise. This wasn't the sound of the radiator banging, or the sound of a branch brushing against a window, or traffic in the streets, or anything I might typically hear at night and sleep through.

This was a crashing noise, and it came from my kitchen.

And I was up, just like that. Asleep, awake, and, in my wakefulness, hideously aware that I had forgotten to lock the front door.

How could I be so stupid? There has been a rash of strange deaths in my neighborhood. The police have carted away bodies covered with scratches and torn to pieces. Patrol cars silently prowl the neighborhood at night, flashing their floodlights into bushes and darkened doorways. The police chief issued a statement a few days ago asking that residents take particular care to insure that they are safe at night. At the top of his list was making sure that you have locked your door. And yet I forgot. It was late, I was tired, and I had been drinking. And now someone is in the house.

Worse still, my cell phone is in my pants. In the hallway. I do not have a landline, and, when I got home last night, undressed and threw down my clothes as I staggered to bed.

It is on the floor near the kitchen.

I have seen this moment in a million horror movies, all of which I now regret watching. I will have to walk down the hallway to get my phone. At some unexpected moment, a cat will jump out at me. Moments later, I will be killed. That's always how it happens.

But this is not a horror movie, and I do not have any choice. There is someone in my house, and I must call the police.

My plan is to grab the phone and flee out my front door. It's not much of a plan, but it is better than remaining trapped in my bedroom, waiting for whatever is making that noise in my kitchen to eventually wander by.

I will walk slowly and quietly. I will scarcely breathe. And I do not need to worry about a cat jumping out at me, as I do not have a cat.

I do not get more than a few feet into my hallway before a cat jumps out at me.

I clamp my hands over my mouth in order to keep from screaming. The noises in the kitchen pause for a moment, then resume. I glance down at the cat. All I can see are glowing eyes staring at me from the darkness. It must be a neighbor's cat. The Plymouths have two Siamese who they let wander the neighborhood. The killer opened the door, and a cat followed him through.

It makes sense, but does little to calm me. After all, in the movies, this is the moment when the killer attacks.

But I can hear the clattering from the kitchen. The kitchen door is open slightly, and a soft light pours out. The light spills across my pants. Occasionally, a shadow moves in front of the door, and then moves away. More clattering comes from the kitchen.

I continue to walk down the hallway. The cat follows, purring.

Another cat leaps at me, this time straight down from above. I let out a little yelp, and then freeze.

The shadow moves to the door and then stops. The second cat, now at my feet, meows.

The shadow moves away from the door again, and the clattering resumes.

Where the hell did that cat come from? It is too dark for me to really look around, but I can't think where, above me, the cat could have leaped from. I can make out its shape in the darkness, along with the first cat. They circle each other warily.

Screw this. I need to get my pants and my cell phone. Perhaps if I make a dash for it, I can grab both and be out the door before whatever is in the kitchen has time to react.

I don't make it four steps before two cats leap out at me, one from either side, tripping me. I spill to the ground and slide several feet, right into my pants. I can now see into the kitchen. I can see what is making the clattering.

There are hundreds of cats in there.

The kitchen is a mess. Somehow, the cats have managed to get the refrigerator open. They have emptied it of its contents, which lie on the floor of the kitchen, torn open. Dozens of cats stand around a river of milk, lapping at it. Other tear at plastic containers of leftovers. Dozens of cats prowl the cabinets, knocking over appliances. They do this slowly and deliberately. There is none of the mewling you would ordinarily associate with cats.

One passes by the door to the kitchen and glances up. He sees me through the crack in the door and stops. He lets out a surprised noise. It sounds like this: "Melp?"

All the other cats in the kitchen stop what they are doing as well. All of their heads move in unison to look at me.

That's a lot of cats.

Behind me, I hear the sounds of claws on hardwood floors. I turn to look. There are four cats sitting in the hall behind me, kneading the floor with their paws, staring at me.

Why are all these cats looking at me?

Oh.

Crap.

Why didn't I lock the door?

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

FOR MY TASTES, the only film that should ever be made about the Holocaust is the one I could not bear to watch. It is impossible to dramatize the murder of six million Jews, it is similarly impossible to show the horror of their experience without following them into the gas chambers and dying with them. Instead, we must settle for compromise, and we must define the terms of those compromises. Spielberg compromised in Schindler’s List by making a film about a heroic Nazi who saves Jews. The director scrupulously avoided the brutal murder of many of the main characters. He brought us into the gas chambers, but when it seemed as though we would witness the hideous death of all the film’s Jewish women and children, suddenly water sprayed upon them — at Auschwitz, they were taking a shower! For me, this compromise was unacceptable.

Life is Beautiful compromised by simply denying the Holocaust -- not by claiming it didn't exist, but by pretending it could be made invisible. The denial went further than the elaborate fantasy the protagonist created to protect his son; it extended to the entire movie, which refused to peer at mass murder except through a thick fog. If Schindler’s List flinched while gazing upon the Holocaust, Life is Beautiful looked away entirely, covering its ears and muttering to itself to escape the horror. This compromise was even less forgivable.

Jakob the Liar, directed by a Holocaust survivor, is not a great movie, but it offers a more acceptable compromise. Set in a Polish ghetto at the end of the war, the world of Jakob is already depopulated of Jews. All but those rich enough to temporarily buy their way out of the camps and those who are strong enough to work by day unloading trains filled with supplies remain, and death is everywhere. Bodies hang in the streets, pushcarts lugged by dozens of men drag away piles of bodies at night, and those who have yet to die feed upon horses who have died in the streets and flee constant beatings from soldiers. When a Jew accidentally overhears a Nazi radio broadcast placing the Russian army near their ghetto, it sparks a delirious, half-raving chain of lies as the inhabitants of the ghetto seize on any scrap of hope. The screenplay, adapted from a 1975 German film, feels drawn from Yiddish theater, building itself around broad characterizations, heavy-handed plotting and doses of black humor. Unlike Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful, Jakob feels like a film about the Holocaust made by Jews for Jews and written in a Jewish idiom. We may not enter the gas chambers in Jakob, but we do enter a Jewish world in the final stages of its destruction. Like Art Spiegleman’s Maus, this is a survivor’s tale in which survival isn’t triumphant, it is an accident of timing and location.

Jakob will take a critical beating, coming after the enormously popular Life is Beautiful (even though Jakob actually finished shooting before Benigni’s film, and Benigni may have been inspired by the german original) and building itself around a surprisingly restrained and complex performance from Robin Williams. After Patch Adams, Williams is the redheaded stepchild of the film world, and the same critics who raved about Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful are already preparing their whipping post for William’s presence in Jakob. A pity, because while Jakob may not be a masterpiece, it is a fine film with an honest approach to the Holocaust, and one that Hollywood has very badly needed.

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STIGMATA fails to deliver what its previews promised: a gorgeously filmed, thoughtful thriller about a woman who becomes the target of demonic assaults. The source of these attacks? She has begun to evidence stigmata, which are unexplained wounds on her body that correspond to those suffered by the crucified Jesus. But this is not a horror film; instead, it is something far pettier. Because however dolled up the film may be in metaphysics and plot points borrowed from The Exorcist, Stigmata is never anything more than common Catholic-bashing.

The Catholic League has already issued an angry press release, which ordinarily means nothing given the League’s history of obfuscation; they regularly hold aloft criticism of church policies as examples of hatred. But they’re onto something here, as only the briefest plot summary should demonstrate: According to Stigmata, there exists a lost Gospel, supposedly authored by Jesus himself. The Catholic Church fears this Gospel because its teachings could overthrow the power of the Church. When a hairdresser in Philadelphia begins bleeding from her wrists and scrawling the Aramaic text to the Gospel on the walls of her lavish apartment, representatives of the church will stop at nothing — even murder — to shut her up. Indeed, the tag line for the film is “The messenger must be silenced.”

Stigmata had an earlier tag line that was, apparently, rejected; a pity, because it comes closer to the actual message of the film. The tag line was “What will you believe,” and this is the question it poses: Do you believe that God is represented on earth by the Catholic Church, or do you believe that God has a personal relationship with man that needs no interceding church? You don’t need to be a Biblical scholar to recognize that this is the fundamental question that divides Catholics and Protestants.

Stigmata, despite its elaborate Catholic iconography and closing images of St. Francis of Assisi, sides firmly with the Protestant camp. Disingenuously, it invents a nonexistent apocryphal Gospel to support its anti-Catholic viewpoint; it has to, as if we are to rely on the existing Gospels, there is only Matthew 16:18 separating these two branches of Christianity (this is the passage in which Jesus turns over the authority of the church to Peter). Catholics and Protestants understand the passage differently, and you can’t go about calling for the destruction of an entire church based on a difference of opinion. Can you?

Of course you can, and the right wing of Protestantism has done so for hundreds of years, sometimes growing so venomous as to accuse the Pope of being the Antichrist and publishing lies about priests and nuns murdering their illegitimate, infant offspring (these stories are still available in cartoon form!). But while these tales might make for good tracts to pass around at your next gun show, it doesn’t make for very good cinema. So Stigmata gives us a cabal of sinister priests, images of levitation, magnificent shots of our 23-year-old heroine bleeding nobly, and an invented Gospel.

In what can only be understood as a deliberate act of misrepresentation, a closing title card suggests this invention might be the Gospel of Thomas, a first or second century compilation of the sayings of Jesus that is widely regarded as the oldest document of its kind. While some might scamper to the library to read this Gospel (it is widely available, despite the film’s assertion that the Vatican seizes such texts and locks them away), most will simply assume that this Gospel supports Stigmata’s Protestant viewpoints.

It doesn’t. In fact, the Gospel of Thomas (supposedly written by Didymos Judas Thomas, who the early Christians believed was the twin brother of Jesus) is firmly part of a tradition called Gnosticism, which argued that the Kingdom of Heaven was already on earth — if only we knew how to look for it. This contradicts most contemporary forms of Christianity and, even if it didn’t, there are few modern-day Christians who would agree with Jesus saying, “If you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits.”

The pity of it is that the Gospel of Thomas is worth reading. It is the only example of what were probably the earliest Gospels: brief wisdom sayings attributed to Jesus. The four Gospels in the current New Testament offer only a partial picture of the beliefs of early Christianity, which struggled to fathom the complex and often contradictory messages of Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel of Thomas offers us a Jesus who has otherwise been lost to history. This Jesus demands that his followers search for God’s justice and compassion here on earth — a demand that supercedes the nasty sectarian squabbling that created Stigmata.

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NOT SINCE Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson joined forces in 1968 to pen a script called Head for the Monkees has there been a film so certain to bewilder its target audience. Because while Dudley Do-Right seems made of the same stuff as the $150 million grossing George of the Jungle (based on a Jay Ward cartoon, it stars Brendan Frasier and features flatulent animals and frequent pratfalls), onscreen it resembles nothing so much as an incomprehensible hallucination. The bewildering plot (a surprisingly sophisticated critique of consumer culture) steamrolls audiences, plowing over their mute confusion as the film zigs and zags wildly from broad farce to deep melodrama. Frasier gamely pushes through the mess, thrusting forth his lantern jaw as he must have imagined his great-grandfather (an actual Canadian Mountie) must have done, even when the script demands he strip off his clothes and dress in Native American garb to perform some sort of obscene, Riverdance-styled harvest ritual.

The film’s one saving grace comes at its start, before the credits ever roll. Because Dudley Do-Right is preceded by a newly animated “Fractured Fairy Tale,” drawn from a 19-year-old unproduced script by Jay Ward veteran Bill Scott. Drawn in bold lines, both physically and in terms of narrative, this short movie recaptures all the pleasures of Ward’s cartoons in their glory days. It is a testament to sly, understated humor, and is the only part of the film that won’t have children and adults scratching their heads in puzzlement.

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THE 13TH WARRIOR is a noisy piece of nonsense, but the half-dozen or so Viking revivalists who did battle outside the movie theater on its opening day did not seem to mind, so neither did I. Based on Michael Crichton’s original novel Eaters of the Dead, the film purports to be based on both the epic poem Beowulf and the historic writings of 10th-century Persian ambassador Ahmad ibn Fadlan. But when the resulting film is of Vikings battling cavemen, the novel’s literary pretensions matter not one whit.

Crichton himself took over directing this beleaguered production from the badly-out-of-his-depth John McTeirnan, whose experiences helming Die Hard and Predator did not prepare him to make a 90-minute film out of a mountain of confusing plot points and a thousand extras in bear costumes on horseback. While Crichton might not be the most elegant director, this film needed no elegance — Crichton wisely shaved the film down to its bone, hacking off any extraneous plot device or characterization until what remains is a grizzled skeleton of a movie. The tatters of a plot that still cling to the film’s bones read like some medieval vision of Apocalypse Now: Vile warriors travel upstream to murder a monster. When our Viking heroes start discovering obese, Venus of Willendorf-style totems next to beheaded bodies, I began to suspect these were representations of Marlon Brando. By the end of the film, in fact, the Norsemen emerge out of the waters with knives in their mouths like so many beserker Martin Sheens.

Alas, what they discover is nothing nearly as interesting as Dennis Hopper’s mad photojournalist. Instead, they enter a room filled with skinny blue men, leading me to believe they had accidentally popped through time into a theater in modern-day Chicago. But there was no Blue Man-styled performance art, just clashing swords and severed limbs. But, really, what more did there need to be?

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JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME will never be important for the films he makes. The classically trained dancer from Belgium churns out a steady stream of low-budget action films centering around his puppy-dog facial expressions, his kicking prowess and (all too frequently) his firm bubble butt. His films blow into town for a few weeks and then, like a carnival, pack up and leave with a tidy profit and little notice. If Van Damme gets no respect as a leading man — well, for most of his career, he hasn't needed it.

But if Van Damme will never be important, his films will. Whether by accident or design, they serve as a testing ground for new talent, low-tech film effects and distribution techniques. The list of names who have broken into Hollywood by signing on to do some Van Damme-age is enormous, from Independence Day co-creators Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich (who helmed the original Universal Soldier) to a virtual who’s who of Hong Kong talent (John Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark). Additionally, Van Damme films tend to open in the foreign market and then wind their way over to the Unites States, somewhat like new works by playwright Edward Albee. Universal Soldier: The Return, for example, opened in Russia. The logic for this is elusive. Is it a bit of post-Cold War psychological warfare to show the residents former Soviet Union an American film about U.S. soldiers raised from the dead to become superwarriors? Or perhaps the filmmakers were hoping to bank on Russia’s virulent anti-Semitism and obsessive love for the Bolshoi by having Jewish wrestler Goldberg repeated pummeled by a ballet dancer.

Whatever the case, this peculiar marketing device has rendered Van Damme’s films unique. Made with American money and in American studios, they are generally filmed, directed and cast with foreign actors and then released abroad — in effect, making them foreign films. This is the new internationalism in filmmaking, folks, and I predict it will become increasingly common in the ranks of small-budget action films and direct-to-video releases. As mediocre as the product might be, the trend is an important one, and we have Jean-Claude Van Damme to thank for it.

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THE NOVEL IS NOT SELLING WELL. That is why my agent, Murray Rosen, wants to meet for lunch. The book, titled Tears for Billy Boyle, tells of the experiences of a young boy in rural Appalachia who ekes out a living catching frogs and selling their legs for meat. The book was met with lukewarm reviews, mostly from critics who gave me some grudging credit for writing outside my typical genre, which is horror fiction.

I have retired from writing horror. I never wanted to be a genre author anyway. When I was younger and starving I wrote an entire novel in three months titled A Night on Zombie Mountain. The book became a runaway bestseller, and was quickly followed by a series of sequels, including Day on Zombie Mountain and Twilight on Zombie Mountain. I finally put the series to bed with Sunset on Zombie Mountain, but I could not get publishers to take me seriously as an author of real literature, which had always been my goal. And so I have written horror for two decades, and it has been good to me. 13 books on the bestseller list. A house on in the Hollywood Hills. Seven film adaptations of my work, five of them among the the top grossing films in the years of their release. Papa Blob is ranked by the American Film Institute as being on of the 10 most frightening films ever made, although they were less impressed with its sequel, Baby Blob.

But these are not the stories I want to tell. I've always wanted to pen tough, serious tales about the forgotten America. I want to write about people that fiction usually leaves behind -- working men and women with hardscrabble lives, emotional problems, and chemical addictions. These books would not be fun to read, but they would provide a portrait of despair and depravity. I do not want to write entertainment, I want to write literature. And so I brought Tears for Billy Boyle to my publisher and told him this was my newest book, and it was not a horror novel, and I would not be writing horror anymore. After the millions of dollars I have made them, they are not in a position to refuse me, and so Billy Boyle was published and promptly sank like a stone. The initially printing was 40,000, which is considerably less than most of my first printings (Daybreak on Zombie Mountain had a first printing of a half-million, and sold out in two days). Only 8,000 copies of Billy Boyle sold.

And so my agent wants to meet. We are set to have lunch at the Hollywood Farmer's Market, where we always meet. And, without warning me, Murray Rosen has brought a guest. It sits at the table next to him, seven and a half feet tall, looking like a moist mushroom. I roll my eyes and sit down opposite them. "Hello Murray," I say.

"Bunny!" Murray says. "I think you know The Sogmuggoth."

Of course I know the Sogmuggoth. I wrote about him in a 60 page draft that I submitted to my publisher eight months ago, before I decided to retire from writing horror.

"What is the Sogmuggoth doing here, Murray?" I ask.

"Just look at him, Bunny," my agent says. "Man, isn't he something!"

"I'm not going to write about the Sogmuggoth," I say.

"But you were really onto something with this," Murray protests. "I mean, he's a murderous fungus. That's really scary!"

"We talked about this, Murray," I say. "I'm not writing horror anymore."

The Sogmuggoth sighs and turns away. Murray points to him.

"Now look, you've upset him," Murray says.

As it happens, Murray wasn't the only one who planned to bring a surprise guest to this meeting. My guests, a balding man in a wifebeater t-shirt and a little boy wearing nothing but stained underpants, spot us from across the Farmer's Market. I wave them over. Murray watches them approach, his eyes narrowing with suspicion.

"And who is this?" he asks.

"This is Mike Dana and his son Scooter," I say. "Mike is an alcoholic and beats Scooter."

"The subjects of your next book?" Maury asks.

"Already halfway written!" I answer.

Maury sighs. He turns to my guests. "Mike, Scooter, could I have a moment alone with Mr. Sparber?" he asks.

They nod and head off to Carmela to buy ice cream.

"Shouldn't the Sogmuggoth go too?" I ask.

"This concerns him," Murray says, and then leans forward. "Bunny, your book about the guy who beats his son is going to be terrible."

I exhale hard. "Murray, I know you're worried about sales ... " I begin.

"I don't give a damn about sales," Murray says, interrupting me. "I represent Florence Dot, and she hasn't sold more than a thousand copies of her books in a decade. I'm telling you this as your agent and your friend. You're not cut out to write this sort of stuff."

I glance over at the Sogmuggoth, who nods soberly.

"I'm sorry to have to put it to you like this," Murray says. "There's no nice way to say it. Billy Boyle was terrible. It was a terrible piece of writing."

"Now, that's not fair," I protest.

"Fair?" Murray asks. "As it happens, Billy Boyle is here today."

Murray gestures. A boy in a straw hat and overalls rises from a nearby table and crosses toward us. Murray puts his hand on Billy's shoulder. God damn that kid, what is he doing here?

"Hiya Billy," Murray says. "Would you mind telling us what you do for money."

"Why sure, mister!" he says. "My and mah dad pull mudbugs out of yonder crick. At least, we did until the cow kicked him. Now I kitch frogs!"

Murray looks at me, disappointed.

"Jesus, Bunny," he says. "That's just embarrassing."

A commotion comes from the ice cream place. We glance over. Mike Dana has taken off his belt and holds it high in the air above Scooter, who cowers in terror. Scooter cries out, "Please, dad! I know things have been hard since mama died, and I know you ain't been yourself since the factory closed, but if you can just stop drinking I know we will be okay!"

Murray sighs. "You see what I mean, Bunny?" he says.

"That doesn't break your heart, Murray?" I ask.

"It does, Bunny," Murray says. "It breaks my heart to see you misapply your talent like this. This isn't writing. This is some bizarre exercise in stringing together cliches about the working class. It's just bad."

"Well, all right," I say. "I guess you're entitled to your opinion, Murray."

"It's not just my opinion," Murray says. "It's everybody's opinion!"

Murray turns to Billy Boyle. "What do you think, kid?" he asks.

"Ah'm not much more than a weak rehash of Huckleberry Finn," Billy says. "But then you go and make all sorts of trouble for me. Why'd yah go and give my mama the diabetes, mister? That wun't nice!"

"It's a hardscrabble story, Billy," I say.

"Ain't no hardscrabble!" Billy retorts, snorting. "You couldn't think up any sort of plot at all fer me, so all ya done is make my life as miserable as possible. You had mah pa kicked by a cow. KICKED BY A COW! Wun't no reason to do that, mister. That was plain mean."

Across the farmer's market, Mike Dana calls over to us. "Hey," he said. "Can I stop beating this kid?"

I glance over at him. He looks frustrated.

"What?" I call back.

"I'm sorry," Mike Dana calls out. "But this beating seems completely foreign to my character. I feel awkward doing it."

"Maybe if you were addicted to heroin?" I suggest.

"I think heroin would make me want to sleep," Mike Dana calls out."Not beat my kid."

"Can we discuss this later?" I ask, annoyed.

Mike Dana shrugs. I turn back to Murray. His eyebrows are raised in a look that I think is intended to convey sympathy. Instead, it says something else. It says "I told you so."

"Listen, Murray, I get it," I say. "So you want me to get back to writing horror. Well, that's not what I want to do."

"But it's what you do well," Murray replies. "I know you want to write serious literature, Bunny, but let's face it: You're just terrible at it."

With that, the Sogmuggoth leaps from the table. There is a young couple at the next table, and the Sogmuggoth scrambles over them, snorting and biting. It is all over in a moment.

Murray gestures. "You see," he says. "Now that's scary."

I decide to walk home to clear my head. Billy Boyle follows me, mouth pursed, unable to make eye contact. A bus passes. I look up at it as it goes by. The driver is a fishlike thing with a lolling tongue and tiny spectacles. The passengers behind him scream and claw at the windows, unable to get out. It is the Bus of the Damned from my short story collection 13 Tales of Transportation Terror. The book spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Farther up the street, a postman skitters by. He is impossibly thin and has buglike eyes. He carries a box with him, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. I know what is in that box. It is a insectoid creature with its head buried in the postman's torso. The creature, called a Skreeakht, controls the postman like a puppet. These were the main characters from my book The Postman Always Bites Twice. That book made 32 million dollars. The Washington Post called it "perhaps the most original horror novel in a hundred years," while Time Magazine ranked it as one of the top ten books of the year.

Behind me, Billy Boyle stops. I turn to him.

"Ah'm sorry ah said them things," Billy says. "Even if they was true, they wasn't very nice."

"It's not your fault, Billy," I tell him. "I wrote you to be honest to a fault."

"Ah still feel bad about it," he says.

God, I hate this kid. And, now that I think about it, I always hated him. I hated writing about him. He's such a little goody goody. When his father got kicked by the cow, he was nonetheless relentlessly upbeat. He even talked to the frogs as he caught them, consoling them, and he cried when he had to kill them for meat in order to pay for his mother's insulin.

"Don't dwell on it," I tell him.

We continue walking in silence, passing a parking garage on Highland. I once set a story here. It's one of the first stories I ever got published.

"Ah hope yuh ain't too sore at me," Billy says.

Jesus, did I really write Billy's dialogue like that? I guess I wanted him to sound southern. Instead, he sounds like a cartoon character. I feel heat flush up my neck and to my face. Suddenly, I find Billy Boyle to be very embarrassing.

"Say yuh ain't sore," he pleads.

"Say, Billy, you hungry for some ice cream?" I ask him. He brightens.

"D'yuh mean it?" he asks.

"Sure. There's a Baker's just on the other side of this street. We can take a short cut through the parking garage."

Billy looks at me for a moment, then nods happily.

He doesn't make it halfway across the garage. It's been a long time since I wrote that story. I forgot how nasty it was. When I wrote that victims were "peeled like a grape," I guess I didn't imagine what it would actually look like.

It's terrifying. It's what I do best.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

ON THE RIGHT you will see an issue of Twilight Zone Magazine that I recently bought. It was published in July of 1981 and is the fourth issue of a magazine that ran eight years. This also happens to be the very first issue I ever purchased, back when I was 13 years old. I was a fan of the television show, dating back to when I was a very young boy and local television stations would run marathons of the show on Thanksgiving, which I would attempt to watch in entirety. Twilight Zone played nightly after midnight, and there were a few years when I would wake myself up after my parents had gone to sleep to watch the show, along with an assortment of late-night movies. To my frustration, Twilight Zone was often bumped in favor of rebroadcasts of sports shows. Further, when the episodes ran, they rarely ran in any sort of order, so it was possible to see the same episode a few times every two or three weeks, while missing other episodes entirely.

Nonetheless, Twilight Zone very much suited my tastes. I liked both the supernatural subject matter and the sometimes nasty twist endings, and I had a sense that the show's narry creator, the black-suited Rod Serling, was injected a lot of social commentary into the show. So when I discovered the magazine, I snapped it up, and did so for years. I had a sizable collection of issues that I left with my parents when I moved to Los Angeles, and they immediately threw out. I believe I was a subscriber for a while. Whatever the case, I recall hungrily tearing through each new issue as it came out; I surprise myself with how many stories I can recall, sometimes with great detail.

So, as I mentioned, Twilight Zone Magazine is to be one of the primary influences on The Panic Mob. I have been flipping through this old issue with great interest, in part for the pleasure of revisiting a magazine I first bought 17 years ago, and in part to pay closer attention to the work of T. E. D. Klein, the magazine's editor. Klein is a horror novelist himself, albeit an infrequent one, producing only a handful of original writing in his career, but he is also a scholar of horror -- his novella "The Events at Poroth Farm" (eventually expanded to a novel called Ceremonies) is essentially a survey course in horror literature. Klein obviously had good connection in the industry, as Twilight Zone Magazine immediately featured authors such as Harlan Ellison, Tanith Lee, Robert Silverberg, and Stephen King, as well as placing the morbidly hilarious cartoonist Gahan Wilson in charge of film reviews and sci fi legend Theodore Sturgeon on the book review beat.

It's an impressive line-up of talent, and The Panic Mob won't be able to lay claim to that; at least, not at first, as this online magazine will have exactly no budget at all when it begins. But my interest in T. E. D. Klein is not that he was able to attract the biggest names in horror and speculative fiction, but the way he articulated an editorial mission for the magazine. In fact, in this very issue, he explained the difficulty he had describing the sorts of stories he wanted:

"Writers -- and the more energetic agents -- frequently ask us what sort of stories we're looking for. 'Good ones,' we're tempted to say, 'with a touch of the weird.' That's rather vague, of course, and none too helpful, but more satisfactory answers are surprisingly difficult to come by. To ask for 'stories in the Twilight Zone tradition' seems a bit tautological, and 'stories in the tradition of Serling, Matheson, Bradbury, Beaumont, Finney, Bloch, and King sounds as if we're looking for pastiches (or perhaps a good law firm). Often, for want of something more specific, we end up resorting to certain catch-phrases: 'human-centered fantasy' or 'fantasy that takes as its starting point the everyday world.' Rod Serling probably came closest when he described the main focus of his television series: ordinary people who find themselves in 'extraordinary circumstances, in strange problems of their own or fate's making.' For now, that will do quite nicely."

I expect part of Klein's difficulty was that he, and Serling before him, were looking for genre stories that exceeded genre expectations. It's really not that hard to do horror or fantastic storytelling badly. A killer in a mask dispatching teenagers will do the trick, or a tale of a man who meets an elf. Genres have built-in expectations, and it takes a certain literary skill to exceed them. Not all of the stories Klein published were great, but most managed to be surprising. In this issue, Klein demonstrates a taste for somewhat comical first-person narration: one story is written in Yinglish, that Borsht Belt mix of Yiddish and English, while another is written in pure hillbilly. A few stories have sharp O. Henry-style twists. The best story in this issue, Robert Silverberg's "A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa," hardly qualifies as fantastic fiction, even though its author is a well-known science fiction author. Silverberg tells of an American scholar on the verge of an emotional collapse who visits Jerusalem during Easter, seeking an underground community of Arab Christians who use an especially potent psychedelic mushroom as part of their religious ceremonies. Silverberg's story is exquisitely detailed -- he had spent time in Jerusalem, and managed to create scenes from the city that were at once alien and credible. His protagonist is a believable mess, given to drinking too much, saying the wrong things, and impatiently pushing himself where he doesn't belong. The story ends with a brief but ecstatic mystical experience, but there isn't more than a hint of the supernatural in the story. Nonetheless, it's not the sort of thing that might easily find a place in a mainstream publication. In fact, it might have had some difficulty getting published in science fiction or fantasy magazines. But it was ideal for Twilight Zone, in part because it is exceptionally well-crafted and in part because it is so strange.

So this is what I am looking for in The Panic Mob: well-made stories of the unexpected. Not being able to take my pick of writing by established authors, this might be a bit hard for me, but, then, I am currently on no publishing schedule and can simply print appropriate stories when they come to me. I shall put together a writer's guidelines this week and begin to send it out. In the meanwhile, I have started the process of setting up the Web page. I have decided to use Wordpress as my publishing platform, because it seems flexible enough for my needs, but I am not familiar with the program and have just begin to train myself how to use it. It will probably be a few weeks before I have a basic design up that I am satisfied with, but that's fine. It may be a while before I have the first few stories I want to publish, and there is no hurry.

BROKEDOWN PALACE reads like a Return to Paradise for younger viewers (no awful spectacle of Joaquin Phoenix dangling from his neck here!): Teenagers Alice (Claire Danes) and Darlene (Kate Beckinsale) jaunt off to Thailand and parade their enthusiastic naivete around the city, essentially demanding to be turned into drug mules. When corrupt Thai officials arrest them en route to Hong Kong with a backpack stuffed with heroin, the girls’ friendship and sanity is challenged. Eventually one must sacrifice herself to save the other.

Unfortunately for the film, the plot described above is all that we get, sans surprise or even squalor. While the filmmakers disingenuously compare their film to Midnight Express, Brokedown Palace contains nothing so sordid as Brad Davis’ and Irene Miracle’s mutual masturbation scene. Imagine our disappointment, as director Jonathan Kaplan previously helmed Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (with Andy Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn), The Hustler of Muscle Beach and Reform School Girls. Kaplan might have turned over a new leaf — after all, he directed The Accused — but this is a women in prison film, after all. And Brokedown Palace slouches toward exploitation at its start, the camera caressing Danes and Beckinsale like some filthy old man. Kaplan repeatedly throws the nubile youngsters into sexually charged situations, but then fails to satisfy, preferring instead a tone of self-seriousness that borders on parody. The film’s most dramatic sequences drew unintentional laughter from its preview audience, and certain scenes (such as a magnificent, incomprehensible confrontation between Beckinsale’s father and Danes in which they scream at each other through a metal screen and across a filthy moat) blossom into pure camp melodrama.

Alas, the only real legacy of Brokedown Palace is that it is the movie that got Danes banned forever from Manila, Philippines. Thailand refused 20th Century Fox permission to film there, understandably upset at a movie that makes their justice system look savage and corrupt, so the filmmakers turned to the most convenient friendly country populated by small, brown, Asian-looking people. They set up camp at the Sanctuary Fabella, a crumbling psychiatric asylum in the Philippines. Danes turned her nose up at the experience, describing Manila as a “ghastly and weird city” that “smelled of cockroaches,” creating the biggest international incident in the Philippines since Francis Ford Coppola set fire to the countryside and left it burning. But Danes' behavior is perfectly understandable, given the theme of Brokedown Palace. Americans abroad, the movie reminds us, are simply potential victims of a ridiculous and wrongheaded world against which they are defenseless. Danes said nothing about the Philippines that Brokedown Palace doesn’t say about Thailand, and by extension the rest of the world — particularly still-developing nations inhabited by yellow- or black-skinned people. I imagine Danes was surprised to discover that her comments ruffled Filipino feathers. What have they got to complain about? After all, isn’t it Americans who are victimized by foreigners?

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OSTENSIBLY a meditation on death, The Sixth Sense is instead an elongated episode of The Twilight Zone, including the requisite twist ending. But as Twilight Zone episodes go, it is a good one — suitably chilling and gesturing often enough at deeper themes that the audience doesn’t leave feeling entirely undernourished. There is real pathos in the story of a boy who lives a lonely, terrified life, surrounded by hideous and occasionally violent spirits of the dead. This plot carries with it enough of a hint of menace that the movie requires no fancy special effects, relying instead on such low-tech flourishes as whispers of voices and unexplained drops in temperature for its spooky mood.

The real horror of the story, however, is conveyed in the choked terror of its young star, Haley Joel Osment. For most of the film this child’s world of tormented souls remains unseen, and Osment must convey the whole of it through quirky behavior and wide-eyed facial expressions. He does this well enough that when the film eventually reveals its ghosts, they are less frightening than we expect them to be. Like Heather Donahue’s terror in The Blair Witch Project, Osment’s emotions tug at us precisely because we are unsure as to their meaning. We do not know the cause of their terror, and our imaginations leak into the space provided. Blair Witch wisely never reveals the source of its terror, while Sixth Sense shows us pale specters with open wounds, and for this reason the latter film provides little that will stay with its audiences but for a satisfyingly bent ending.

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THE IRON GIANT, adapted from the children’s novel by Britain’s Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, presents its audience with a surprisingly sophisticated question. Since the titular giant has obviously been designed as a weapon, can it choose to be something different? Or, as director Brad Bird eloquently states it, “can a gun choose not to be a gun?”

This is an unusual theme for a children’s movie and did not appear in the original novel (Hughes’ story reads more as a lyric meditation on Godzilla films). Bird’s film, in fact, shows a near-pathological fear of weapons. His rewrite of Hughes’ story has been reset in Maine at the dawn of the Cold War, and terrifying images of nuclear devastation and McCarthy-like suspicion abound. Birds’ film reaches its climax, in fact, with an atomic payload whistling down toward an American coastal town. Hughes was reportedly delighted by these revisions (he died before the film opened), and it is easy to see why. The Iron Giant presents a sober, impassioned demand for tolerance and peace masquerading as lighthearted kiddie fare. In his children’s novel, Hughes had done the same.

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SHIRLEY JACKSON'S The Haunting of Hill House, upon which this film was based, was not a ghost story. Jackson stuffed her novel with all the conventions of a ghost story, including a sprawling gothic mansion filled with things that go bump in the night, but she was too sophisticated a writer to produce a mundane spookfest. Instead, the novel details with rigorous logic the emotional deterioration of its main character, Eleanor. Jackson was fascinated by characters who were twisted and childlike. Her short stories and novels delighted in irony and ambivalence.

Perhaps Dutch director Jan De Bont can be forgiven for missing the point of Jackson’s writing — after all, if it waddles like a ghost story and quacks like a ghost story, it must be a ghost story. So De Bont has filled his adaptation of Jackson’s novel with computer-created infant spirits and malevolent statues and set them in motion haunting his version of Hill House as loudly as they can. Windows shatter, ceilings plummet, and the whole building seems to take on the corrosive personality of the evil dead that inhabit it.

But the terror of the novel was in its restraint. Perhaps the four researchers at Hill House are under siege by ghosts, who make themselves known by way of beating on the doors late at night and scrawling terrifying phrases onto the walls. But Jackson suggests another possibility — that the only evil afoot is that of a fractured, frightened psyche. The sudden, shocking climax to the novel leaves open the real possibility that we are not witnesses to the supernatural but instead to a commonplace suicide. This possibility remains in director Robert Wise’s 1963 adaptation of Jackson’s novel.

De Bont has updated his version of the film by taking everything that was suggested by Jackson’s novel (and, to a great extent, by Wise’s film) and making it explicit. If Jackson had something beating on the walls, De Bont has fists explode through doors. If Jackson gave us a strange flirtation between her female characters, De Bont makes that flirtation openly lesbian. If Jackson hinted at ghosts, De Bont has them burst out of paintings and fireplaces. The result is a noisy, grim spectacle, rarely frightening and barely compelling. He has replaced the controlled psychological terror of his source material with a brash, blinding light show. With Jackson, we dug into her text, reaching for its depth. With De Bont, we close our eyes and turn away, eyes aching and ears ringing.

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Another public service announcement from Sailor Martin. This time, the sailor teaches something useful. Sort of.

Footage from a British PSA, also called Don't Spread Germs.

More Sailor Martin.

DESPITE THE FOUL MOUTHS and bawdy sensibilities of its characters, Role Models is a lazily -- almost sloppily -- sweet-natured story. Seann William Scott and co-screenwriter Paul Rudd play thirtysomething friends who have reached a crossroads in life. It's the rather typical one for this sort of film: The two men have reached the moment when their essential immaturity has moved past boyishness and become a liability. Scott, playing a somewhat spacier version of his usual smartass character, is still a rogue, grinning unabashedly at women and using dopey pick-up lines to bed them. Rudd, in the meanwhile, is going through a premature midlife crises -- at the start of the film he can't get his voice above a dull monotone, even when he's kidding around. A breakup with his girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks, underused in this film) prompts Rudd into a meltdown that lands him and Scott on the wrong side of the law. Their options: jail, or volunteer to act as a mentor in a Big Brother-style program overseen by Jane Lynch, a former cocaine addict with a lopsided grin and a tendency to launch into twelve-step tough talk, even when it is not called for.

Rudd and Scott are paired with two misfits. The first, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse (McLovin from Superbad), is a cape-wearing nebbish with awkard, shy mannerisms and a passion for live-action fantasy role playing. The second, a pint-sized terror played by Bobb'e J. Thompson, has a foul mouth and a genius for pushing buttons. The conceit of the film is that neither Rudd nor Scott are grown-up enough to mentor anybody, much less two kids with problems. The film is plotted in a by-the-book manner, and we watch as the men grow fond of the kids and connect with them. But director David Wain steers clear of easy sentimentality. For instance, he has Scott and Thompson bond over the music of KISS, because, as Scott explains it, the band consists of Jews who managed to figure out how to get into a lot of girls' pants.

The film is slight, coasting on the real chemistry of Rudd and Scott and note-perfect performances from both of the boys. Mintz-Plasse plays his character with real sympathy, and his gawky mannerism become endearing and eventually adorable, while Thompson demonstrates an alarming mastery of comic timing, his best lines delivered with the rising inflection of a dare. What stands out about the film is its refusal to participate in two of the conventions of this genre. Firstly, it refuses to bully. Particularly in the case of Mintz-Plasse and his role-playing companions, the film could engage in some terribly mean-spirited comedy. Instead, the group is presented as misfits, but, eventually, people with their own oddball charms. The film also refuses to follow a typical character arc, in that Rudd and Scott don't really mature in the film in a typical way. The climax, in fact, has them abandoning a pressing adult responsibility in order to participate in an elongated faux battle, dressed in ridiculous costumes and participating in an embarrassing spectacle.

In this way, Role Models has its characters mature in a wholly unexpected way. Rudd and Scott never buckle down and start the hard work of being adults, which always feels a bit contrived in this sort of film. Instead, they simply learn to be friends to the two kids they were initially forced to mentor, and they become friends in an important way: they learn to appreciate that what seems like escapism can be an act of the imagination, and what seems like the actions of a social misfit can be a lot of fun. They learn to support the kids in these acts of imagination and their attendant enjoyable activities, and they learn to have fun themselves.

DIGITAL GHOSTS haunt the sets of Stanley Kubrick’s final film, which is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s novel Dream Story. As everybody must know by now, a half-dozen computer-created figures were inserted prior to the film’s release, a concession on the part of the film’s production company to the ratings board. If Eyes Wide Shut was to receive an “R” rating, a good portion of an orgy sequence that consumes the middle of the film could not remain. Rather than take shears to the sequence, in which a mansion filled with costumed and masked revelers couple on daybeds and tables, a team of digital artists inserted figures in front of the softcore action. Two naked women holding hands here, a man in a shroud there, and the offending sequence has been effectively shorn of anything too graphic.

If an audience member did not know about the addition, they might not notice. Aside from having a strange, doll-like quality, the digital figures work seamlessly in the scene. But it is interesting that 69 years after his death and 78 years after the publication of his most famous writing (Reigen, a collection of sexually charged short plays that the author himself deemed “completely unprintable”), Arthur Schnitzler still demands censorship.

The film board is in good company. Schnitzler’s writing was banned in his native Austria, burned by the Nazis, confiscated by the Communists and a film adaptation of Reigen (La Ronde, 1950, directed by Max Ophüls) was banned from import into the United States. Have you never heard of Schnitzler? It may be because he has always hidden in the background of modern literature, in part because he has never been the subject of a Henry Miller- or Allen Ginsberg-style obscenity trial. It is impossible to find English translations of much of his writing, he serves as a footnote in most German literature classes, and he is not mentioned in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Biography. Come to think of it, scanning my bookshelf, he is not mentioned in any reference material.

We should not be surprised. Even considering the subject of his writing (often dealing with sex), Schnitzler was clinical about intimacy. He was inspired by, and friends with, Sigmund Freud. His novels and plays could not be mistaken for hardcore pornography or even for the erotic chapbooks available in his day. Schnitzler was an impressionist, and as such he was not interested in the graphic representation of a physical act. He was instead seeking to represent how the act is experienced. This made for fascinating writing, but we remember stream-of-consciousness writing with the clarity of a dream. Compared to Miller or Ginsberg’s jagged, vivid prose, Schnitzler’s work has a gormless internal logic that defies memory. We read Schnitzler and forget we have done so. Of the hundreds of reviews of Eyes Wide Shut that have been published since the film opened on Friday, few mention Schnitzler. I have yet to read one that points out the Schnitzler’s La Ronde was the basis for The Blue Room, David Hare’s play that played on Broadway. The Blue Room also starred Nicole Kidman, including her famously naked backside, as with Eyes Wide Shut, and received a similar avalanche of media attention. Is this oversight simply bad reporting? Or is Schnitzler another ghost, haunting his own works like the digital creations in Kubrick’s film?

Kubrick did not seem particularly interested in Schnitzler. While he has owned the rights to Dream Story for 20 years, when he mailed the novel to Frederick Raphael he tore the cover off it. Raphael recounted in a story in The New Yorker how carefully Kubrick edited out Schnitzler’s major themes. Kubrick refused to allow the main characters in Eyes Wide Shut to be Jewish, as they were in the novel. He updated turn-of-the-century Vienna to modern New York. He and Raphael reduced the novel to the barest bones of its plot, then rebuilt it to Kubrick’s liking. And what was the story Kubrick wanted to tell?

It wasn’t Schnitzler’s story, in which a Jewish doctor seeks to use sex as an equalizer between himself and a wealthy Gentile society that does not want him. In fact, Kubrick’s film completely inverts this theme by casting the only Jew in the cast (Sydney Pollack) as the wealthy Gentile in the book. Kubrick has even given Pollack a Jewish name in the film: Victor Ziegler. Kubrick seemed to enjoy engaging in these perverse rejections of his source material. Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of A Clockwork Orange uses cartoon-like sets and a distracting angular editing style to spin the story’s politics in the opposite direction from Anthony Burgess’ reactionary novel. In The Shining, Kubrick has Jack Nicholson drive an axe into the stomach of a character who, in Stephen King’s original novel, was the rescuing hero. The director could not have made his point more forcefully: This is not the novel.

And so Eyes Wide Shut is not Dream Story; it is Kubrick. And if anything can be said with certainty about Kubrick, it is that he made genre films. Almost without exception his movies can be easily categorized: Full Metal Jacket is a war film, Spartacus is a gladiator movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey is science fiction. But it is also true that Kubrick refused to make genre films the way we expected them to be made. His early crime melodrama, The Killing, uses a complex, elliptical narrative structure that would have Quentin Tarantino drooling (and which served as the inspiration for Tarantino’s free-form timeline in both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction).

Eyes Wide Shut is a porn movie. Specifically, it is an upscale, art house porn film, similar to Henry and June or The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But Kubrick, perversely rejecting the conventions of pornography as completely as he rejected the details of Dream Novel, refused to ever let his characters have sex. Every scene is structured as they should be in a porn film: our naïve hero (Tom Cruise) blunders from one situation to another, each erotically charged, with all the characters approaching him in an explicitly sexual manner. It is as absurd here as it is in the most insipid direct-to-video porn, with women attempting to seduce Cruise next to their dead fathers, or in costume shops, or (most notably) stage actor Allan Cumming’s extended flirtation with Cruise at a hotel. Cumming giggles and makes goo-goo eyes at Cruise for a full 10 minutes while informing our hapless hero that his college friend might be dead. It is a line reading that would be wholly inappropriate in anything other than a porn film, in which the mere presence of two humans sets off so powerful a sexual charge that they must have sex. Even a roaming pack of Yale students (identified by their collegiate sweatshirts) act upon Cruise sexually, in a manner of speaking: They gay-bash him in the East Village, which I didn’t know was common behavior for Yalies.

But for all this Cruise never has sex. Come morning, he regrets it and tracks down his footsteps from the previous day in what must be the longest and least successful booty call in film history. Instead of coitus, he finds nothing but dead or dying prostitutes and a trail of lies. Some reviewers have read this as reflecting a Puritan moralism in Kubrick. Infidelity, they believe Kubrick is saying, leads to disaster.

It is hard to imagine that Kubrick, a director who is almost defined by his refusal to make films with simple messages, intended that. Instead, we might be looking at the only remaining traces of Schnitzler in the film, and perhaps the reason why Kubrick was first attracted to Schnitzer’s novel 20 years ago. Because if the events of the film are like those of a dream — a message suggested in the film’s title, then discussed in the film itself and made explicit by the title of Schnitzler’s novel — then it is a dream that doubles back on itself. If we are certain of something, by the end of the dream we will no longer be certain of it. If we have visited a place, when we revisit the place will have changed. “We are awake now,” Kidman tells Cruise at the end of the film, but it is a moment of ambivalence. We do not know that if we were to revisit this exact moment, this exact discussion, it would not suddenly mean its opposite.

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Tri-Danielson
The Danielson Family (Tooth & Nail Records)

SOUNDING LIKE the creators of the music one might expect to hear when having a picnic with the Manson Family, Danielson is an oddity in the world of Christian rock. Composed of actual family members (the Smith family, in fact) ranging in age from early teens to mid-20s, Danielson takes the stage dressed in doctors’ and nurses’ uniforms with embroidered hearts sewn to the sleeves. They play songs composed by the eldest brother, Dan, who sings in a nasally, near-tuneless falsetto. Somewhere in Dan’s lyrics are buried snippets of prayers and revisions of Bible stories, but the language is eccentric and densely personal. As a result, songs, such as “Thanx to Noah” come off as manifestos by the Weather Underground. “Take a slow man,” the Smith family sings, “open him up ...”

“He’s red on the inside!” Dan shrieks. The song continues with this theme, informing us that a wealthy man, a humble man, a selfish man, and dozens of other men are all, likewise, red on the inside. Is this a plea for universal tolerance or is it a revolutionary call to mass slaughter?

Whatever it is, there is nothing like it — either in the toe-the-line fundamentalism of most Christian rock or in the bland lyricism of modern pop. Danielson draws from both worlds and then, it seems, grinds them in a trash compactor and dresses up the remains with cheerful bells and whistles. For Dan Smith and his family, religion and madness seem intertwined, producing hallucinogenic streams of gnosis. It is a searing vision of intimate contact with a living God and the closest thing rock music has produced to the trembling magnificence of the ancient prophets. If the results are more terrifying than danceable, all the better. After all, nobody hummed along with Ezekiel when he brought forth his judgment on the sinning Israel, and nobody danced along to Joshua’s horns when they brought down the walls of Jericho.

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GEORGE BAILEY'S life spools out before us every Christmas, a flickering blue and gray story of crushed desire and miraculous redemption; The film is so ubiquitous that during the holiday season, on any random street in America, if we were to knock at any door we would likely be greeted by the sounds of Bailey and his guardian angel squabbling with Nick the bartender.

Both director Frank Capra and star Jimmy Stewart named It’s a Wonderful Life as their favorite films, despite the movie’s initial failings at the box office and a critical beating it took in Manhattan (Bosley Crowther, writing for the New York Times, concluded that “the weakness of this picture is the sentimentality of it — its illusory concept of life.”) The failure of Life forced Capra to close his independent production company, Liberty Films Corporation, and brought about the decline of Capra’s career. After Life Capra would direct only nine more films, four of them for television (with titles that betrayed their wretchedness, such as Hemo the Magnificent and The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays.)

It’s a Wonderful Life must have been a terrible disappointment to Capra. When he co-wrote, produced and directed the film he was among America’s most highly regarded directors, with established masterpieces such as It Happened One Night and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on his résumé. Both Capra and Stewart had recently gone to war, the former using his considerable talents as a filmmaker to produce the Why We Fight series, a documentary series that helped create the sense of World War II as being a “Good War.” Capra’s films were propaganda, but they weres damned effective propaganda — Spielberg borrowed heavily from Capra’s fiercely patriotic understanding of war for Saving Private Ryan.

Returning from the war, Capra started up Liberty Films and, with Life, hoped to bankroll his career as an independent filmmaker with an immensely popular first film. The script for Life was based on a short story by Philip Van Doren Stern called “The Greatest Gift.” Stern had not been able to sell the story to any magazines, so he printed 200 copies of his story and sent them as Christmas cards to his friends. Included on the mailing list was his Hollywood agent, who passed the story on to Capra. “The Greatest Gift” went through a long series of writers (including Dorothy Parker) and a weird series of revisions (including an ending in which George Bailey battles an evil version of himself at the film’s climax) before it finally emerged as Life; Capra was still scribbling dialogue for the film onto the script after the film began shooting.

The resulting film was, as James Agee wrote for The Nation, “one of the most efficient sentimental pieces since A Christmas Carol.” Unfortunately, it opened in a United States that had lost its taste for sentimentality. Capra’s love of poignant, high-spirited screwball comedies was distinctly out of fashion. Hollywood got tougher after the war, with Best Picture Academy Awards for 1946 (the year Life was released) going to The Best Years of Our Lives, a sobering and semi-tragic story of the painful return of America’s battle-scarred veterans to their pre-war homes and lives. As omnipresent as Life seems now, it almost evaporated into the ether upon its release. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when the film began appearing on television, that it began to develop a following; in 1974, when the copyright on Life was allowed to lapse due to a clerical error, the film began a second life. Television stations, particularly PBS affiliates, began programming the film into their holiday time slots with alarming frequency, inspired by the film’s nonexistent rebroadcast price.

In the ensuing 25 years, Life has become widely recognized as a holiday classic, and has also inspired a critical reevaluation. Reviewers began to notice the film’s terrible melancholy — on repeated viewings Bailey’s suicide attempt is obviously motivated by his profound disappointment with his life. Bailey is a great tragic character, his simple wanderlust (his urge, in his own words, to “shake the dust off this crummy little town”) repeatedly foiled by the circumstances of history: the depression, the war, even his own marriage. Bailey’s conflicting emotions concerning Mary Hatch (Donna Reed in her first starring role) ranks among the most complicated romances in the history of film, and showcases Jimmy Stewart’s remarkably expressive acting at its finest. He is uncontrollably drawn to Hatch, but resists his emotions, understanding that they would create another tie that would bind him to the town and the life he longs to leave. In a few scenes, this conflict plays out in moments of frightening sadism, as Bailey’s torn feelings descend on Hatch as cruelty.

This is good drama, complex beyond the simple sentimentality and melodrama ascribed to Life by critics. Bailey’s torment is a logical alternative to the endless remountings of A Christmas Carol that pop up this time of year. I argue it is a better story: Carol’s Scrooge is cured of his miserliness after the first ghost, but the story continues to torture him with two more frightening spirits before depositing him back at his house in time for Christmas. George Bailey’s conflict, on the other hand, remains unresolved until the final moments of the film, when the citizens of Bedford Falls file into his living room to hand over their meager savings.

Interestingly, though, both tales essentially detail the same story: the redemptive powers of good capitalism. Scrooge’s stinginess makes him mean, and he is bullied into spending his money by threats of loneliness and death; George Bailey, on the other hand, is fundamentally a good capitalist (so good, in fact, that he can prevent a run on his family bank merely by explaining simple economics to his panicked accounts during the initial panic of the stock market crash). Bedford Falls is the product of Bailey’s compassionate capitalism, which includes helping poor immigrants raise the funds to buy a house. Without Bailey, Bedford Falls’ only capitalist is old man Potter (who, scowling from his dragon-gilded wheelchair, is Scrooge reborn as the devil). Potter’s vision of the town, renamed Pottersville, is a terrifying noir city of neon and gambling, where everything joyous has become terrible; as Bailey visits the film’s characters in the Pottersville sequences, all have turned into tragic versions of themselves — they’ve grown cruel, or distant, or diseased. The last scene of the film recognizes Bailey’s economic importance as the money he has so unselfishly flooded into his community is returned to him during his time of need.

It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol have become this country’s essential cultural expressions of the Christmas season. How telling that the theme of these stories is so essentially similar: That during Christmas, we demonstrate our goodness by how we spend our money. George Bailey’s ultimate triumph is that his financial importance is made clear to him, and he is transformed from an unhappy capitalist to a happy one. The irony is that the film’s importance in this country developed opposite its economics — the more popular the film became, the less money it made for its creators. Ultimately, the film cost Capra both his production company and his career. It is as though It’s a Wonderful Life ultimately reverted to its original form: a Christmas card, given freely, without any expectations of financial gain.

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WILD, WILD WEST draws less from the original television series than from one of Troy McClure’s hundreds of wretched movies named in The Simpsons — specifically, The Cantrabulous Fabtraption of Professor Horatio Hufnagel. The original Wild, Wild West unsuccessfully sought to wed the Western with the spy film. Both genres had by this time been revised and deconstructed into weird abstractions (look to The President’s Analyst and Once Upon a Time in the West for examples of each), so this combination must have seemed inspired. It would be a rollicking gag of a television show, the producers must have told themselves; It would brandish its six-shooter and trick bow tie while winking a knowing wink. The resulting campy mess played like some awful, albeit enjoyable, heat-inspired hallucination: Handsome Jim West battling mechanical monsters while midgets bit at his ankles and bosomy whores danced endless can-can high-kicks around him.

The midgets are absent from Will Smith and Barry Sonnenfeld’s screen adaptation, but the mechanical monsters and bosomy whores remain. Because both the spy film and the Western are slouching toward extinction, the new Wild, Wild West shrugs off their trappings in favor of computer created bells and whistles whirring and spinning across the vast American desert. But the West is just set-dressing in this film, just as the cowboy hats are just costuming, and neither represent anything. The battle at the center of the film is not the battle of the cinematic West: Pioneer battling destiny, settler battling hired gun, cowboy battling Indian. Set in the years just following the Civil War, Wild, Wild West’s battle is the North against the South, with Yankee ingenuity set against Confederate duplicity. And, at Will Smith’s insistence, it is slave battling slave owner, with his fists and bullets flying every time a word racial epithets to form in a villain’s mouth. These themes prove too heavy for the film, built as it is on bedsprings and plastic toys, and like the vast, mechanical spider that clambers all over the last 20 minutes of the film it wants desperately to burst into pieces. And, in our heads, it does. The film continues to play for hours after we have given up making sense of it, and the filmmakers do not care that to us it seems another horrendous, nonsensical hallucination.

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EVANGELICAL CARTOONIST Jack T. Chick hates Halloween.

Chick, creator and publisher of the popular “Chick Tracts,” is a somewhat mysterious figure. No information exists about him except a brief biography published on his Internet site, describing his journey from youthful actor and military man to full-time proselytizer. Chick refuses interviews, leading some to speculate that Jack T. Chick doesn’t exist at all. Like Ellery Queen, his might be a corporate name used by a variety of cartoonists scrawling similarly amateurish morality tales in which the wages of sin are death — and an eternity in Hell. Chick Publications’ bile-filled free tracts tackle everything from the Pope (he’s in league with Satan) to homosexuality (a one-way ticket to Hell), but there must be a special place in Jack T. Chick’s (perhaps nonexistent) heart for Halloween. He has published at least four separate tracts decrying the holiday as a satanic festival of slaughtered infants and Hell-bound sinners.

One, titled “Boo,” tells of a group of college students who rent a cabin to hold a Halloween party. They decide to sacrifice a cat, but their plans are cut short when Satan shows up with a chainsaw to make a few sacrifices of his own. Another, called “The Trick,” observes a group of Satanists as they prepare for Halloween by poisoning apples and inserting razor blades into candy bars. A witch, who leads the ceremony, explains carefully that “The children who are mutilated and murdered every Halloween are no accident. They are carefully planned sacrifices to Satan, carried out by those who serve and worship him.”

Even ignoring the astonishing hysteria common to all of Jack Chick’s writing, there is something about Halloween that terrifies right-wing Christians. Dozens of Webpages misidentify the holiday as a pagan festival to their death god and insist that it is a night of rampant Satanism. At large Halloween celebrations around the country, such as the carnival that consumes Hollywood Boulevard every year, Christian witnesses show up en masse holding picket signs and passing out pamphlets. Some churches even sponsor their own anti-Halloween events, such as the Abundant Life Christian Center in Arvada, CO, who built their own haunted house in 1997. Rather than the usual assortment of vampires and mummies, this spook house contained a realistic abortion, a satanic cult sacrificing a human, a teen suicide, the funeral of an AIDS victim and a re-creation of a date rape.

What is it about Halloween that inspires such animosity? It is a very popular holiday — Hallmark cards estimate that 65 percent of the American population decorate their houses for Halloween, a percentage only bested by Christmas. It is also, in theory, a Christian holiday. Seventh century Pope Boniface IV created it in response to a problem: the Catholic Church had too many saints. Pope Boniface called his holiday “All Saints’ Day;” it was a catchall holiday in celebration of saints that could not be accorded their own days on the calendar — a sort of Catholic President’s Day. The evening before was called “All Hallows’ Eve,” hallows being another word for saint. Eventually this name became shortened into Halloween.

Pope Boniface set All Saints’ Day on May 15. It wasn’t until a hundred years later that Pope Gregory changed the date of the celebration to November 1, putting Halloween on its now traditional date of October 31. The reason for the date change was simple and common: It was intended to replace a Celtic holiday that fell on the same date. This holiday was called Samhain (pronounced Sow’ an), and therein lie the roots of contemporary evangelical Christianity’s terror of the holiday. While Christianity supplanted Celtic religions in the British Isles over 1800 years ago, traces of the old pagan religion remain lively, even to this day.

This conflict is gorgeously dramatized in the 1973 film The Wicker Man. Although ostensibly a horror film, The Wicker Man will disappoint enthusiasts who are looking for a traditional monster flick, particularly when they discover it is a musical. Every 15 minutes or so the film’s characters burst into pagan-sounding folk songs and dance merrily around May poles. Despite this, The Wicker Man has genuine depth, telling of a policeman who is sent to investigate rumors of child sacrifice on a small Scottish island. He quickly realizes the inhabitants of the isle have reverted to paganism, to such a degree that it is taught in the grade schools. He gets caught up in a May Day celebration that ends in his own sacrifice when the pagans trap him inside a huge, burning wicker statue of a man. By this time the policeman, a devout Christian, has gone mad. As he burns he screams bible passages, seeming for all the world like an Old Testament — or, for that matter, the same sort of street-corner preachers who protest Halloween.

While The Wicker Man is set during May Day, the burning wicker statue at its climax was historically associated with Samhain. The holiday marked the Celts third, and final, harvest before winter; in fact, “Samhain” means “end of summer,” and was the Celtic new year. During this time the Celts culled their herds of cattle, weeding out those who were too weak to survive the winter and those who would not be used for breeding. According to Roman reports, these animals were sacrificed in the wicker statue along with humans. Many sources on Halloween report human sacrifice; however, scholars are split on the issue, some arguing that the Romans invented stories of ritual human slaughter as wartime propaganda against the Celts, as the Romans routinely painted their enemies as savages.

Whether or not human sacrifice occurred, Samhain was a supernatural period. The Celts were a pastoral people, so winter was a lean time for them, and the end of summer meant a dramatic shift in their lives. These periods of transition were viewed with awe, as the Celts believed that two identical worlds existed: the world of the living and the world of the dead. During the transition between the seasons, the veil between these two worlds grew thin, and the dead could communicate with the living. Surprisingly, this was not viewed with dread — in fact, there is some evidence that the Celts believed these dead souls brought gifts to children.

While the holiday of Samhain disappeared with the rise of Christianity, the people of the British Isles continued its practices on October 31. The Celts, for example, built vast bonfires during Samhain. To this day Scottish youths build similar bonfires, some digging a trench around them as did their pagan ancestors thousands of years earlier. Many of the traditions associated with Halloween have similarly supernatural origins, such as bobbing for apples (used as a divination; the first person to take a bite of an apple was believed to be the first to marry) and trick-or-treating. The Celts believed that the spirits of the dead would engage in horseplay and practical jokes, and out of this came the tradition of dressing as spirits and demanding gifts — with the understanding that if the gifts were not provided, repercussions would follow. Hard as it is to believe, children who toiletpaper a neighbor’s yard are engaging in the same sort of behavior as the ancient Celts.

While only the most zealous of Christians could be made nervous by these vestigial remnants of a long-dead religion, protesters still appear at PTA meetings to denounce Halloween parties at school or on street corners to admonish trick-or-treaters. In their own way, these protesters are also re-creating history, taking the part of the Romans who wanted to destroy the Celts. The dead battles spring to life every year at this time, renewing their enmity and ferocity as though they had never died. Perhaps the Celts were correct: At this time of the year, the veil between the world of the living does seem to grow thin, and the souls of the dead walk — and battle — among us.

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Horses, Cattle and Coyotes
Sons of the San Joaquin (Shanachie)

SEVERAL TIMES EVERY YEAR, in out-of-the way Western cities like Prescott, Ariz. and Roswell, N.M., as many as 10,000 cowboys arrive clasping scraps of paper. They take control of the local hotels, gather in conference rooms, and nervously readjust their 10-gallon hats and electric-blue fringed shirts as they rise before their cheering peers to read what they have written: poetry. The text is spare and simple, telling epic stories of cattle punching and corral gunfights.

Hanging in the air at these cowboy symposiums is the high, sweet sound of three-part harmonies. The spirit of the Roy Rogers’ Sons of the Pioneers live on, as do their classic songs (“Cool Water,” “The Streets of Laredo”) in the form of singing cowboy trios. Among these trios, Rogers has identified The Songs of the San Joaquin as being “the only singing group alive who I feel sound like the original.”

Many of the trio’s songs are originals, penned by band member Jack Hannah. Hannah was raised in the Great Central Valley of California, surrounded by cattle ranchers, and his lyrics ring with an authenticity that escapes much contemporary cowboy poetry. Hannah remains a romantic, admitting that the cowboy is “America’s greatest folk hero,” but his story-songs contain an unusual depth of historical understanding. The Sons of the San Joaquin’s Website contains a wealth of surprising historical essays, all penned by Hannah (he reveals, for example, that the first American cowboy was a Native American), and Hannah peppers his song lyrics with unglamorous, rough-hewed details that make them less a starry-eyed ode to cowboys than a faded, sepia-tinted memory of them.

Hannah’s melodies are gorgeous. He identifies closely with the California cowboy, or vaquero, and his plaintive melodies include gospel, Spanish and Mexican influences. This is the far Western extreme of country-western music, historically and geographically distinct from Nashville or Bakersfield, and it sounds like music that would play behind a 1930s radio serial about a range war rather than in some blue-collar honky tonk. His songs hang in the air like a cold spot at the site of a haunting, reminding us that the ghost of the American cowboy lingers among us, now finding its place among Stetson-clad, pistol-toting poets.

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IT WAS 10 a.m. when the work crew began dissembling my apartment.

I was watching a judge show on television. They came in without knocking, arms loaded with boxes, and began to pack up my possessions. Thirty men, most pretty rugged looking. One of them stared at me on the sofa for a moment. I stared back. I had no idea what was going on. The workman went to the door, and, a moment later, a small man with a clipboard entered and crossed to me.

"I think there is some sort of mistake ... " I began.

"You have to get up," he said. "We need to take the sofa."

"I'm pretty sure you have the wrong apartment," I said.

He cocked his head, confused. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"Well, you're moving someone out, aren't you?" I said. "It can't be me. I paid rent."

"No, no," he said. "We're moving everything. Strike is at 10."

"Strike is at 10?"

He showed me the clipboard. It had a timetable and addresses. He pointed his pencil at it. There was the address of my apartment building: 1009 Park Ave. And a time: 10am. And a note: Strike.

"I still don't understand," I said.

"What, are you a new hire?" he said. "We have to strike this. This whole block. We're setting up the dentist office set here, and it has to be up by noon."

I shook my head.

"Look, just stand up, please."

I stood. He left. Two workmen took my sofa. My apartment was almost empty of everything I owned. I went to the window. Streams of workmen poured out of my apartment building, arms loaded with boxes, which they placed onto large white trucks. The same was happening to apartment buildings all along the street. And, at the apartment building across the street from me, workmen were actually disassembling the building. It snapped apart into sections, which they boxed and loaded onto trucks. I turned back to the workmen in my apartment. "Hey," I said.

They kept working. One of them was pulling down one of my walls.

"HEY!" I said. They stopped and looked at me. One turned and went out the door. The man with the clipboard returned, annoyed.

"What's the matter with you," he said. "Go to the craft services building. Have lunch. You're not needed back here until eight p.m. Until then, this is going to be the Painless Family Dentistry set."

Painless Family Denistry? I decided to speak slowly. I don't know why. Perhaps I felt it would help articulate what I was feeling, which, at this moment, was a mixture of confusion and dread.

"That's my dentist," I said.

"I don't care about your backstory," he snapped. "I just need you out. The principal will be here at noon, and we have to have the new set up."

"I'm going to Painless Family Dentistry at noon," I said. "I cracked a tooth."

He frowned. He looked at his clipboard. He looked back up at me.

"And you are?" he asked.

"Bunny Sparber," I said.

He turned and shouted to his workmen: "Get me a phone."

A workman brought him a cell phone. He dialed a number, never taking his eyes off me. He spoke into the phone.

"This is Murphy," he said. "We got a problem"

A pause.

"The problem is the principal. He's right here. I'm looking right at him."

A pause.

"No, we already started striking. Half of his apartment is in boxes. Okay. I'll ask."

He moved the phone away from his ear and spoke to me.

"Aren't you supposed to be on your way to the bus?" he asked.

"I got a ride from my girlfriend," I said.

"I see," he said. He spoke into the phone. "He got a ride from his girlfriend. No, I don't know. We've had this problem before with actresses not communicating his schedule. He's walked past sets being built a hundred times already. I dunno, I guess he just thinks they are construction sites or something."

"Can I ask something?" I said.

"Just a moment," he said, and then returned to the phone. "Well, he caught us this time, and I don't know what to do. He's looking at me, wondering what's up. Do we have some sort of contingency plan for this?"

I waited patiently while he listened to the voice on the other end of the phone, and then he nodded and hung up. He looked back at me expectantly. "You had a question?" he asked.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"Nothing," he said. "You're already at the dentist. You fell asleep during a root canal. You're dreaming this."

"I don't feel like I'm unconscious," I said.

He hit me with the phone.

I woke in a dental chair. My dentist, Dr. Runkanock, sat opposite me, back to me, writing on my charts.

"Ouch," I said. The side of my face ached.

Dr. Runkanock turned back to me. "Slept a little, did you? That's not unusual. Not with Nitrous."

"My face hurts," I said.

"Root canal," Dr. Runkanock said. "I wrote you a prescription for painkillers. Shouldn't hurt for too long."

"How long was I out?" I asked.

"A while. It's 2 p.m. A root canal takes a little while." He stared at me, smiling. "Felling a little out of it?"

"Very," I said. "I had a dream that workmen were taking my apartment apart."

"People have funny dreams on Nitrous," Dr. Runkanock said.

"Everything was a set," I explained.

"A set," Dr. Runkanock asked.

"Yeah," I said. "My entire block fit into small boxes." I felt silly saying it.

"Haven't heard that one before," Dr. Runkanock said, shrugging.

"It felt real," I said.

"Nitrous," he said, and then returned to my chart.

Of course it was the nitrous. When I was a boy, I often fantasized that the world was actually just a very small set, and, when I wasn't looking, sets and cast members were moved around to fool me into thinking it was the real world. Wherever I went, it seemed like I saw the same few hundred people, as though an especially cheap production company were recycling actors. I thought that if I turned around fast enough, I might catch people flipping through scripts. I suspected that car rides didn't actually take me anyplace new, but just moved me around a little while a new set was put up. But later I realized that this was just a childhood fantasy. Sure, wherever I went, I saw people who looked like other people, but that's just because some people resemble other people.

This was a real world, full of real people and real places. It wasn't some huge set that existed merely to fool me. Why would it be anything else? Who would have that sort of a budget? Why would they even do such a thing? But the Nitrous had brought back my childhood imaginings and given it the form of a dream. And that was all.

I rose to leave and thanked Dr. Runkanock. He turned back, smiling, and then, for a moment, looked confused, like he meant to say something but forgot what it was.

A voice whispered. "3:00 next Tuesday."

Dr. Runkanock nodded. "Remember you need to come back at 3:00 next Tuesday," he said. "We need to add the crown."

I rose from the dental chair. I stared at him. He stared back at me. And then, briefly, his eyes glanced to the right. I looked over. There was a vent near the floor, and the vent seemed lit from within. I walked over to it, knelt down, and looked in.

Behind the vent was a little room, and in that room was a man wearing a headset and holding a script. He had a pencil in his hand, and he crossed out something on the script, then nodded to himself. He looked up and saw me looking back at him.

"Oh crap," he said.

"It's the Nitrous," Dr. Runkanock said, his voice very close. I turned to look at him. He stood just behind me, holding a metal tray. "You're still asleep," he said, "and the nitrous is making you imagine some very strange things."

"I'm not asleep," I said.

He hit me with the tray.

Read more of I'm Just a Bad Boy, a Fake Memoir.

BADLY SPOKEN, the words of Shakespeare blend into an incomprehensible babble. While the bard was capable of stark, clear prose (consider Iago’s chilling declaration in Othello: “I hate the Moor.”), as an author he was first and foremost a poet.

He had little choice, as Elizabethan theater was, above all, the staging of language. Shakespeare’s actors at the Globe Theatre frequently would perform on a bare stage, dressed in costumes cast off from their wealthy benefactors and brandishing minimal props. It was up to the playwright to create the set and setting for the play, whether simply (such as when Rosalind in As You Like It declares, “Well, this is the forest of Arden.”) or otherwise.

Shakespeare preferred otherwise. He toyed with language, often building elaborate stage directions into his dialogue. When he was at a loss for an utterance (which was rare, as Shakespeare’s vocabulary, culled from his writing, included 17,000 words) he invented one. He is credited with having conceived more than 1,500 neologisms, including such now-common words as watchdog and assassination. What results is a torrent of sounds, some familiar, some archaic, some nonexistent outside their lone appearances in single sentences. Let us open Twelfth Night and select a passage at random: “Of what validity and pitch soe’er,” Orsino says, deep into his “If music be the food of love” speech. “But falls into abatement and low price, even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy that it alone is high fantastical.”

Soe’er? Abatement? High fantastical? It would take a scholar to untangle this thicket of dense prose, and actors and audiences are rarely scholars. As a result, despite Shakespeare’s enduring popularity, performances of his plays regularly involve actors speaking lines they do not understand to an audience that does not comprehend. Shakespeare is, necessarily, literary, as the transient nature of theater cannot do his words justice. It is not enough to simply see a Shakespeare play; his audiences must also be willing to sit at a long table with a dictionary, several folio editions of the playwright’s work, a half dozen additional reference books and the telephone number of a very bright Shakespearean scholar to help out with the trickiest passages. Shakespeare either requires commitment or incomprehension, and far too many performers and audiences choose the latter. It is a testament to the power of Shakespeare’s plays that audiences can still draw so much pleasure from theater that they hardly understand; it is a similar testament to the plays that they survive so many misconceived productions.

Spoken properly, the words of Shakespeare are among theater's most influential. These are, after all, the very passages that have become among the most quoted in history, from Miranda’s declaration “O brave new world” in The Tempest to Hamlet’s bitter “What a piece of work is man?” Not an actor, nor an audience, nor a critic, nor any human born in the western half of this world goes through life untouched by Shakespeare's words. He intrudes into every aspect of our lives, his plots and words emerging from sources as diverse as the starlets in porn films to the soliloquies of Klingons. His plays are freely adapted into modern variations of themselves; The Taming of the Shrew, for example, has become both the musical Kiss Me Kate and the high school hijinks comedy 10 Things I Hate About You.

Rhino Entertainment Company’s Word Beat label, which has in the past specialized in collections of recordings of famous historical speeches or readings of beat poetry, has taken the logical step of compiling a recording of Shakespeare’s words — they are, after all, as essential artifacts of history as Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech or Jack Kerouac’s readings from Mexico City Blues. Rhino’s collection, titled Be Thou Now Persuaded: Living in a Shakespearean World, is voluminous: four CDs of assembled monologues and dialogues, plus two additional CDs that contain a complete reading of Romeo and Juliet. Performers include Sir Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles, both of whom built their sizable reputations upon their popular adaptation of Shakespeare. Olivier can be heard calling out “Once more into the breach, dear friends!” from Henry V, a role that he virtually defined until Kenneth Branagh’s film version; Welles, however, is represented by his bizarre film adaptation of Macbeth and speaks in so thick a Scottish burr that it may cause listeners’ ears to ache. Celebrity cameos abound, from Paul Robeson to Vanessa Redgrave, and occasionally the compilation’s editors seem more starstruck than careful; their inclusion of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s wild histrionics from the film version of The Taming of the Shrew couldn’t possibly be the best performance available, could it?

These lapses are rare, however; most of the dialogue found on Be Thou Now Persuaded fascinates, representing not simply Shakespeare well spoken but also a dizzying variety of interpretations. For example, Hugh Griffith’s reading of Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech from The Merchant of Venice is deliriously melodramatic. Griffith bites into his lines with audible pleasure, his chewing undoubtedly snapping up vast chunks of scenery as well, and he punctuates his character’s scorn with jagged cries of “Revenge!” As hammy performances go, Griffith’s is a joy, and his utter commitment to the text of the monologue grants Shylock a weird dignity; the character could be reduced to an anti-Semitic caricature, but Griffith makes the merchant irresistible by virtue of his bluster. “If you prick us,” Griffith intones gloomily, “do we not bleed?”, but Griffith sounds as though he were bleeding already.

Cyril Cusack’s performance as Gloucester from King Lear, however, weighs heavily with gravity. Cusack’s thin voice, cracked with age, sighs out a frightening observation: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods,” he says, voice growing flat with resignation. “They kill us for their sport.” Shakespeare supports these extremes, allowing performances that threaten to shake a theater’s foundations and send a cloud of bats fleeing its rafters; allowing as well solemn declarations, made with only a hint of emotion, in which the terrible beauty of Shakespeare’s words are made the main player and carry both the drama and the emotion of a scene.

If Shakespeare’s words support both brash and somber performances, they demand comic displays. The author delighted in broadly comic characters, and his tragedies are defined almost as much by their sense of the ridiculous as by their sense of the terrible. Many of his words were so happily bawdy that his text has long been the subject of shocked pruning by society’s guardians, leaving them sounding like the edited version of David Mamet’s Glengary Glenn Ross that occasionally plays on television (in which Ricky Roma’s disgusted “You cunt, you fucking child” has been replaced with “You fool, you foolish child.”) Shakespeare uncensored is often pure spectacle, in which foul language and severed limbs fly across the stage with alarming frequency, and Shakespeare obviously found all this uproariously funny. Be Thou Now Persuaded abounds with such comic sequences, from Anthony Quayle’s blustery Falstaff to John Neville’s bewildered Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s (concerned about his lacking humor, Aguecheek makes an inadvertently hilarious observation: “I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.”).

While it is hard to know if Rhino intended this boxed set for the general market (it is difficult to imagine a teenage girl on a school bus merrily listening to her Walkman and mouthing the words to Titus Andronicus), Be Thou Now Persuaded is a terrific resource — it is neither literature nor theater, but somewhere between the two; richer and livelier than words on a printed page, but more permanent and accessible than a performance. It is a pleasure to listen to as well, because Shakespeare’s words, read aloud, are wonderful storytellers; the CD separates them into small chunks of text, each making small, eloquent points. These are not sound bites; they hint at deeper meanings and larger themes, with a single sentence carrying as much meaning as can be found in an entire presidential debate. These are words of substance that Shakespeare, by way of Rhino, hands us, and as they grow familiar with repeated listenings they also grow more complex. These snippets of dialogue function as poetry should, demanding as much from their listeners as they provide. With Shakespeare, that which is demanded, like that which is provided, is enormous.