Max "Bunny" Sparber

I'VE BEEN WORKING OUT with my Target-bought grippers for a half week or so, and was starting to feel pretty good about myself. I seemed to be able to squeeze them for an almost endless number of repetitions, and so I decided to challenge myself by just squeezing continuously for as long as I could. At first, I could only keep the things closed for about 30 seconds, but soon I was clamping them shut for two minutes. I also started squeezing them closed using just two fingers. All in all, I felt I had done good work on my gripping strength in just a few days, even if I was using a cheap and unimpressive gripper.

This morning, my first Captains of Crush gripper arrived. It's the "Trainer" model, which means two things: It provides about 100 pounds of resistance, and it's still below Iron Mind's 4-step gripper program, which starts at 140 pounds. Oh, and it meant one more thing: All the good work I though I had done in the past week was just child's play.

These are no-nonsense, aluminum grippers with imposing heft and a diamond pattern carved into the handle. Also, they are much, much harder to squeeze, even at only 100 pounds. I could just barely close the the gripper when I first got it, and, then, that was it. No matter how hard I squeezed, I could not get the gripper closed. It's not surprising either -- people who use the grippers like to tell stories of bringing them to work and seeing who can squeeze them shut, with nobody able to, or bringing some of the more difficult models up to professional weigh-lifters and well-muscled athletes and giving them the grippers to try; inevitably, they can't squeeze them shut.

So I spent the day squeezing my new gripper. It's going to take a while before my hands get used to it -- the diamond pattern bites into my fingers, and until callouses develop there it's going to hurt a bit. Now my hands feel stiff and swollen, which was never the case with the cheapo grippers.

I did some reading on the Web today. I don't remember where I read this story, but somebody was talking about a friend who is certified as having closed the number 3 gripper, and what followed was a bizarre, but irresistible, list of the sorts of things he can do with his vice-like hands. He can, for instance, drive his thumb through a full and unopened can of coke like a knife pushing its way into butter. More impressively, he is capable of a feat of strength that is literally cartoonish: He can squeeze a can of spinach until it pops open.

I also came across this forum, where a set of twins have been working their way up the Captains of Crush ladder and posting videos of their accomplishments. Their descriptions have been especially interesting, especially now that they have traded up to the number 3 gripper, which features 280 pounds of resistance, which is almost 100 pounds more resistance than the number 2, which they had mastered. To their horror, they found they couldn't close it at all, saying it was like squeezing a brick. Incrementally, they have been making progress, but it's obvious that, when I get up to a number 3 myself, I've got quite a haul ahead of me before I can close it.

I have especially enjoyed one of the twin's descriptions of his increased grip strength, which has surprised him. After a month or so working out with the number 1, he wrote this: "veins are starting to bulge in my hands and they feel like cinderblocks now - my hands used to feel soft like a girl's hands (not just the smooth skin, but the muscles too) - now my hand feels like a wooden plank. It's pretty awesome."

One of the twins also produced this entertaining video about his triumph over the number 2 gripper:

IT'S NICE having an updated prescription and knowing that it is possible to buy glasses for $20 or thereabout online. A few weeks ago I ordered prescription sunglasses for myself. I've never owned any before, and, as a result, I spend bright days wincing like Clint Eastwood in a Spaghetti western.

My sunglasses arrived yesterday, and, I must say, I'm quite pleased with them. It's been so long since I have owned any, I forgot just how sunglasses make you feel, which is sort of cool. Nah, scratch that. A good pair of sunglasses will make you feel like a combination superspy and beatnik, which is, quite honestly, exactly how I want to feel most of the time.

I'm sure I'll be getting more glasses and sunglasses. I've always liked glasses because they're as close to eye makeup as men typically get, unless it's 1985 and you're Prince. Obviously, based on a succession of anti-consumerist posts, I don't consider just purchasing a pair of glasses to be an accomplishment -- the accomplishment was getting my eyes checked, which on one of a series of basic health maintenance things I've been meaning to do. But that doesn't mean I don't like to own pretty things. When I get a nice pair of glasses, I'll share it here as a sort of addendum to my original accomplishment, because I am a bit of a show off.

More 101 Things in 1001 Days.

BLUE COLLAR is something of a misnomer, and Michelle Myers Berg, who created and stars in the one-woman show Blue Collar Diaries, points it out immediately. Directly addressing the audience, she tells us that the people in her neighborhood wore collars with all sorts of colors, and then, one by one, she introduces us to them. Myers Berg plays an assortment of characters from her childhood in Merriam Park, including a Evangelical radio host, a poolhall burnout, and a weary cocktail waitress, but she keeps circling back to her own family, and, especially, her deceased father.

Myers Berg's neighborhood wasn't just working class, it was distinctly urban -- she mentions her high school, Central, was a destination point for educators exploring inner-city schools, and gives us a sampling of her experience as a cheerleader. While other cheerleaders offered peppy jumps and kicks, her school's cheerleading squad specialized in laconic dance moves borrowed from soul music line dances and rhythm and blues backup singers. Suburban cheerleaders found them terrifying, and Myers Berg explains that they took advantage of that, carrying themselves like pep squad juvenile delinquents after long public transportation bus trips to tonier schools.

Myers Berg hints that she may have been a bit of a hellion in her youth, but she is strangely absent as a character in her own narrative, popping up mostly as an observer and later as an adult commenter on the lives of others. She lived in the shadow of her father, a terrifying, haunted man who disciplined his eight children with an impatience that bordered on the sadistic, although sometimes hilariously so. In one instance, she describes him expressing his impatience for his childrens' bickering. He settles an argument about who gets to sit next to the window in the family car by packing his family into a delivery truck. It has no windows, but also no seats, and so the children must lie on the grooved metal floor like so many little corpses, feeling each bounce of the wheel and rolling over each other with each turn. They never fought about the window seat again.

Myers Berg's father had night terrors, and used alcohol to help him sleep, and she delves into the cause of this: Her father was a Korean War veteran; He shared very few of his experiences in the war directly with his children, although they indirectly cast a shadow over Myers Berg's entire childhood, revealing themselves in unexpected ways: a crawlspace in a closet filled with military trophies, and the way her father could casually, and unerringly, gun down birds with a shotgun at her grandfather's request -- but which would leave him whimpering and sullen. She eventually researched her father's experiences, trying to get hold of other veterans who served in his unit, the 555th Field Artillery Battalion of Charlie Company. She met with little success, and eventually found out why: His unit had been massacred, suffering among the highest casualties in a war defined by it's brutal excesses.

These scenes are, for me, the most interesting in the play. Myers Berg is a solid storyteller and an engaging performer, but some of her narratives, although based in the sorts of people she grew up around, have the ring of fiction to them -- her inventory of Rondo blues artists and Catholic school nuns and busybody neighbors are florid characters, and fun to watch, but they are constructed characters, rebuilt from old memories, while her stories of her own family have the uncluttered and unforced quality of truth. With the other characters, Myers Berg tends toward mild exaggeration, and some of the characters wind up feeling like just that -- characters. But on the few occasions she gives voice to her father, speaking his dialogue, she gives him a distracted plain-spokeness and a hint of embarrassment that is both unshowy and fascinating. He's the most interesting character in a play that sets out to introduce us to dozens of interesting characters, for two reasons -- firstly, because his story is a compelling one, but, secondly, because Myers Berg is so fascinated by him, and that translates to the audience. Myers Berg's bigger performances, which sometimes verge on caricature, are great fun, but she was wise to dial it back in describing her father, relying, instead, on a few subtle physical descriptions, such as they way he would sweat rust after a day of work at the machine shop.

It helps that she witnessed her father during moments of intimacy that are only possible in a family, when he either failed as a person or succeeded, and he did both, and both a great stories. She witnesses him not knowing how to respond to several African American boys from her neighborhood, and it's a painful scene to hear described, as her father retreats into himself, looking through the two youths as though they didn't exist. But, earlier, Myers Berg told of how her father, who scrapes by on a meager salary and must rely on hand-me-downs to keep his family dressed, spontaneously buys a neighborhood child new winter boots when he discovers she has none. It can't be easy to paint a portrait of your father which shows him capable of both unexpected acts of compassion and humiliating moments of pettiness, but these are the sorts of things that make people interesting. In a play that's carefully populated with eccentric and flashy characters, her father, who is never openly eccentric or flashy, ends up being the one we want to hear the most about, and that's a hell of a great eulogy to give the man.

Photo by Scott Pakudaitis.

Blue Collar Diaries plays through April 18 at the History Theatre, 651.292.4323.

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The boy I knew from ZOOM
WHEN I WAS A BOY, maybe 10 years old, I went to summer school, and met another boy there. I remember almost nothing about this other boy except that I took an instant dislike to him, the way boys do -- for no reason at all. I don't remember what the class was, or why I was attending, but it must have been very small, as I wound up frequently talking to this boy I disliked. And I remember he told me he had been on the television show ZOOM, and I remember not believing him, and telling him I didn't. And I remember being very jealous of him, because maybe he was telling the truth.

It's possible he was lying. Radio producer Dan Gediman auditioned for ZOOM, was nearly cast, but then wasn't, and lied about it for years, which he discussed on This American Life. I don't know Gediman's biography; Perhaps he was that boy I disliked, in which case I was right to call him a liar. But perhaps the boy in the classroom had, in fact, been a cast member. ZOOM regularly turned over its cast members, and so had quite a few in its six years of production, from 1972 to 1978. In addition, the show regularly presented mini-documentaries about real children who did really interesting things, and he might have been one of those children. But, at the age of 10, I often lied about myself to make myself sound more important, and so when this boy claimed to have been on ZOOM, I just presumed he was a liar, as I was. The other option was that he was telling the truth, and that option made me so jealous I could not stand it.

I can't explain the jealousy. I watched ZOOM, but with mild disinterest. A lot of the show seemed to be made up of girls' games, with the cast playing patty cake or speaking the deliberately bewildering language of Ubbi Dubbi. Annoyingly, every girl I knew in grade school had learned this language, created by added the sound "ub" before each vowel in a syllable, and spoke it all the time, uband ubi cubouldubn't ubunduberstuband uba wubord thubat thubey subaid. Annoying.

I enjoyed The Electric Company, with its op art graphics and puckish sense of humor, and, when I could find it, a show called Vegetable Soup, which was a sort of ultra-urban Sesame Street, in that the show was set in the inner city and addressed issues like racism and poverty. I watched it because it featured hallucinogenic animation that looked like something Ralph Baksi might have concocted, which both fascinated and terrified me.

Years later, I came across a zine whose author had a peculiar fondness for the show ZOOM, and he made his case. I read the article with considerable fascination, and, when I had finished, I realized that I had underestimated ZOOM. I was 23 years old at the time, and, for the first time in my life, I wanted to be a ZOOM kid.

Some quick background
There is a lot of story to ZOOM, and I don't want to detail it all, but I'll break down some of the highlights, just to give a sense of how unusual the show was. It was created back in 1972 by a PBS producer out of Boston by the name Christopher Sarson. The zine article claimed that he was influenced by a British television show, and for years I tried to track down the name of the show, even going so far as to write the producers of a newer production of ZOOM that ran from 1999 to 2005. They wrote back to say they had been scratching their head about that exact question, but did not know the answer. Last year, in a discussion about the show on the online forum Metafilter, somebody named the BBC production, and it was a doozy: Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead? Researching that show, I discovered it debuted the year after ZOOM, so I am not sure that the tale of it inspiring ZOOM is accurate. It may have been in the drafting stages when Sarson heard about it, or perhaps ZOOM inspired Why Don't You?, or perhaps they inspired each other. The shows are quite similar, however, in that both presented a radical challenge to young television viewers, made explicit by the title of the BBC production.

Turn off your television and go do something.

This may not seem like much to anybody who has had a cranky parent shout it to them on a nice summer day, and, if the shows were nothing but an anti-television harangue, it wouldn't be worth discussing. But they were more than that. They were an instructional guide in interesting things to do away from the television, and how to do them. Many of these were simple crafts, such as making cat's eyes or little puppets. Some of what they instructed were games, including the dreaded language game of Ubbi Dubbi. And sometimes, as I have mentioned, they showed us children who were doing really remarkable things. I don't remember the specifics, it having been 30 or more years since I have seen the show, which I watched with mild disinterest anyway, but I recall them being things like children who played in professional orchestras, or knew everything there was to know about spiders, or put on their own plays.

The producer seemed somewhat modest about the content of ZOOM -- he is quoted on TV Party as saying "It's nonsense to say it is innovative. It's nothing but kids playing games, rapping with each other, singing, dancing, being kids. There's nothing copyrightable about it. We don't even need writers. We rely on the kids; they mail in the ideas." But he was wrong. Children's television had always consisted of entertainment created by adults for children, and, with a few notably exceptions, encouraged passive viewing. ZOOM was created by children for children and encouraged active participation. Most people who watched ZOOM, even a few episodes, can still sing the show's address and zip code: 02134. It's because the show actively, relentlessly solicited content from its audience members. This wasn't just an innovation, it was a radical break from previous programming for children, and it is one of the few television shows to treat seriously the experience, and unique culture, of children.

Why it's worth it to be a ZOOM kid even when you grow up
Of course, I am an adult now, and, even though I have an academic interest in rhymes and games of children, that is not the aspect of the show that most interests me now. Instead, there was something else that moved me about ZOOM when I read about it in that zine, years ago, and, honestly, it transformed me.

I shouldn't be surprised that a zine author might be interested in ZOOM. Zines were, after all, DIY publishing -- the authors did every aspect of manufacturing a publication themselves, from creating the content to photocopying the issues to distributing the finished product. ZOOM was likewise DIY. It was made by ordinary kids. Firstly, the content was offered by viewers, and, secondly, the cast was drawn from regular boys and girls. The show's producers held open auditions, and weeded out child actor wanna-bes. They included in their contracts a provision that the children could not pursue acting gigs for a set time after the show ended. And they switched the cast out frequently enough to discourage having the cast become mini-celebrities, which they were only partially successful at doing. But they weren't hoping to avoid creating a generation of spoiled child actors; instead, by discouraging a star system in which a few freakishly talented wunderkinds displayed unusual and unlikely talents, they were hoping to have every child think themselves capable of what they saw on ZOOM. If the show's content seemed fun enough, and was well explained enough, and the children who presented it seemed normal enough, maybe the viewers would actually turn their teevee sets off and try out what they had seen.

Ubobvubiousluby ubit wuborkubed.

You don't need to be a child to think about the world in this way. ZOOM was radical because it rejected passive consumption in favor of active creation, and, unfortunately, as adults, we don't generally get that sort of encouragement. Culture often seems like something that other people make, through a process that we never see, and all we get is the end result, and we get it by paying for it (or stealing it online) and then consuming it. And, too often, we're given an illusion of unattainable excellence. We see photographs of celebrities in which they have been Photoshopped so they are free of blemish, with magnificent bodies and glorious hair, and we will never be that. We hear songs sung by teenagers in which nearly every note has been autotuned to the right pitch, and the resulting song has a plastic genius to it that cannot be produced by people just sitting around playing songs -- it's created by technicians with thousands of dollars worth of equipment and hundreds of hours in which to tweak every element of the song until it is rigidly perfect. Movies costs hundreds of millions of dollars, television costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and all of it requires armies of skilled professionals to set up lights and lay down dollies and hold boom mics. It's all out of our reach. We don't have the money for it, and, more than that, we've never been given any indication that we have the talent for it. Shows like American Idol regularly mock the talentless and winnow out idiosyncrasies, so that all that remains are pretty people with pretty voices.

But I have a problem with that. And my problem is that culture has been turned over to a small group of professionals, and removed from the hands of the rest of the population, who are expected either to be consumers, or, if they are ambitious enough, and talented enough, and pretty enough, can aspire to join the ranks of the pros.

That's not culture. That's the creation of a commodity. There is often value to it, sure; I'm not calling for the end of well-crafted pop songs or great action movies. But that's not all there is to being creative, and hat's not all there is to culture.

On the value of folk culture
If YouTube, and related sites, demonstrate anything, they demonstrate that people like to make stuff, whatever their talent or lack thereof. The short movies made by YouTube users are examples of an emerging folk culture, and, I think, one that should be encouraged.

First of all, let me quickly explain what I mean by folk culture. I'll use the Wikipedia definition, since it is perfectly serviceable: Folk art describes a wide range of objects that reflect the craft traditions and traditional social values of various social groups. These art works from 'common folk' are generally produced by people who have little or no academic artistic training, nor a desire to emulate "fine art."

So give a 10-year-old a cheap video camera and an internet connection, and the moment he films a 10-second video his brother falling off a trampoline and posts it to YouTube, he's created folk art. I know it seems like a stretch, but, as far as I am concerned, the backyard trampoline, and the accidents that happen as a result of it, are as deeply a part of modern American culture as building a barn was part of Amish culture. I've given a profoundly unsophisticated example, yes, but some of the hallmarks of folk culture are its unsophistication and naivety. This is art that directly documents the experience of its creators, and it is made for as good a reason as anything: because its creators think its funny.

There are some benefits to this sort of thing. The first is that we have this neat little document of an American experience, and I expect future historians will find stuff like this invaluable. But, for me, the second thing is more interesting: Here we have a 10-year-old learning how to make movies, even if he is doing it crudely.

We're at a unique time in history, in that the tools of making art have suddenly become very cheap and very available. There have always been some tools that anybody could afford, such a pen knives, and make things with, such as whittled sculptures. But now it is possible for anybody with a laptop computer to buy an inexpensive microphone and record a song, or to buy an inexpensive digital camera and make a short movie. Blogging platforms allow people to be their own publishers and distributors. It's like the zine revolution, but writ large. We used to photocopy 10 pages and hand-staple it together, mailing out a dozen or so copies and leaving another dozen at local record stores to sell for seventy-five cents. Now we can put in online and potentially find an audience of hundreds, or thousands, or millions. And we aren't limited to just printing text. With a computer and a couple of hundred dollars, we can do just about anything.

So what's your point?
My point is this. It's not enough just to have the technology to do this. It's time that people who actually do these things start looking at the world through the lens of ZOOM. It is time for us to become each others educators. There is a lot of this going on online already -- YouTube provides another example, in that a simple search for, say, blues riffs brings up hundreds of instructional videos walking you through how to play guitar.

I have often included some of the details about how I do things on my blog, and have also tried to included a few links that provide instruction. But I am going to dedicate myself to making that an essential element to my publishing, and, more than that, to my reporting. When I interview people, I want to find out how they do things, so that if someone is inspired by what they do, they can try it as well. And it doesn't need to be high art -- if it's just people getting together and doing something, I want to try and document some of that, because that's where culture comes from. It may seem like it's just a group of kids playing a game, as we would see on ZOOM, but they are actively creating their own cultural experience, and, without that, all we get are commodities that are sold to us, and all we get to be are consumers.

I want to be more than that. I want to be a ZOOM kid.

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JASON DERUSHA, who is responsible for WCCO's Good Question segment, discusses discusses how he uses social media to develop story ideas and find experts, and the benefits to reporters and news organizations of having an active presence on Twitter, Facebook, and in the local blogging community. Online, Jason has a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and post photos on Flickr.

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A RERECORDING OF my song "When The Water Rise Up," done as a sort of jug band gospel tune. With the Red River flooding, it seemed somehow appropriate.

"WHEN THE WATER RISE UP" LYRICS:

When the levee bow
When the water rise up
When the water rise up
When the water rise up
Got no place to go
When the water rise up
When the water rise up
When the water rise up

I hear the storm, man
I hear it blow
Ain't no storm can move me
Got no place to go

Wind whips the windows
Storm's at my door
Hurricane don't you blow now
You ain't welcome anymore

Flood at my feet now
Ain't gonna scare me though
Ain't no storm can move me
Got no place to go

LISTEN TO "WHEN THE WATER RISE UP":



DOWNLOAD "WHEN THE WATER RISE UP."

MORE NEW SONGS!

I FEEL AS THOUGH I am reaching the wall. The wall is that period of time, after two and a half or three months, when I get bored with whatever project I am working on, get distracted by a new project, and just wander away, like a child chasing after a butterfly, or an adult entomologist chasing after a butterfly. I have not been especially rigorous about my diet for the past few weeks. It's not that I have gone back to consuming amounts that would cause me to gain weight, or that even amounts that would keep me from continuing to lose weight (although I lose no weight between last week and this week, but one week does not constitute a trend).

No, it's just a general laxness. I don't write down what I have eaten until the end of the day, and so I may well be forgetting something here or there. I've started snacking again, which, ultimately, can completely sabotage a diet. I'm eating bigger portions, and less fruit, and eating before I am actually hungry, and continuing until I am full. Incrementally, these sorts of things will undermine my efforts.

I expected this, and I suppose I could say to myself "Well, I lost 25 pounds, I am no longer overweight; I should be satisfied with what I have accomplished." But that wasn't the point of this exercise. The first point, obviously, is to get back to skinny. But the second point was to develop some tools for overcoming the wall. I want to be able to do a longer project to completion, rather than switching from project to project every few months, and end up with a blog littered with things I have begun but never finished. I'm sort of old to be teaching myself how to do long-term projects from soup to nuts, but better now than never.

So it seems to me the best thing I can do now is address the fact that my attention is waning, and then, through sheer force of will, get myself back on track again. I still have 40 pounds to lose, and it's probably going to take four or five months to lose them, so I have to get used to being rigorous about this sort of thing. I'm starting to think that few really meaningful things are ever done in less that a year, and it's not helping me that I can't seem to maintain my attention for longer than three months. So here I go, recommitting myself to this project; that may be the struggle for me on this project, at least for a while.

More Rock Star Skinny.

AN INTERVIEW with photographer Wing Young Huie, whose past projects include Frogtown and Lake Street USA, two expansive looks at the people who make up several neighborhoods in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

Wing Young Huie will be leading a workshop in Identity Portraiture as part of the Walker Art Center's Target Free Thursday Nights, March 26, 6pm-9pm.

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First, a few comments about the Guthrie
I NEVER REALLY EXPECTED Guthrie Artistic Director Joe Dowling to do something that would transform Twin Cities theater. When I was at City Pages covering local theater, Dowling could be a bit frustrating. I found, and continue to find, his programming to err on the side of timidity -- as an example, his forthcoming season includes The Importance of Being Earnest and A Streetcar Named Desire, which, while being undeniably excellent scripts, have turned into mainstays of dinner theater precisely because they have stopped being challenging. They are, unfortunately, the sorts of plays to which you can bring your rural cousins who attend the church where they wave snakes around and drink strychnine, which, honestly, is more exciting theater anyway.

The Guthrie seemed to be in a sort of a bubble a few years ago. It drew from local talent, sure, but often people who had already made a name for themselves nationally, and badly underused the excellent group of character actors that made up the Guthrie's regular performing crew, placing them in supporting roles that were, at best, occasionally flashy, but hiring New York talent for lead roles. There were stories about local actors auditioning for the Guthrie -- very good local actors, mind you -- and being received with total indifference, which is a pity, as the Guthrie can take its pick of local talent, and some of these people are very, very talented.

But something has changed with the opening of the new space. I suspect economics might be, in part, at the root of it, but that change is very good and very welcome. The Guthrie has become far more integrated in the local theater scene, in two ways. Firstly, they are using a lot more local talent, and in sometimes very big roles -- not just onstage, but in every aspect of their productions, including writing the plays and directing them. Secondly, the Guthrie now has three stages, and often brings in guest companies to mount plays in their space, often in the black box Dowling Studio. Perhaps this was Joe Dowling's plan all along, and it took the opening of a new space to give him the opportunity, in which case I commend him. Perhaps the theater is just so expensive to run that they have had to cut back on the expense of New York talent and instead rely on locals, and have to keep their stages active all the time in order to keep income flowing in, in which case -- well, I commend Dowling anyway. People should get credit for excellent outcomes, intended or not. The Guthrie has been a shot in the arm for the local theater scene, and this is a time when the local theater scene badly needs the support of a powerhouse like the Guthrie, as local arts tend to suffer very badly during economic downturns.

Now, about By the Bog of Cats
One of the best examples of the importance of this development is that the Frank Theatre now makes occasional use of the Dowling Stage, because if there is one word that cannot be used to describe the Frank Theatre, it is "timid." Founder and Artistic Director Wendy Knox does plays for the best reason of all for doing plays: because they challenge and inspire her. And so we end up with a play by Irish playwright Marina Carr in the Guthrie Theater, and, while Joe Dowling is Irish, and he and Carr share the Abbey Theater on their resumes, I'm not sure Carr would have wound up at the Guthrie if the Frank Theatre didn't bring her there -- or, at least, not until she had achieved a rare sort of international fame as a playwright, which she hasn't yet.

Her play, By the Bog of Cats, is a retelling of the tale of Medea, but set in the Irish midlands -- probably somewhere in the vicinity of Tullamore, where both Carr and a very famous whiskey hail from. For those who don't remember the story of Medea, she was the foreign-born wife of Jason, the captain of the Argonauts, and she helped him steal the Golden Fleece. But Jason betrayed her by marrying the daughter of the King of Corinth, and Medea took a terrible revenge on Jason.

Carr has rather ingeniously translated this myth to her native Ireland. In place of the Medea who was born in the vicinity of modern Georgia, then Colchis, Carr gives us Hester Swane, the daughter of tinkers, an itinerant group who are sometimes identified as being Gypsys, but aren't; they are, however, a socially distinct group in Ireland, and historically despised. Hester Swane is played by Virginia Burke, and it is an awesome performance.

That word, "awesome," is a bit hard to use nowadays, as it sounds like something a sun-blonded surfer would shout the moment his bare feet hit hot sands, but I mean it in the way it's intended. Her performance inspires awe, as it should. Hester is a capricious and semi-feral woman, briefly raised and quickly abandoned by an equally wild mother, and Hester is a woman who is prone to sudden outburst of astonishing violence. She suffers occasional visions, such as one at the start of the play, in which a spectral man in funereal garb warns her she'll be dead by the next day. But she's also a woman of deeply wounded pride, and her most recent wound comes at the hand of a local farmer named Carthage, with whom she had a daughter, but who is now abandoning her to marry the daughter of a local landowner.

This is a tough role to play, and, more than that, tough to play sympathetically. But Burke struts around, her arms akimbo, often with a sardonic half-smile playing across her face, delivering her dialogue as a series of scoffing challenges, and the portrait that emerges is not one of some unsympathetic creature for whom pride trumps common sense, but instead a village oddball whose wants are plain enough -- she wants to spend time with her daughter, and she wants to be left alone. Occasionally, though, she breaks down and reveals a pettier side to her, wheedling Cathage to take her back, and these moments are embarrassing, because you want Hester to be a stronger woman than that. But these moments are necessary, as the play will eventually move toward tragedy, and the tragedy is a product both of Hester's genuinely undeserved heartbreaks, as well as her capacity for cruelty and pettiness.

The world of Hester
Carr populates her play with some really terrific characters that surround Hester. Cathage is a bit of a snooze, but he's supposed to be, and he's played with a mixture of weary charm and subtle bullying by John Catron. But the rest of Hester's world seems made up of oddballs, including a local seer that calls herself the Catwoman, played with ghastly good humor by Annie Enneking. Blind and dressed in rags, the Catwoman carries mice in her pocket and occasionally snacks on them, licks wine out of saucers, and flirts with the village priest. He is Father Willow, a bearded and ancient fellow played by Gabe Angieri, who can't make a speech without getting lost in his own oratory, and who barely functions as a moral force in the play. (Hester begs him at one point to stand up for her, and he shrugs: "They wouldn't listen to me anyway.")

Hester sets herself to warring with the Cassidys, the paterfamilias of which is a bitter farmowner named Xavier, played by Guthrie regular Bob Davis. He is himself a wounded man with a family tragedy in his past, a grotesque sacrifice; Davis plays the role with surprising frailty for a man whose temper, we are warned, is terrible. Davis shows just enough malice that we believe he is capable of terrible things, but also shows us a man ruined by the fact.

And that's perfect, because this is a play about terrible things, and lives that are ruined by them. It's in the final act of this play that the real awesomeness of Virginia Burke's performance becomes evident. Because Burke dredges up an inhuman act that is nonetheless completely understandable, and, upon completing it, collapses with an anguished cry that is genuinely heartbreaking. I use awesome here in the oldest sense of the word, from when it meant an experience of both amazement and dread -- and it's not just the violence that Burke demonstrates that inspires awe, but her own agony at having done it. There are no heroes in Marina Carr's updating of this old Greek story, there are only the wounded and those who will wound again, and they are often the same people.

By the Bog of Cats plays through April 5 in the Guthrie Theater's Dowling Studio; 612.377.2224.

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1. Why I couldn't write about I Love You, Man

I SAW I LOVE YOU, MAN the other night. Cute film -- surprisingly sweet. It's not uproarious, but it's got a solid cast who are all intrinsically funny, albeit a little underused.

I sat down to write a review for it this morning and realized that's it -- that's all I have to say about the film. I could have invented something. For example: It's a movie set in Los Angeles that is almost completely devoid of Hispanics, African-Americans, or Asians, which means it is not actually set in Los Angeles but a pretend Los Angeles made up of rich white people. But that wouldn't be a complaint unique to this film. Instead, it's a chronic problem in Hollywood filmmaking.

Similarly, while the lead actors are Jewish, they might as well not be, and the film pretends they aren't -- somehow, we are supposed to believe that the very Waspy J.K. Simmons and Jane Curtain have managed to produce Paul Rudd and Andy Samburg; in other words, the Neo-Nazi from Oz has fathered Jew and Jewier. But making the actors explicitly Jewish wouldn't have contributed to the story being told, except, perhaps, to addsome additional texture. Also, when you have J.K. Simmons and Jane Curtain, you use them. Neither of the two leads, Paul Rudd nor Jason Segel, have shied away from playing Jews, so it's not a chronic problem for them.

So I sat down to write a review, and realized I didn't have much to say about the movie. More than that, didn't know what I would have to say that would be needed when someone can just go to Rotten Tomatoes and read dozens of reviews of the film. So I didn't write.

2. Consumption, regurgitation, and redundancy

I've come around to the idea that one of the things we need to do on the Web is start thinking about the content we put up. There is an enormous signal to noise ratio now. Some of the noise is nonsense, but a lot of it is pure redundancy.

I go through about 100 blog posts per day, and you'll often see a video, or a link, or something else amusing or interesting, suddenly get reprinted or linked to on nearly every blog. I never understand the point of this, for two reasons. Firstly, there's a pretty small community of bloggers in the Twin Cities who all read each others blogs, and so if something has been published on one blog, chances are if you republish it on your blog, you're going to be showing exactly the same content to exactly the same audience. But, secondly (and, I think, more importantly), there is a tendency to mistake regurgitating content for creating content.

This isn't unique to the Web, and I have been as guilty of it as anyone. When I was younger, I was quite a film snob. I was unduly proud of what I had read about film and the films I had watched. But film snobbery is easily acquired. Even back then, when you had to be a bit rigorous to be a proper film snob -- watching television at all hours to catch broadcasts of old films and haunting second-run theaters -- it was still a snobbery based around pride in consumption.

There's no challenge to that; it's just a matter of waiting for opportunity. Similarly, while I read about film constantly, and enjoyed knowing about film, ultimately everything I knew was something somebody else has discovered or reported. That's just another sort of consumption. I don't mean to minimize the real pleasure I took, and still take, in seeing movies and reading about the subject. Instead, I merely mean to point out that being able to sit in a theater doesn't constitute an accomplishment, and being able to remember what other people have written about the subject does not constitute creating new content.

I'm at a point now where I don't want to be just a consumer, I don't want to regurgitate other people's content, and I don't want to create content that's redundant. I have had to think about what this means for me, as I come out of a rather typical experience of writing about art and culture, and that writing is often rooted in consumption, regurgitation, and redundancy.

3. The reasons so many publications print nearly identical content

Publications want to attract audiences, which, if you're looking to make a profit, makes perfect sense. After all, we live in a consumerist society, and so publications tend to do events-based coverage, because people want to know what to do with their weekends. That coverage tends to be summaries of what consumers can expect to see and a quick note telling them whether it is worth spending money on. There aren't many publications that focus on stuff their audience hasn't heard of -- instead, publications are like bars that have live music who want to hire a band that already has an audience, because they are in the business of selling beer, not giving opportunities to talented unknowns.

Similarly, publications usually want to write about things that readers are already interested in. And that means there will be redundancy and regurgitation, as there is only so much new you can say about something that everybody is already writing about -- especially when you are using a limited format rooted in telling people how to spend their money.

(Of course, this is not a universal trend. There are bars that happily book unknown bands on the basis of a really great demo, and there are publications that write about total unknowns simply because they think it's a good subject. But such stories are increasingly rare, particularly when the economy is so sketchy.)

Well, I'm not out to tell people how to spend their money, but instead am writing about things that I find meaningful. Since I am writing for my own edification, I just want to write stories about subjects that interest me, and stories I feel are underreported. A lot of stories are, because the artists are obscure or because their work isn't events based or because they are working in a medium that the mainstream media doesn't prioritize or know how to cover. So why write about I Love You, Man?

4. What this means for my own writing

I'll be thinking about this as I think about how to cover arts. Firstly, I am going to increase my focus on local arts. I'll still write about big release films and the like now and then, but only when I feel I have something distinct to say about the subject or when I can report something new. Secondly, when covering local arts, I am going to try not to duplicate the content of other publications.

The Guthrie Theater doesn't really need my reviews, as there are still a half dozen local theater critics who will see anything they produce and report back on it, and I don't know that I have much to add to what they have to say. I'm still interested in writing about the Guthrie, as it's importance to the local and national theater scene must not be underestimated, but I am going to have to think about how to cover them without being part of a throng of critics clumped together opening night. I'm sort of a weirdo, and so it's pretty likely that I will have a few opinions of my own, but one or two idiosyncratic turns of phrases isn't really worth the effort required to write or read it. I think I will try for more artist profiles and behind-the-scenes stuff when I feel a review would be reduplicating other coverage. If something is worth writing about, there's more to write than a straightforward review.

That's not to say I won't be reviewing anything anymore. But I am going to try to put my attention as a critic to performances and arts that gets scant attention otherwise. There will probably be a lot more fine arts and dance coverage, as those barely attract any attention, and I'll be looking into smaller local theaters -- which has always been where I have placed my attention anyway.

Obviously, I'm doing this in my spare time, and so my arts writing will focus exclusively on the stories that really move me and I already know are likely to be worth writing about, which means a lot of stories will slip through the cracks. I suppose all I can do is try to be as open about my process as possible, so if anybody else likewise wants to start covering local arts, they will now how I do it, and can choose to do the same, or come up with another way.

And so there will be occasional essays like this one, where I detail what I am thinking, or how I do something. Because, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I have started to think that we may actually be reaching the end of print, and it may be quite a while before the Web develops a money-making model that will allow it to step into the gap left by old media. So all we can really do is collectively dedicate whatever time we have to do the job ourselves. It's either that or endlessly recycle the same half-dozen YouTube videos and humorous blog links, and, honestly, if that's all the Internet is good for, it's not worth much of anything at all.

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ABOVE IS THE OPENING CREDIT SEQUENCE for The Many Women of Sailor Martin, a movie that has not yet been made.

At the end of May, I will be spending a week in Omaha, Neb., to participate in the Great Plains Theatre Conference. One of my plays, The Older Gentleman, will have a staged reading there, and get responses from a panel of playwrights. I will likewise be sitting in on panels and offering responses to other playwrights. Additionally, there will be seminars and evening performances, and I look forward to taking advantage of these opportunities.

But I will be doing something else in Omaha. I will be making a complete motion picture.

I have a unique opportunity in Omaha. Firstly, but for the conference activities, I will have a week to work on this project. Secondly, I am a product of the Omaha theater scene, and still have many friends who are performers who I can rope into appearing onscreen. And, third, I now have the equipment, or most of it, at least, to make a digital film, guerrilla-style.

The conference is more than two months away, but if you're going to make a movie the way I am going to do it, the more work you do upfront, the less you have to do when you actually start shooting. And this is going to be a particularly loosey goosey production, constructed out of a series of structured improvs and shot documentary style in whatever location is available and using whatever cast member happens to be on hand.

That's not to say this will just be a lot of goofing around, though. There will be a plot, or something resembling a plot. Specifically, our hero, Sailor Martin, will find himself with some gambling debts, and will turn to a beefcake photographer for help. The photographer promises a certain amount of money in exchange for naughty photographs of women, and so Sailor Martin begins to contact his ex-girlfriends, hoping to convince them to strip down to their unmentionables to help him. And so begins an odyssey through Sailor Martin's own romantic history.

I'm still figuring out the form this will take, and what the improvs will be, and what I will need to make the film. I already have some friends committed to helping with this, and, obviously, I have a credit sequence (starring Coco, who will also appear in the movie, operate the camera, and help with the editing. And I have music for the soundtrack -- Sailor Martin has been unusually prolific in producing original music in the past few years. I thought I would begin to document the process here, and would document it in as much detail as possible, so that others can see exactly how I did it (or, perhaps, failed at doing it, if things go catastrophically wrong).

I am attempting to make a film that is really a product of the digital age, and the advantages, and limitations, that come with it. The advantages, specifically, are that it can be made very, very cheaply. It will be shot entirely on a Kodak Zi6 pocket HD digital camera, using available light or extremely simply lighting setups. It will be edited on a Mac laptop using iMovie and uploaded directly to this blog in 10-minute chunks, one per day, for eight days; or, at least, that's the plan so far. These are the advantages.

The disadvantages, of course, are that it will be a little sloppy, it will be filmed in a digital format that, while HD, is still not something that would look especially good on a movie screen or even a large televisions screen. The sound may be murky, as I will be relying on the digital video camera's internal mic, which is not the best. The image will be shaky, although there are some tricks I will be using to minimize that. But the goal is to make a movie for about the price of one month's rent, including the cost of purchasing the camera, which I have already done.

I am sketching my ideas out on a Google docs document, which you can access here. Additionally, I may be filming a few scenes here in Minneapolis in advance of my Omaha trip, in order to expedite the process and also take advantage of some of the talent here. Whatever I end up doing, I will be documenting here, so that you can see how the film was made, step by step.

Speaking of which, the credit sequence was created very simply. I took some photos of Coco dancing and then edited them in Photoshop, and then strung them together in iMovie for a sort of primitive animated effect, editing them in time to the Sailor Martin song "Cell Block Number 4."

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ACCORDING TO THE POPULAR THEORY, the custom of shaking hands was intended to be a demonstration of friendly intent. It showed that you didn't have a weapon in your hand, or, at least, the hand you were shaking with. But there is no gesture, no matter how friendly, that people can't use as a game of one-upmanship. We've probably all been on the receiving end of a vicelike grip; presumably, we're supposed to respond with a similarly crushing squeeze, and the game would be afoot, with both hand shakers glaring at each, sweating, grimacing, and clenching teeth until one relinquished his grip and the other was the victor. At least, that's how badasses do it in movies.

But there are legitimate reasons for having a powerful grip, or, at least, there are if you think tearing a phone book in half is legitimate. A strong grip is important for a lot of sports, such as baseball, horse racing, and any number of martial arts, but it's at its most impressive as sideshow-like demonstrations of strength, such as bending nails between two fingers.

Gripping has come into its own in the past few decades, in part thanks to the development of inexpensive but well-made grippers, such as those made by IronMind, that allow people to develop pulverizing grips with the same sort of programmed exactness used in weight training. IronMind offers the awesomely named "Captains of Crush" grippers, which gradually increase in pressure -- beginners can start with a gripper that offers 80 lb of resistance, and they offer grippers with up to 365 lb of resistance -- the hand that can squeeze that can apply as much pressure as a typical dog bite, which, as anybody who has ever been bitten by a dog can attest, is terrifying. In fact, IronMind will certify people as having successfully closed their harder grippers.

And that's my goal: to get certified as being able to close their No. 3 gripper, which offers 280 lb of resistance. It's not their 365 lb No. 4 gripper, true, but, to date, only five people have been certified as being able to close.

I began yesterday with some store-bought grippers, but that was a waste of money; I doubt they offer more that 20 lb of resistance, and, for whatever reason, my grip is already strong enough to easily squeeze that closed. This week I will order the Captains of Crush "trainer" model, which offers 100 lb of resistance, and get started with that. For now, I'll just squeeze the ones I already have and think about the day when I can have people yelping in pain when they offer up a friendly handshake.

SEVERAL AUDIO ITEMS in the collection of The Pavek Museum, a small museum in St. Louis Park dedicated to the history of radio and television.

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ORIGINAL SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE cast member Dan Ackroyd signs bottles of his new vodka, Crystal Head, at Byerly's in St. Louis Park. Voice over and some images taken from a promotional video on the vodka's Web site.

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179 POUNDS, a loss of 25 total. That put my body mass index at 25, which is the very top range of a normal BMI for my height. It's taken me two and a half months to get back to normal, and I lost weight relatively quickly -- an average of two and a half pounds per week, which is more than double the weight loss you can expect on a typical diet. So, while this wasn't a huge amount of time to spend dieting, it's enough that I will be cognizant of just how much time it takes to lose weight in the future; it's supposedly easier to try and maintain a target weight than lose weight, and it was instructive for me just how long it takes to get back to normal, even when you're only mildly overweight.

Of course, I don't plan to stop losing weight at the very top end of the normal BMI category. Especially with my body type, with my lean frame, "normal," at this weight, stills look a little bloated. I'm rounder around the middle than I want to be, and mt face is fuller than I want. The goal of this project, after all, is not simply to stop being overweight -- although I am quite pleased to have accomplished that part of the goal -- but to get back to being skinny. To get down to the bottom end of my BMI, which is around 135 pounds (I'm shooting for 140.) This stage of my diet I am calling "From the Top to the Bottom," as I mentioned in an earlier post, and I began documenting it by taking photos of myself this morning, to map out just how different the extremes of the normal range of the BMI is -- it's about 40 pounds, after all.

The cookie and shake diet isn't bad. It benefits from its extreme simplicity. I've just been swapping out two meals a day with diet bars or shakes, and having small, healthy snacks, and eating one proper meal per day. I haven't been hideously rigorous about this diet -- I think I am suffering some exhaustion from the extreme rigorousness of the last diet -- but it hasn't really mattered. I'm still staying within the range of caloric intake I was shooting for, and so will continue to lose weight. I have been using diet bars manufactured by Special K, which are 180 calories each. They have four flavors -- double chocolate, chocolaty chip, strawberry, and peanut butter. I haven't tried the peanut butter yet, and, of the other three, I seem to like the double chocolate one best, but it's hard to find. All of them are pleasant enough -- they have a nice crunch to them, and taste a bit like a sweetened snack bars, which, I suppose, is what they are. They're fortified with vitamins and minerals, and seem to satisfy my hunger for three hours, or thereabouts.

I've been using the Target brand diet shakes, although sparingly. They just taste like chocolate milk. They also have 180 calories, or thereabouts, but they use an artificial sweetener, and I am unaccountably suspicious of those. I also find the shakes somewhat less satisfying than the bars, for reasons I am hard-pressed to pin down just now.

MPR AND ALMANAC HOST CATHY WURZER discusses her book and documentary, Tales of the Road: Highway 61, in which she explores one of Minnesota's -- and America's -- most iconic roads. The book is available at area bookstores and on Amazon.com; the documentary debuts on Twin Cities Public Television on March 23rd. 8 p.m. More information can be found on Cathy's Web site, TalesoftheRoad.net.

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THE LOCALLY FILMED Living Arrangements, directed by Sam Thompson, has a clever premise, similar to that of Roger Corman's satiric horror comedy Little Shop of Horrors. Living Arrangements places a vegan couple in a small Minneapolis duplex that has, for unexplained reasons, a werewolf in the attic; in short order, their moral objections concerning meat fall away as they find they must either feed the monster or become its next meal.

The film is plagued with many of the problems of small-budget, independent films by relatively inexperienced filmmakers. For one thing, despite touches of visual inventiveness, its a flat film, in a variety of ways. The lead performances, by Joe Noreen and Alexandra Glad, have an appealing, deadpan quality, but there's a sameness to all of their line deliveries; while they affect some satisfyingly menacing, shifty glances toward the film's end, for the most part they're the same soft-spoken and slightly befuddled characters they started as, even when they begin butchering their friends. And while the script, by Freedom Jones, has a strong structure, it trips repeatedly on the more mundane details. The film's characters make decisions because they fit the satiric needs of the script, but they are poorly justified -- as an example, they just decide to start feeding the werewolf in their attic, despite the fact that he seems to have done perfectly well for himself previously. They express some fear that they might become a victim of the creature, but they never do anything as simple as put a lock on the attic door. Perhaps we're just supposed to assume that they're really crappy vegans who have just been looking for an excuse to get meat back into their lives, but when you have to start making assumptions to make a film work, it just isn't working.

Additionally, while the overarching comic storyline is solid, the film itself is fitfully funny, and some of the comic jabs just come off as cheap shots, such as a belabored flatulence joke from a minor character that feels like something Kevin Smith would have tossed out, and Kevin Smith doesn't toss out much. The film doesn't manage to be very scary either, in part because of a visual plainness -- the cinematographer reflexively centers his shots and and frames the characters in roughly the same way, including the werewolf, so there is a sameness throughout. The werewolf is a passable piece of costume design, but not terribly inventive, and, worse still, the film treats him as a punchline, rather than a character. I suspect the filmmakers felt that the point of the beast was satiric, and so they are quite vague about their monster, but vagueness never helps a film. It's obviously not a traditional werewolf -- for one thing, it never turns back into a man -- but what is it? The characters have no real curiosity about it, and their relationship with the monster is almost exclusively based in the cockamamie idea they have gotten that they need to feed it. Movie monsters usually have a set of rules that accompany them: movie werewolves, as an example, must be killed with silver. And yet our vegan hero, who has been established as a film buff (he works at Cinema Revolution), at one point goes after the creature with a regular gun, sans silver bullets.

Here's the problem: Horror is a subset of fantasy. You get to tell one big lie in fantasy, and the audience will allow it, because there is a contract between storyteller and audience. You lie to us, and we willingly suspend our disbelief. But part of that contract is that the lie has to be a good one, and consistent. The lie in Living Arrangements is that there are werewolves. We understand that premise going in, and we accept it, as long as the filmmaker upholds his end of the bargain. So the lie has to be made real. If there is a monster in the attic, while we don't have to know how it got there, we do have to know why it stays. We do not necessarily have to know why it doesn't obey the typical rules of movie werewolves, but we do need to know what the rules are, and they must be consistent. This werewolf has got to be as nuanced a character as any in the film, and isn't. Compare him to the bloodsucking plant in Little Shop of Horrors, who likewise forced the film's main characters into acts of murder. The plant is a complete character, with clear, and clearly articulated, desires and goals. The werewolf here is just a guy in a suit in an attic.

But if this is a film of little frustrations, it is also a film of little pleasures. There are some enjoyable cameos, including an appearance by American Movie's Mark Borchardt, who brings his strange deadbeat charm to the film, as well as brief appearances by numerous locals (as an example, artist Scott Seekins can occasionally be seen wandering around in the background). The film features a quietly menacing performance by Paul Cram, a lean fellow with piercing eyes and a habit of holding his silences for just a moment too long; unfortunately, as it turns out, he is just a frustrated gay man with a yen for the male lead, which seems like a waste of an actor capable of creating genuine moments of onscreen discomfort. The filmmakers loaded their soundtrack with Mark Mallman songs, which is an interesting choice -- his glammy pop isn't what you would typically think of for a horror film, even a comedic one, but they don't distract from the film and give it a signature audio quirkiness. It may not be entirely successful with either its horror or its comedy, but the film has its charms. When it works, it works in unexpected ways, and that's always a joy. So many independent films work perfectly well, but in dull ways, and I'd always rather see an interesting failure than a boring success.

Living Arrangements plays at the Uptown Theater March 19 at 7 p.m.

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I JUST GAVE THE RED CROSS $20, the last installment of $100 I pledged to give them. It's not very much, really, especially spread over three months. More than that, it is much less than I owe them. When I lived in New Orleans, and Hurricane Katrina came, Red Cross volunteers put me and Coco up, and fed us, and provided some small provisions, and gave us money. By my estimation, merely to repay them for the assistance they gave me, I would have to donate about $1600. And I will, and more.

But I have never really given philanthropically before I began this project, generally because I had very little money, but that's not much of an excuse. I had, on occasion, donated $10 here or there, but rarely. I have often volunteered my time, because I have time even when I don't have money, but most places that rely on donations will tell you that as much as they appreciate and need their volunteers, when push comes to shove, there is a lot more they can do with money than with donated labor. Not that volunteerism isn't necessary and important, but so much of what charitable organzations do requires money -- in fact, anyone who has done a lot of volunteering knows that their labor is often used in fundraising efforts.

And so I thought I should make giving money a goal, and I picked the Red Cross because I have experienced their work firsthand, and know that they do a lot of good. I have also commited to giving $100 to a local organization that helps the homeless, and must begin researching this. And once I have given that money?

I suppose I'll keep on giving. This was never meant to be something I start and then stop again, but, instead, a way to start making charitable giving a habit. It just feels right. There are so many people in need, and the best I can do is help fund the people who can help.

More 101 Things in 1001 Days.

MINNEAPOLIS has a modest St. Pat's Parade compared to St. Paul, but it's fun and lively; at once point, a nervous Irish Wolfhound paused the parade to relieve himself, to thunderous applause from the paradegoers. Included in this slideshow are Minneapolis mayor R.T. Ryback and the parade's Grand Marshall Esme Murphy, a reporter and Sunday morning anchor for WCCO.

THROUGH MY DAY JOB as editor of MnSpeak, I just got a press release about an upcoming play. The play is called Ivan the Drunk and His Terrible Tale of Woe, and, as it happens, I am writing the play. I suppose it was bound to happen some day, but it's still a bit unexpected to receive a press release about your own project.

Properly, though, this is a project of the Off-Leash Area, with whom I have already worked twice, writing the dialogue for their plays A Gift from Planet BX63 and The Jury, both of which were performed in a garage that they have converted into a bijou performing area. This production will be in a somewhat larger venue, the Open Eye Figure Theatre space, but the process for making the play has been mostly the same, in that the Off-Leash Area folks came up with the story and basic structure, and I am mostly providing dialogue (although I was brought in early to this one, and so the resulting play will have a little more of my input at the outset). The press release sums us the play very nicely, so I will simply reproduce it here:

(Minneapolis/St. Paul) Off-Leash Area co-artistic directors Paul Herwig and Jennifer Ilse present their new play Ivan the Drunk and His Terrible Tale of Woe. Ivan is a tragicomic fable about a clownish Russian WWI combat veteran who, at the moment of his death, travels back through time in search of understanding and redemption. Accompanying him on his journey is a grotesque burden: a huge dummy stuffed with the metaphoric wreckage of a cruel life. Ivan is performed with captivating movement and presented with the compelling and inventive visuals for which Off-Leash Area has become known. The play’s interactive sets take their inspiration from Russian Orthodox gold leaf icons and the austere, religiously themed works of French painter Georges Rouault. Ivan the Drunk and His Terrible Tale of Woe is a timely production that entertains even as it plumbs the depths of its inviolable subject matter.

“While the show is presented as a fantastical fable, it is about a very real and relevant issue,” explains Herwig. “This show is about the choices people make during war, and about the confusion and conflict surrounding the meaning of patriotism. This is not a pro- or anti-war show, but rather a story about what a soldier endures and the price he pays for his devotion to his country, about how his trauma affects his own life and everyone around him, and the price a society pays for not attending to the consequences of that selfless duty.”

Ivan the Drunk and His Terrible Tale of Woe coincides with the 10th anniversary of Off-Leash Area, which has produced seventeen highly lauded original productions in the Twin Cities since 1999. Since that time, the company has received two Ivey Awards and numerous grants, including a much-coveted National Endowment for the Arts “Access to Artistic Excellence” grant for Ivan. This is the first NEA grant for the company, by far the smallest company in the region to receive this award. Off-Leash Area shows have been included in numerous “Ten Best” lists and received plaudits from City Pages as “Artist of the Year” and “Best Theatre of the Year.”

In addition to Herwig and Ilse, the cast consists of local dance luminaries Karla Grotting, Judith Howard, and Kym Longhi, with text by nationally produced playwright Max Sparber and music by one of the busiest local composers for dance, Ben Siems.

Ticket and Fact Sheet Information:
Ivan and the Drunk and His Terrible Tale of Woe plays June 4-21 at Open Eye Figure Theater, 506 East 24th Street, Minneapolis.

All shows at 8 p.m.; Box office: 612-724-7372; www.offleasharea.org

SPLENDID THINGS, an improv troupe, recently did an interview with Metro Magazine in which one of the members, Eric Knobel, bemoaned the lack of press coverage for local improv. "Without reviews of what different groups are trying, and who’s succeeding, the general public has no benchmark,” he told the magazine. I agree, but improv isn't likely to get much coverage, because most critics don't know how to review it. After all, if you're a reviewer who relies on summarizing a plot and then providing a laundry list of the details of a show, and most critics are like that, you're going to be a bit of trouble when reviewing a show that will be different every time it is mounted, sometimes with a different cast altogether.

All you can really do in writing about improv is to write about the people who do it and the structure they use. And that also is a bit of a problem for most critics, because they don't really know that much about improv, or how it is made, or what the rules are for doing good improv. So all they can say about a show is "so and so was in it" and "it was or wasn't funny." And that is, at best, a paragraph, and not a review.

Now, I wouldn't propose that I am an expert on improv comedy, but I do have some background in it, having been through the Brave New Workshop's year-long improv program (all but for the final class in the series, in which the class writes and mounts their own amateur sketch comedy show; I have had more than 20 of my own plays produced, and so was already familiar with that part of the process.) I use some of the tool of improv when I write, and a lot of my own creative projects incorporate elements of improv. I also have some experience as a stage performer, often in plays with improvisational moments built in.

So I'll begin with the typical review, and then move on to a little more analysis, informed by my own background in improv and understanding of it. The short form: Splendid Things is three people: Eric Noble, who I have mentioned, who has a sort of sad sack quality; Hannah Kuhlmann, who is a bit bossy; and Michael Ritchie, who is cadaverous and enjoys doing accents. They have started a 10-week run at Bryant-Lake Bowl on Monday nights, and hope to bring in guest improvisers every week; last night, they featured Ferrari McSpeedy, a semi-legendary improv duo composed of Mike Fotis, who is big and verbally ingenious, and Joe Bozic, who is lean and seemingly fearless. Collectively, they are funny. Actually, based on my experience of going to local improv, they're about as good as it gets in the Twin Cities.

And now, the longer critique. Improv is a very hard sort of theater, and they are doing the hardest form of it of all, called long form. This is quite a bit different from the theater games that you find in something like ComedySportz or on Whose Line Is It Anyway, in which each game is a specific challenge, and has specific rules. This is not to disparage these sorts of improvisations; I actually think they are superior to long form improv when your goal is to create a short, funny, audience-pleasing moment.

Long form typically works like this: The performers begin with some random element, often a suggestion from the audience, and then, inspired by that suggestion (although sometimes not obviously inspired), one or several performers steps out and makes what is called a declaration. This establishes the scene, and also who the character is, and can be just about anything -- Bozic began one last night by declaring that he had to get to a grocery store on Lake Street, while Kuhlmann began one by complaining that someone had locked themselves in a bathroom for hours. Del Close, who was sort of the Stanislavski of Chicago improv, used to drill his students, allowing them only two declarations per scene, and he was right to do so -- if you watch a lot of improv, you'll see troupes who panic when they get lost in a scene, and so just keep tossing out ideas for what may be funny, and get further lost as a result, because they have not created a scene but some gormless improv in which everything seems to be happening and once and nobody knows what is going on.

Splendid Things avoids that trap, for the most part, and so there is a leanness to their improvs that is quite refreshing -- one example from last night had two World War II soldiers with droning New York accents (one, appropriately, named Brooklyn; as it turned out, their entire squadron was named after New York boroughs) reading a love letter from a girlfriend. Going off to the factory, they complained, had made women mannish, and the whole scene revolved around their simultaneous fear of, and grudging respect for, women with men's hands ("Rosie the Riveter is a handsome woman," they allowed.)

But long form improv is a medium with a lot of traps, only one of which is making a scene too busy. The essential goal of long-form improv is to create a complete scene, and so one of the cardinal rules of improv is that you don't say no. It just submarines a scene, which is supposed to be built collaboratively. There was a very funny moment of 30 Rock when Tina Fey's character remembered her experience doing corporate improv gigs with Jane Krakowski. They ask for suggestions from their audience, and they get "Oprah," "Billy Bob Thornton," and "potatoes." Fay does her best Slingblade impersonation, miming eating soup. "I sure like this potato soup," she says, to which Krakowski responds "No you don't, Oprah!"

The essential tool for building a scene in improv is called "yes, and." Essentially, this means you say yes to whatever your improv partner has suggested to you, and then you expand upon it. But I heard a lot of "no" from the Bryant-Lake Bowl stage. I know some improvisers who will say that there are times when it can be useful to say no, and perhaps it is, but, as an audience member last night, every time I heard no, or a variation, it seemed to sabotage a scene, and never seemed like a purposeful decision. It's going to sound like I am picking on Kuhlmann here, because I am going to name two moments when she did it, but I am only listing these because I remember them; to some extent, every performer at the BLB denied their partners' improv. In one instance, an improv was set at the Mall of America, where, apparently, a shark had been rampaging and eating everyone, at least, according to Kuhlmann (at that moment, Bozic dragged himself across the stage as though his lower torso had been severed, which, albeit funny, was a sort of denial, as Kuhlmann had already established that everybody had been eaten.) Knobel then told Kuhlmann to get some bandages, falling into another improv trap -- he was directing her from the stage, which you shouldn't do, because you're supposed to trust that your improv partner will do what a scene needs, and not boss them around onstage. And then Kuhlmann said "We're out of bandages," the final denial. It's no surprise that this was the scene that fell flattest last night, although the denials were subtle in the scene. It just couldn't progress, and fizzled out very quickly -- although, to Splendid Things's credit, they have a sense of when a scene isn't going to work, and mercifully cut these scenes short.

A more direct example is in a scene in which a family sits around a table, worrying about their rage-filled father, who is on his way home. Mike Fotis did something very interesting in the scene: When the father was mentioned in the scene, he instantly became the man, seated opposite the family and miming driving home, and the scene became a sort of cinematic split screen, in which the family discusses the father, and then he behaves in a way that confirms what we have heard about him. Finally, he gets home, marches to the dinner table, and says "How was soccer, kids?"

"We don't play soccer," Kuhlmann answered, and suddenly what had been a very tight scene deteriorated into confusion.

I could go on about little errors like these, and there were quite a few of them. Some of the declarations were maddeningly vague, the equivalent of walking out on stage and saying "Look at that thing over there," which is totally useless in improv. Worse still, the performers occasionally did versions of what Del Close identified as the second cardinal sin of improv, which he demonstrated by miming opening a book and handing it to a partner, saying "Read this." It puts all of the burden onto your improv partner, and variations of this happened a little too frequently.

But I won't go on, as both Splendid Things and Ferrari McSpeedy are seasoned improvisers, and I suspect they may do postmortems after their show to discuss what worked and what didn't -- and, if they don't, they should. I would like to mention what I think is a bigger issue, which is that sometimes being funny can work against a scene, and it is not something that any of the improvisers on the BLB were exclusively guilty of, but is instead a chronic problem in long-form improv. It seems counter-intuitive that a performer shouldn't try to be funny in an improv show, and, of course, they should. But a lot of the people who get into improv are very funny people to begin with, and so quippiness, or cleverness, or absurdity comes to them very naturally. But this makes for excellent zingers, or bon mots, or moments of hilarious weirdness, but does not make a scene. Scenes are built around characters and situations, and I suspect there may have been many moments last night when I could have stopped the show and said "What is your relationship to him?" "How do you feel about the other characters?" "What do you want out of this scene?" and the performers wouldn't have known. But if you're going to do long form, you have to know these things. Scenes build out of characters' relationship with each other, and their desires, and how their desires can conflict with each other. Without that, all you have is a series of funny moments, and, as I said, that's the sort of thing ComedySportz-style improv excels at, but doesn't work as well in long form.

Now, this is not to say that the stage was bare of any of that. As I have said, both improv troupes are quite good, and Ferrari McSpeedy, in particular, has a knack for creating scenes around characters -- although if anyone is going to freeze a scene for a moment of great cleverness, it is Mike Fotis, who has a lot of moments of very flashy verbal gymnastics, and can't seem to resist tossing them out, even when they don't serve the scene. And so we had a show made up of a lot of very funny moments, but very few scenes seemed to develop and progress naturally, or develop any real plot, or come to any clear conclusion. And I know I am demanding a lot -- that several performers get up and make up a complete one act play on the spot. But it was the promise of long form improv, and I know that, when improvisers trust the process and stick to the rules, it can be done. Not every time, but every so often, and when it happens, it's dazzling. And we go to improv to laugh, yes, but, if I can go back to the Metro interview with Splendid Things, Ritchie says "I consider [improv] a form of art with just as much possibility as film or what people are going to see at the Guthrie."

They've got the funny down pat. Now they have to nail the art. Maybe some nights they do -- they are, as I have said, very good at improv. Last night they didn't.

Splendid Things appears Mondays at the Bryant-Lake Bowl, 612.825.8949.

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A ST. PATRICK'S DAY SONG from Sailor Martin, based on his plans for the St. Paul St. Patrick's Day Parade. Played with a ukulele, a toy xylophone, a harmonica, claves, and a tambourine.

"WHO'S GOT THE NERVE" LYRICS:

Who will buy me a drink on St. Patrick's Day?
Who will march me from bar to bar?
Who will help me throw bottles at the St. Paul parade?
Who will run with me from police cars?
Who's got the nerve? Who's got the nerve?
Who's got the nerve from a proper old drunk?
Oh tell me whose got the nerve?

Who will run with me from Market to Wall
With our pants dropped down to our knees?
Who will sing naughty songs to Miss Shamrock?
Is there anyone else but me?
Who's got the nerve? Who's got the nerve?
Who's got the nerve for a proper St. Pat's?
Tell me who's got the nerve?

I got a brand new bottle of James Power's best --
Who will drink it with me?
There are boys today spoiling for a fight;
I've brought chains and shillelagh.
Who's got the nerve? Who's got the nerve?
Who's got the nerve for a proper old row?
Tell me who's got the nerve?

LISTEN TO "WHO'S GOT THE NERVE":



DOWNLOAD "WHO'S GOT THE NERVE."

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THE DISADVANTAGE of reviewing a film a week after it has opened is that all the other critics have already had a shot at it, if it is a major release, and, unless you are especially contrary or have an idiosyncratic sensibility, there is not much that you can say that hasn't already been said. Watchmen opened last week, and, here it is, the second weekend, and what have I got to say that others haven't already said? I mostly agree with what others have said: It's not a masterpiece, and that's disappointing, as many believe the Alan Moore graphic novel that it is based on is the best superhero story written. It's not a terrible movie either. The director is Zach Snyder, who previously helmed the remake of Dawn of the Dead and the film adaptation of Frank Miller's 300, which were effective but unsubtle, and, in the case of the zombie movie, managed to eliminate the considerable satiric sophistication of the original film. So there is nothing in Snyder's past to suggest he is capable of producing a masterpiece, even, as in this instance, when he almost slavishly translates the original material into a film.

But if Synder is unsophisticated, he is also fitfully entertaining, and there is a lot about Watchmen that works as a movie. It is possible to endlessly argue about whether comic books can effectively be translated to the screen, and I don't fall on one side of the argument or the other. Both mediums rely on the fast communication of visual information, and both have relied on physical spectacle and the artificial construction of action to tell their stories -- the comic book through placement of images in panels, and the film through editing. So there is a lot in common. But comic books can cram a lot more visual information into a frame, and, when well done, entire secondary plots can be told through an accumulation of background details. This is much harder to do with a film, although God knows Snyder tries -- there is not a superhero in Watchmen who doesn't have a huge number of framed press clippings, as though their need to display their publicity outweighs their need to keep their alter egos anonymous. And there is something quite entertaining about this, as it would sort of fun to be in a world where you go into your neighbor's house, who, by day, is a car salesman, and there on his mantle are framed photos of him in costume and carefully preserved news stories of criminals he felled.

I will say this: Snyder's careful fealty to Moore's original book demonstrates that Moore, who is famously a fast writer, can be a little sloppy. His story, which is set in an alternate 1980s in which superheroes are real and have altered the course of history, is mostly narrated by Rorschach, a vicious little vigilante in a filthy trench coat and a shifting mask resembling psychological inkblots. He's a terrific character, but I don't think Moore quite got a grip on him until midway through writing the book, when he strips the character of his mask, reveals his backstory, and puts him in prison. Rorschach turns out to be obsessed and grubby, driven mad by his past and contemptuous of humanity, who has forged his own code for living in the world. This includes exacting his version of justice, which generally involves broken limbs and butchered villains. There is a great scene in the comic book, perfectly put on the screen, in which Rorschach defends himself against another prisoner with a knife. Rorschach quickly destroys the man and then turns to face the other prisoners, hissing at them "I'm not trapped in here with you; you're trapped in here with me!" Rorschach is played in the film by Jackie Earl Haley, and his raspy voice has been compared to Christian Bale as Batman, but I think that's a bad comparison. He reminds me more of Clint Eastwood, squinting and scowling while he chokes out his dialogue. Rorschach is Dirty Harry, but with a mask rather than a badge; he's just as lethal, and, from an outsider's perspective, just as mad.

Unfortunately, up until this point, Moore had written Rorschach as something less interesting: a sort of combination right-wing crank and Travis Bickle. And Moore gave Rorschach some really execrable dialogue in his early scenes that sound like Bickle's diary monologues from Taxi Driver, but written as cheap pulp. The Watchmen movies retains these, and they're cringeworthy. Fans of the original book have raised holy hell of Snyder changing the original ending of the book, although the original ending was cribbed from an old episode of The Outer Limits and was just a bit daffy, while this ending, in which one of the heroes is set up as a patsy, is perfectly serviceable; the fanboys shouldn't have been complaining that the ending was changed, they should be complaining that the original Rorschach dialogue in the early scenes was left in.

I suppose if I have anything to say about this film that hasn't already been said, it is that your enjoyment of the film is going to be dependent on how seriously you take the idea that the original graphic novel was a masterpiece. Because, if it was, Snyder trashed it up, adding in some action scenes that are lively but often a bit much -- bones explode out of flesh, and CGI blood flies, as heroes take on dozens of attackers simultaneously. These scenes feel more at home in a Hong Kong action film than a work that is generally pretty unflashy and realistic, at least as far as superhero movies go. And Snyder's selection of music is hilariously misconceived, seemingly lifted intact from other films, such as Forrest Gump and Apocalypse Now, so you end up with "All Along the Watchtower" playing as a masked hero flies an owl-shaped vehicle toward the Antarctic, and "Flight of the Valkyries" playing as a giant blue superhero causes Vietcong soldiers to spontaneously explode. (The open credits, which are dazzling, are unfortunately set to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a Changing," a song choice inspired by a chapter title in the original book, but which feels obvious and overweening here.)

But you may not feel that the Watchmen graphic novel was a masterpiece. I don't. It's fascinating, in part because it was a radical detournment of the tradition superhero comic, and it benefits greatly from ingenious artwork from Dave Gibbons. But it's a slight story -- so slight that Moore had to bulk out the 12-issues with considerable supplemental material, including a second comic book within the first (a pirate comic, as, in a world where superheroes are real and unpopular, superhero comics don't sell very well.) And Moore's book is a gloss on well-established superhero tropes. Almost all of his characters are either meaner or more pathetic version of characters from other comic books -- Dr. Manhattan, for instance, who is the glowing giant from the Vietnam segment, is this story's version of Superman. To Moore's credit, he does something quite interesting with the character, exploring how someone with godlike powers might become alienated from humanity, and start to see them as small things that aren't really worth too much attention. But Moore has essentially clevered up what is already an inherently pulpy genre, and Snyder doesn't trash it back down so much as he restores some of the pulpy elements to it, such as absurd and impossible heroics.

And the truth is, had someone set out to make a masterpiece, there is a real possibility they might have misfired altogether and created some unwieldy and hugely depressing morality tale in which neurotic superheroes suffer beautifully as the world moves toward doomsday, which, sometimes, is what the original book is. But Moore always pulled back when his book seemed to be getting too morose, tossing in an extended action scene. And these weren't just audience-pleasing distractions -- they're necessary. After all, characters are defined by action, especially superheroes, and their action is kicking ass. It's their metier. And so they do in the Watchmen movie, splendidly, if absurdly, just as superheroes always do in superhero stories. Yes, it's a bit declassé, but you can't have superhero stories without giving them the chance to be super and heroic. Otherwise what are they? Snyder may not have a talent for subtlety, but he knows how to show a man in costume take on a room full of prisoners, and so at least he got that right. If he had failed at that and instead focused on angst and shame and moral ambiguity, there would have been no need for a superhero movie. If Watchmen was to be nothing but people in masks and ridiculous costumes sobbing, he could simply have brought a camera into a sci-fi convention and told them that there would be no squid in his version of Watchmen.

No. That would not have been a superhero movie.

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YES THAT IS. That's a photo of me with our 42nd Vice President of the United States, Minnesota native and 12-year Senator Walter Mondale.

Mondale, you see, has an annual taste for amateur theatrics. As do, it seems, students at his alma mater, the University of Minnesota's Law School, whose red brick building is currently named Walter F. Mondale Hall, and whose intramural hockey team is named The Fighting Mondales.

For some reason, it's a bit surprising to discover that law students have their own hockey team. I'm not sure why, as students of law probably enjoy sports as much as anybody, but I suppose I thought studying law meant years of doing nothing but burying your head in books of sprinkling trusts and dependent benefits, without much time for extracurricular activities.

And if it's a surprise to discover they have a hockey team, how much more of a surprise it is to discover they have an amateur theatrical society, called the Theatre of the Relative Talentless, or T.O.R.T., har har. They've been putting on self-scripted and self-acted full-length musicals since 2002, beginning modestly at the Open Book Loft and eventually expanding immodestly to consume the tony Pantages theater space. But when your show features big cameos, you need a big room, and past shows have not only featured Fritz Mondale, but Minnesota Supreme Court judges, Attorney Generals, and Mike Ciresi, who managed to sue the American tobacco industry on behalf of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota to the tune of $440 million. You don't put people like that onstage at Coffman student union: they're the Margo Channings (or, depending on how you feel about lawyers, the Eve Harringtons) of local law.

And so, on March 6 ad 7 of this year, T.O.R.T. filled the stage of the Pantages with a production called It's a Wonderful Law School. The script was apparently authored by a fellow named Mark Torma, who also appears in the production, with contributions from a dozen other writers, who also appear in the show, and what they produced was a lampoon that owes as much to Mad Magazine as Broadway.

The story, as you probably have guessed, is a riff on It's a Wonderful Life, but with the savings and loans banker George Bailey replaced by a law student named Georgie, played, in the gee-whiz manner of stage ingenues everywhere, by Laura Vannelli. We follow her through her years at law school, mostly through elaborate musical numbers, themselves lampoons of popular songs -- "Jesus Christ Superstar," as an example, becomes "Law School Superstar," and Blue Öyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper" becomes "Don't Fear the Workload," complete with a half dozen law students beating on cowbells in an ecstatic frenzy, as Will Ferrell once did.

As it turns out, there is an awful lot I did not know about what goes on in law school, which was covered in great detail in this play. For instance, I had no idea that the U of M's Law School has an anonymously published newsletter called Bar Review Weekly, which mixes satire and gossip with a typical college student's obsession with drinking, and, apparently, editors are inducted in through a ritual that seems like something borrowed from the Masons. I also didn't know that LexisNexis sends representatives to law schools to teach students how to use their legal document database service, and gives them free stuff, which, according to this show, consists mostly of an exhausted and defeated man begging students to come to early morning programs and bribing them with logo-emblazoned shirts and bottle openers. We journalists use LexisNexis as well, and I don't recall anybody ever tossing me any schwag to do so.

This is the sort of show that theater critics should want to attend, but often don't, and, even if they did, aren't invited. After all, it's an amateur show, done for fun, and inviting a theater critic would be a bit like inviting a dining critic to your Friday night pizza party, only to hear him complain that the Hint of Lime Tostitos might be better with a hint of not being stale, and while mold is desirable on some fancier French cheeses, it really doesn't belong on a pizza made from processed and pasteurized mozzarella. It's not really the critics place to attend a show like that and comment that the band sounded slightly worse than most high school jazz bands, or that some of the actors hammed up their dialogue to such an extent that Al Pacino would have been embarrassed, so pretend I didn't just say those things.

But this show is the sort of thing that is worth writing about, not for the sake of criticism, but because it is a performance that took place in the Twin Cities, and a really interesting one, and deserves to be noted. I mean, the Guthrie might get an actor or two from Law and Order now and again, but they have yet to put a Vice President on their stage. Beyond that, there's something really nice about knowing that, if you get a large enough group of people together, you're going to discover some unexpected talents. You don't really expect lawyers to just start singing and dancing, and, moreover, if they do, you don't expect them to be any good at it. But almost all of the performers in this production were competent singers and dancers (or, at least, seemed to be; whoever was responsible for staging this thing did the old high school musical trick of putting the less skilled performers behind the more skilled ones). Moreover, many of the performers were a real pleasure to watch, including a handful of dancers who obviously had taken years of dance classes, or, at least, hip hop aerobics classes. Moreover, many of the cast members were genuinely quite funny, such as Dave Robbin in the Donna Reed role. There was a moment in the play where he achieved a minor romantic point with Georgie, and, behind her back, he pumped his fist in a secretive triumphal gesture that was a comic and deliberately exaggerated as anything I have seen onstage. Whether any critics were there to see it or not, this was a moment of genuine theater.

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MARCH 14, Pi Day, was Make: Day at the Science Museum of Minnesota, cosponsored by Make: Magazine and Make: Television. On hand were a number of local inventors and tinkerers. Included in this short documentary are interviews with Make: Television host John Park, a musician from the band Savage Aural Hotbed, and Science Museum staff member Keith Braafladt, as well as demonstration of small robots, homemade instruments (including several by Tim Kaiser), a "clothes drier symphony," and a cannon that fires smoke.

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I'VE NOW BEEN WORKING ON my list of 101 things for 40 days, and, over the course of the last week, I went back and radically revised it. Some of it was that I realized I hadn't really challenged myself enough -- there were a few tasks that just didn't require much work -- and so I made them harder. With others, I realized that there is a lot that can be done in almost three years, and so I adjusted the task to reflect that. Some tasks I threw out, as I had selected them arbitrarily, or they were specific where they could be bundled in with a more generalized task. But there were a few decisions I made for another reason altogether.

I was uncomfortable when I started this list with tasks that could be accomplished merely by purchasing things. I don't consider consumption to be an accomplishment, even if you save for it, because there is no real challenge to spending money. In fact, I think a lot of people pride themselves on how they spend money, feeling that, because they have excellent taste, they are somehow really getting something worthwhile done by putting money into it. But, really, what they are doing is validating someone else's excellent taste -- the person who created the item that is being bought. And taste is pretty arbitrary. I've known people who spent small fortunes on clothes, or music, or art, and I thought their taste was dreadful and their money misspent.

Not that I am complaining about consumption. It's what we do. At it's worst, I suppose people become a little like locusts, just devouring everything around them and leaving nothing but waste in their path. But most of us are a little more responsible than that -- although it's pretty clear we could be a lot more responsible. We haven't done much good for our world in our time here, and have done a lot of harm to it. And, with the economy being in crisis now, and the U.S. still being mired in an unforgivably wasteful and unnecessary war, and crookedness and scandal seeming to have been business as usual for the past eight years, well, I'm a little sick of being a consumer. Or, I should say, I'm a little sick of just being a consumer. I still have to eat, and I enjoy watching movies, and going to plays, and reading books, and goofing around online, and all the other things that make me into a consumer.

But we're exiting a strange time, a time where Americans really primarily defined themselves by how and what they consumed. It's hard to imagine it, but there was a time in American history where people played their own music. There was a piano in the corner of a lot of bars, and someone would play it, and people would gather round and sing. Many families had a similar tradition at home, where they would have some instruments around, sometimes very crudely made folk instruments, and the family would sing together for entertainment. There are still hints of this -- karaoke, as an example, or the fact that many churches still include group hymn singing as part of their service. But, with the development of recorded sound and radio, this tradition began to fade in America, and I would guess it is a pretty rare family that gathers on a Friday night, pulls out guitars and accordions, and plays music together.

It was the same way with a lot of things. Look through Victorian newspapers, and you will see a superabundance of amateur theatrical organizations. Minnesota lumberjacks used to regularly put on short plays for their own amusement -- often outrageous, bawdy things, with men playing women and an abundance of coarse humor. Soldiers did the same thing. And soldiers had their own newspaper, Stars and Stripes, in which they published foxhole short stories and poetry.

Of course, this impulse toward collectively creating culture never completely left us, and I love some of the strange forms it took, including mass media sing-a-longs, such as the television show "Sing Along with Mitch" and the follow-the-bouncing ball cartoons that once opened films; it's hard nowadays to imagine singing out loud at your tv screen or in a crowded movie theater. People still do all sorts of amateur arts, and I'm always thrilled to see it, especially when it's really interesting, or excellent, and it often is. But I feel like it's pretty common for these activities to get siphoned off to store-bought crafts or other prefab creative undertakings, where the amateur artist's primary experience is that of a purchaser and assembler, rather than a creator. And there is a really good reason for this, as we have all grown up watching hundreds of hours of television commercials that tell us we are defined by what we buy. It's no wonder a lot of people mistake a purchase for an accomplishment. I have myself, many times.

But, as I said, I'm sick of it. Sometimes, at my most pessimistic, I look at other people, and look at myself, and all I can hear is the munching of locusts. I'm feeling that way now, probably, again, as the result of coming out of the other end of eight years in which blind, unthinking consumption was treated as a panacea, and the results have been catastrophic. So I have removed most of the few goals that were exclusively based in buying things, and, more than that, I have tried to formulate a way in which I can pair my consumption with my output. This is an ongoing project, so there may more changes to my goals down the road. In fact, I am sure there are. I still have goals that are rooted in consumption, even if they can be done without spending much, or any, money. I have been going to museums and book readings, as an example. I consider these to be salutary goals, but just listening to someone else read really isn't much of an accomplishment, even if it is educational.

So the question is, how can I make these things participatory, or, at least, have some element of creation that matches my consumption.

The answer isn't very complicated, of course. I'm already doing some of it, as with my weight loss goal, which I have been documenting on this site, and is entirely about how and what I consume. I am a blogger and a journalist, and it isn't too hard for me to make it a goal to write about whatever I am doing. Last night, I went to see Tom Davis, formerly of Saturday Night Live and the former comedy partner of Al Franken. He has just written a book about his experiences, and he read from it, and, afterward, it seemed ridiculous to me that I didn't set up an interview with him. I emailed his publicist today, but I may not be able to catch him before he leaves town.

Of course, I can't commit to reviewing every single thing I consume, and why would anybody want to read that. But if it seems like something that is worth a damn, I'm going to try and put something about it up on this blog.

And beyond simply writing about the things I consume, I'm really dedicated to producing my own original creations, as much as I can. This is something I do anyway, but, thanks to the Web, I find myself in a position I would never have imagined when I was a boy: I can be my own publisher, of whatever I want to do. So you can expect to see me continue to publish original songs, and movies, and short stories, and poetry, and anything else I feel like making. It's not all going to be good, I know that, and, moreover, it won't be to everybody's tastes, but so what? You don't like it, go out and make your own.

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IT HAS BEEN four years since the last time I had my eyes checked and my prescription updated. Worse still, I broke my glasses some months ago and went back to wearing an older pair, and that prescription dated back to 2001. So I have been needing to get my eyes looked at and get a new pair of glasses for some time now.

Last week, I went to the University of Minnesota's eye clinic for a really thorough exam. I was oddly nervous about it, but my nervousness was greatly lessened by a haggard woman in the waiting room. You ever see someone who seem likely to ask you for money, even if you are in a bathroom together, or church, or, say, an eye clinic? This was one of those people. She was unwashed and had skin like cracked leather, and her clothes seemed stolen from a hobo encampment's laundry line. She lay on the sofa next to me, clutching a filthy rag to one eye and moaning in pain. I looked at her and thought, well, whatever is going to happen to me, it's probably better than what she's about to deal with.

In fact, my eye exam went quite smoothly. At this eye clinic they don't even do the puff test to check for glaucoma, which always sends me reflexively flying backward in my chair, and then I feel silly about it for hours. Instead, they use a green laser, which feels a little like the long light show at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, although it doesn't last as long and you don't come out the other end Star Child. Nothing was wrong with my eyes, although I was warned that I should come visit if I start seeing double, or seeing spots, or seeing floaters, or spontaneously exsanguinate out my eye sockets. Thanks, doctor; I will.

That day, I placed an order for new glasses via an online site called Goggles4u.com, where most of the frames are $12, and you can get a pair of glasses, lenses and all, for under $40. I was in sort of a bold mood, so I bought a pair with thick reddish pink lenses, and then sat back to wait for them. When you order something online, you can never be sure just how it will fit, or if you have made a horrible decision, but, for the price, I felt I could take a little risk.

The glasses arrived today, and I was pleased to discover that I like how they look on my face. They are outrageously reddish pink, which is, it must be said, not an especially masculine color. But I don't need to prove my masculinity to anybody. Or, if I do, it's not going to be my glasses I show to prove what a man I am.

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WEIGHING MYSELF this morning, I weight 181.5 -- up a half pound since last week. Now, I don't think I have actually gained a half pound, but instead I am victim of those random scale fluctuations that happen now and again. Nonetheless, I am not surprised that I didn't lose weight. My discipline has slipped this week -- not dramatically, but a bit. I've snacked here and there, and eaten a few sweets, and eaten out. I don't expect it would be enough to permanently stall my weight loss, but nonetheless it's the sort of thing that causes occasional plateaus.

Fortunately, I had planned for this. Today I change my diet. The RocknRolla diet is over, and was a good one, as I succeeded in losing 22.5 pounds in two and a half months. A few days ago I tried on some suits I had bought years ago. They were far too small on me when I bought them, but now they very nearly fit. Five pounds or so and they will be comfortable, which is nice.

You sort of expect a loss of 22 pounds to be dramatic, but it isn't. I carried that weight all over my body, including my arms and legs, and that's what slimmed down first. My stomach is smaller, yes, but there is still a ring around my middle, and will be until I get down to 160 pounds or thereabouts. You sort of expect to be able to stand in your old pants and have them tent around you, like the images in weight loss ads. No. My old pants are loose on me -- very loose -- but still wearable. Nonetheless, it is quite nice seeing myself in profile and not seeing my stomach bulge outward. I'm made of straighter, cleaner lines now, and am glad.

I have briefly mentioned my next diet, but, now that I have begun it, I shall detail it a little more. I am calling it the Cookie and Milkshake Diet, in part because I have a taste for cutesy names, and, in part, because that will be a big component of this diet. Twice per day, instead of eating real food, I will be eating diet bars or drinking diet milkshakes. I've already been doing this, to a small extent, for about a week, but now I get serious about it. I'll also be reviewing the diet products I eat.

The whole point of this diet is that these diet products replace a regular meal, and give you a more exact count of your calories. You swap out a few meals per day with the diet bars and, voila, you've dramatically reduced your calories. Additionally, they are fortified with vitamins and minerals, for whatever that's worth. Generally, the plan works as follows: You have a shake or diet bar for breakfast, one for lunch, and make your own supper, with a few low-calories snacks thrown in over the course of the day. The bars and shakes tend to be about 180 calories, and part of the appeal of the plan is that it simplifies things -- two meals per day are just taken care of.

It may take me a week or two to settle into a form of this diet that I like. I am moving the number of calories I eat per day up to 1100, which, I suspect, is about as many as I have been eating anyway, and then underestimating. At this amount, I should continue to lose between a pound and two pounds per week, which is fine -- once I enter a normal BMI, any additional weight loss will be cosmetic, and I needn't rush that.

Here is the food diary for this new diet.

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BUNNY TAKES a quick spin around Lark Toys, an enormous independent toy store in Kellogg, MN, that features its own carousel and miniature gold course, as well as manufacturing its own fudge.

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IN THE SAME WAY that it is vaguely thrilling to watch your car's mileage tick over from, say, 99,999 to 100,000 miles, I get a little thrill every time my blog reaches a similar milestone, and this is one of those moments. This post is number 1,000 on this blog. Figuring each post averages about 500 words, and I think that is a very conservative estimate, this blog now has a half-million words on it, or about 6 and a quarter full-length novels. I just started this blog last year, so that seems like a lot, but, then, perhaps half of the content I posted is old material. So I only really wrote about three novels worth of material in the past year.

Jeez, that still seems like a lot.

Anyway, I think I will have a drink to celebrate.

I WEIGH 181 POUNDS. 23 pounds lost, two more pounds to go before I exit a BMI that has me at overweight and enter a BMI that has me at normal. I've been at this diet for just over two months, which, if you think about it, is not very long at all. Dieting, like a lot of things in life, seems to take forever when it is happening, and then seems to have taken no time at all when you look back on it.

I still have a bit of a gut, and will for a while. When you lose weight, you take it off in reverse-order of how you put it on. The first thing that started showing when I started getting heavier was my stomach. It will be the last thing to go, although it has shrunk considerably. I would guess I have dropped two pants sizes. My arms and face have slimmed down quite a bit, and my jawline is clearer. Whatever hints of jowls were beginning have disappeared. I've lost 12 percent of my body mass, which seems like a lot to lose in two months. Of course, I'm shooting for 32 percent, which means, when this diet is done, there will be one-third less Bunny than there was when I started.

It's a strange feeling. We're accustomed to getting bigger. We spend our first few decades growing. But we don't generally get smaller. Intellectually, I know what is happening. My fat cells are releasing glycerol and fatty acids, which my body uses as energy, metabolizing them into carbon dioxide and water. I have been exhaling, sweating, and otherwise getting rid of between a pound and two pounds per week for two months. But it still feels weird. Like: where did it go? It feels like something so tangibly physical as fat shouldn't just disappear as air and water. There's something unnervingly alchemical about it.

Speaking of water, I got curious about the stuff this week. I've already tackled the myth that you should drink eight glasses of water per day, and discovered that the only reason you might want to do this is if you have a strange desire to pee a lot; otherwise, it's one of those pieces of common health wisdom that has no real basis in anything. Another bit of wisdom you're often told is to drink water when you're hungry instead of eating. I guess the presumption is that hunger is caused by an empty stomach, and, if you fill it with water rather than food, you will satisfy your hunger without taking in any calories.

I have never found this to be true. I can drink so much water that I feel positively sick from it (and it is possible to get sick from too much water by diluting your electrolytes; the proper term for this is hyponatremia, and it is potentially fatal), I can drink enough water that my stomach feels positively swollen, and still be hungry. And this is because hunger isn't caused by an empty stomach, but by the hypothalamus responding to chemical impulses, and water doesn't satisfy that.

That's not to say it's not worth drinking a glass of water if you're hungry. Apparently, a lot of us can't really distinguish hunger from thirst, and so will reach for a candy bar when all we need is a splash of good old H2O. If you're the kind of person who mistakes thirst for hunger, it may be that a glass of water will satisfy you. But if you're actually hungry, it ain't gonna do squat.

Next Thursday I end the RocknRolla diet and start the Cookies and Milkshake diet. I expect I will have gotten myself down to 179 pounds by then, or close to it, and so the next stage of the diet will be to explore what things are like from the top of the normal range of the BMI to the bottom. I'm right now transitioning out of being plump and into being normal. The next step will be to transition out of being normal and into being skinny, which, after all, is the stated goal of this project. It may take me longer to work my way through the 40 pounds that encompasses the normal range of the BMI -- the less you weigh, the slower the pounds come off. But, then, there is no real hurry, as my biggest goal, which is to get myself to a healthy weight, will already have been accomplished.

I have already started to introduce elements of my next diet, the Cookies and Milkshake Diet, into my eating habits -- I've been having one Kellogg's protein bar as a meal replacement, on and off (mostly on), for a week, and yesterday I got a few diet shakes and drank one of those for lunch. It definitely helps you track your calories, but I don't know yet whether or not this will cause me to lose weight any faster. I have been assuming that I was underestimating the amount of calories I was taking in, but it is possible that I was right on the button, and will just continue to lose between a pound and two pounds every week. And that will be fine. I'm trying this diet for novelty, mostly, and there is a lot of entertainment for me in eating a chocolate bar and drinking a chocolate shake every day. I think I will do that diet for between 8 and 10 weeks and then switch to something else.

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I AM STARTING TO THINK that we may be looking at a long drought, journalistically speaking. Newspapers are collapsing, and, when not collapsing, are cutting back. Way back. And, frankly, newspapers have been on the decline for years. For some reason, a decade ago, they got it into their heads that they needed to be more responsive to their readers' desires. This was not usually the ways newspapers worked. They had previously taken an almost paternal responsibility for their readers, and considered it their task to provide content that the readers should be getting, whether they liked it or not. So newspapers did a lot of investigative journalism that got a lot of people angry at them, and had offices in third-world countries that nobody cared about, and reported news from there, and readers skipped these sections and complained that they didn't care. But at least the news was getting reported, and making it into the public record, and sometimes that sort of news would suddenly become important. Maybe something big would happen in that third-world country, and everybody got interested, and the newspaper happened to have a reporter on hand who had been in the country for years, and knew the language, and knew everybody, and could ferret out the really important news and provide it, and write it well.

Those days have sort of been gone for a long time. If people weren't interested in the world, newspapers weren't going to bother with the rest of the world, except to occasionally reprint wire stories. We've had more than a decade of newspapers capitulating to the wants of their readers, which has resulted in expanded sections that have very little real-world meaning, such as sports. I know people love sports, and more power to them, but sports writing is a form of entertainment writing, and the amount of space it is given in newspapers at the expense of other coverage is unforgivable.

Worse still, newspapers capitulated to partisan bullies. The right wing made a reflexive habit for two decades out of complaining that coverage was unfair. After a while, the newspapers started listening, at first by turning to right wing spin doctors for "balance," regardless of whether these spinmeisters had anything to offer other than talking points, and later by including them as columnists, without any concern at all for whether the information that these columnists printed was true or just useful lies. I don't know that the last eight years would have been different with good newspapers. Maybe Bush and his administration would still have had their way. But the truth of the matter is that the Bush administration, which was already one of the most secretive administrations in history, went underinvestigated and underreported by the mainstream press.

And it's just going to get worse. Real news is expensive. You have to pay people to do things like pick through thousands of pages of public documents. You have to pay them to chase down stories. It takes time, and time costs money. If you want to make sure you have your facts right, and you do, as libel is also expensive, you have to be prepared to spend that money. But, increasingly, newspapers don't have that kind of dough. They may never again have the money for it. We may actually be experiencing the end of newsprint. I have a hard time believing it, but, at the same time, I just don't know how newsprint is going to recapture an audience that has mostly gone online. I don't know how they are going to recapture advertising dollars, especially as it has become obvious that the world of newspaper advertising was its own sort of bubble, selling ads for prices that were invented out of whole cloth and promising a return on investment that could never be demonstrated. And I don't know how they are ever going to recapture the credibility they once had. News audiences should not be pandered to. We need our news editors to make paternalistic decisions about what we need to know, or we wind up not getting the stories that are going to be the most important in our lives, and wondering what happened.

Maybe the Web will take over. There are Web magazines popping up, and some of them are doing good work. But they have no money, and this recession is looking like it will be long and gruelling, and I just don't expect that Web publications will start seeing any real money until the economy picks up enough for people to be willing to invest in new publications in a newish medium.

I'm an arts writer, and this has affected me as well. The truth is, newspapers have never been very good about covering the arts in general. And if hard news suffers, arts writing suffers twice as much. It is generally considered to be a luxury and expendable. If we're looking at a drought in hard news coverage, the world ahead, as regards arts coverage, is something more like one of those barren planets of red, lifeless dust you sometimes see in science fiction movies. Sure, there will still be some coverage. Movies will still get reviewed, because movies have a mass audience, and newspapers will still pander to whatever is popular. But movie reviews will increasingly be written by a few nationally syndicated writers, and, believe it or not, there is value in having local coverage of this sort of thing. There was a movie quite a few years ago called Babette's Feast. It was based on an Isak Dinesen story, and it did pretty well in the United States for an odd little Danish movie about two elderly sisters and an elaborate meal, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. But it did phenomenally well in Minneapolis. It played here for months and months and months, a local success story somewhat paralleled by Harold and Maud, which also played in the Twin Cities for a very long run. Why did the Twin Cities respond to these movies like that? Hell if I know, but it's interesting that they did, and worth discussing, and that's not the sort of thing a writer from Chicago or Los Angeles is going to be able to write about.

But movies will get covered, if broadly. Other local arts will go without coverage. Theater coverage, which has never been comprehensively covered here, will dwindle even further, and the priority will be given to the big theaters, like the Guthrie. Fine arts coverage, which is already almost nonexistent, may literally become nonexistent, as may happen with dance coverage and any other art that doesn't attract a very large audience. Music coverage will be limited to big acts and mainstream artists, and quirky or niche musicians will find themselves lacking coverage. Things are bleak, friends, and everybody in the arts knows it.

The arts, however, has an advantage that hard news doesn't have. It is cheap to write about. The arts writer rarely needs to file FOI demands, or sort through finance reports, or knock at the door of the survivors of murders. We just go see a show -- and often get comped in -- and then write about it. If we have some extra gumption, we might interview some of the people involved. If we have some journalism skills, we might write longer stories about how theaters finance themselves, or why the Cities have become home to a robust comics community, or how local musicians are increasingly making sophisticated use of the Web to market themselves directly to their audiences.

I have been an arts writer for more than a decade, but the market for my writing is increasingly drying up. So be it. I still have a blog, and I still go see local arts, and I can still write about it. And so I have decided to pursue this more aggressively on my blog. I will be seeing more shows, and doing more interviews, and doing more writing. I don't know if I am the best person to do this. I have idiosyncratic tastes, and there is undoubtedly deserving stories that I might overlook, and I tend to be long-winded and enjoy going on weird detours in my writing. But I'm not bad at arts writing, and I'm better than some.

So start looking for a lot more arts criticism on this site. And, when I find other people who are likewise doing worthwhile arts criticism, I will link to them, and perhaps, down the road, build a network, of sorts, of local arts writing. We critics are not always a beloved group, and people may disagree with what I have to say about shows, or exhibits, or movies. But we critics serve several important functions: We help get the word out about local arts; We provide honest assessments of what we see, for whatever that's worth; And we are part of the institutional memory of local arts, creating a document of the work that was done.

I don't know what will happen with this writing down the road. I sometimes get burned out on arts writing and need to take a break from it. I sometimes get invested in my own projects and put everything else aside for them. And, when given a chance, I would always rather get paid for my writing than not. But, as much as possible, I will try to step into the gap created by the lack of local arts coverage and cover what I can, because it's worth doing, and it is something I can do.

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THIS WEEKEND, I completed an album of 15 original songs titled This Is Sailor Martin. I have created songs for Sailor Martin before, but this was a little different. In the past, I have tracked down public domain instrumentals and created new lyrics for them, singing over the original recordings. The songs on This Is Sailor Martin, however, are completely original -- every instrument played on them is played by me, and it's a funny assortment of instruments. Most of the songs are based around a ukulele riff, but I fleshed out the sound by playing a variety of other instruments, many of them purchased at a toy store, including a harmonica, a tambourine, a tin accordion, an ocarina, and a wooden egg filled with sand.

Layering all the instruments like this forced me to change the way I make recordings. In the past, I have simply turned on my digital camera and started recording in digital video mode. I sang my song, and then downloaded the video and stripped the sound off it. This was, for a while, a satisfyingly lo-fi way of doing things, but it limited me to one instruments, as it was just too much work to make and edit together multiple recordings. At the start of this project, I went out and purchased an inexpensive USB microphone for myself, called a Blue Snowflake. Now I was able to perform and sing directly into Garage Band on my Mac. This also allowed me to add every element of the song separately, and manipulate them separately -- I am using an old version of Garage Band, but it still offers a variety of filters that allow me to make my ukulele sound like an electric guitar, as an example.

This wound up changing the way I write songs. Creating music this way gave me a chance to be more spontaneous and improvisational than I have been in the past, when I would have to write the entire song before I sat down and recorded it. For this project, I generally sat down in front of the mic and came up with a chord pattern or a riff on my ukulele (and sometimes on other instruments), and then added instruments until I had created a little instrumental bit. I started this project by creating a list of possible themes for songs for Sailor Martin (mostly crude little jokes), and I would then consult this list and start writing lyrics based around the music I had made. I would then create the song in segments, adding additional verses, or choruses, or middle bridges, or instrumental solos, wherever it seemed appropriate. This process was greatly aided by the fact that I was writing in deliberately primitive musical styles -- my biggest source of inspiration was garage band music from the 60s -- so the song's arrangements and chord structures never got terribly fancy; I figured Sailor Martin's music would generally the musical equivalent of a blunt instrument. As a result, I was able to record the album pretty quickly, in about 15 days. It was still a great deal of work, with each song taking three or more hours to create; additionally, over the past two days I went through and tweaked every single song, fiddling with the mixing and adding parts or changing them where I felt it was necessary, which took most of the weekend.

The learning curve in creating this was quite steep, and I'm just starting to get the feel of making music in this way. I plan to do a second album of Sailor Martin music over the summer (and give myself more than a month to do it), consisting of Halloween novelty songs, and I'll be upping the ante on this next production a little more, by trading up to the latest version of Garage Band, adding a MIDI keyboard, and using instruments not bought in toy stores. I plan to have that project completed by October.

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