Two summers ago my husband and I went on a weeklong trip to the Black Hills area of South Dakota. This spring, we moved from the Chicagoland area to a small town in Iowa. Something unexpected happened to me with both events: I fell in love with America. The great expanses, beautiful under the warm sun, brought me closer to nature than I’d been in years and showed me that the rural Midwest is truly the heart of the country. Where blue skies meet golden prairies or great stretches of green cornfields, wildflowers line the roads, and wildlife is easily sighted, peace of mind comes easily and fortitude seems to spontaneously spring within you.
I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series as a child and loved it, and Laura Ingalls Wilder Country, William Anderson’s illustrated tour of the many places Wilder called home, reminds me just how central the sense of place—physical place—was to Wilder's life and is to her books. I'm glad I stumbled upon Anderson's book and bought it in South Dakota and finally recently read it after visiting one of the Ingalls family residences, the Masters Hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa.
Laura Ingalls Wilder Country brings together gorgeous modern photos by Leslie A. Kelly of the landscapes where Wilder lived in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, and Missouri with photos of the exteriors and interiors of the Ingalls and Wilder homes, the families’ belongings, and the family members themselves. Pieced throughout are illustrations from the Little House books by Garth Williams—which brought warm memories rolling back to me—as well as first-edition Little House book illustrations by Helen Sewell and Mildred Boyle, along with artwork depicting the regions, including paintings by Wilder herself. Informative text and captions describe the Ingalls and Wilder families’ lives in each place. From the log cabin in the Big Woods to Laura and Almanzo’s beloved farmhouse in Missouri’s Ozark Mountain country, each home and landscape comes to life thanks to Anderson’s research, Kelly’s beautiful color photos, and the absolutely fascinating photos of the Ingalls family and objects such as Pa’s fiddle. Special sections on Laura and Almanzo’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane; Almanzo’s family and his childhood near Malone, New York; and the lives of Laura’s parents and her sisters, Mary, Carrie, and Grace, beyond the Little House books round out the work.
Anderson’s book has inspired me to reread Wilder’s books, and I can’t wait to see them through my adult eyes.
Grade: A
The Prairie Is My Garden
Paintings by the fantastic Harvey Dunn (1884-1952), the renowned South Dakota artist, whose uncle Nate Dow actually married Grace Ingalls.
German author Bernhard Schlink’s 1995 novel The Reader is a tour de force character study that weaves questions of guilt, truth, and evil together with spare, beautiful prose. In 1959, fifteen-year-old German schoolboy Michael Berg has a five-month affair with thirty-six-year-old streetcar conductor Hanna Schmitz, is abandoned by her, and encounters her again by chance seven years later in a courtroom, where he is observing a trial for a law school seminar—and she is being tried for a war crime.
A fast read, the text is full of striking images of eroticism, nature, and tenderness. Hanna is a strong physical presence, vividly described and by turns tender and physically abusive, and she proves to be just as strong an emotional presence for Michael after she is gone. Hanna strongly contrasts Michael, who is cerebral, analytical, and vulnerable to her strength of personality, yet she herself is a walking contradiction. Her tenderness is paired with coldness; her strength is paired with her own remarkable vulnerability; her care for him upon their first meeting, when he vomits in the street at the start of a case of hepatitis, is sudden, brusque, “almost an assault,” yet she embraces him when he cries. She primarily calls Michael “Kid,” and she often plays a mothering role in their encounters, bathing being the introduction and coda of their affair, but this tenderness does not change the fact that she is molesting a fifteen-year-old boy. Most troubling is Hanna’s strange combination of strength and weakness.
Michael learns during the trial that Hanna was an SS guard at Auschwitz and another concentration camp during the war and that during a journey to move many women prisoners, a church holding the prisoners had caught fire during a bombing, and Hanna and the other guards had left the church locked while it burned. Hanna explains that she did this because she and the few other guards present would not have been able to control the prisoners when they flooded out of the fire: “We couldn’t just let them escape!” Her explanations destroy her case.
Accountability and decision-making seem foreign to Hanna. She is an example of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” and, though a strong presence, she is ultimately weak because she drifts from one situation to another as if she has no choice in the matter—and yet we know, once we know her personal secret, which I will not reveal, that she did have another choice; but she dismissed it out of pride. At the age of twenty-one, she voluntarily joined the SS after being offered a job as a foreman at Siemens, the factory at which she worked. For Hanna, hiding her secret comes above making moral decisions. When questioned about her involvement in selecting prisoners in the camps to be put to death, she asks the judge, not in defiance, but in earnest, “I … I mean … so what would you have done?” Further along in this questioning, she asks aloud, “So should I have … should I have not … should I not have signed up at Siemens?” When questioned about her decision not to unlock the church doors, she again asks the judge, “What would you have done?” There is a strange virtue in her honestly seeking right answers to what she should have done. But it is disturbing that these questions are only coming now, years after the horrific facts.
Hanna remains a mystery throughout the novel, and her actions always leave Michael alone to pick up the pieces, first when she leaves town without an explanation, then at the end of the trial, and again at the end of her life. Yet her apparent cruelty is tempered with the true affection she felt for Michael after they parted and her desire to learn as much as possible about the Holocaust and its victims, both evidenced by the possessions in her prison cell. Further, she claims to be haunted nightly by the ghosts of her past. The puzzle of The Reader is whether Hanna is a monster or a sympathetic character. This question bonds us to our narrator, Michael, who spends most of his life enduring the same conflict, consciously and subconsciously.
Schlink's novel is gorgeous and haunting long after one finishes.
This movie cruises along the Avenue of Dumbness for the first hour and ten minutes or so, and then it suddenly becomes entertaining during the House of Bling scene, in which Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, as hapless twins in the city Jane and Roxy Ryan, are given makeovers by a group of over-the-top urban stylists. Roxy calms her panicking sister down by throwing a glass of water in her face, and Jane’s answer, “Thank you. I wasn’t thirsty,” had me laughing my ass off on the couch. The hair salon antics from then on (despite the pretty dumb makeovers themselves) are genuinely funny, and the movie from then on is genuinely entertaining--for the last twenty minutes.
The plot is this: Jane and Roxy are opposites—Jane the uptight scholar, Roxy the rocker chick class-cutter. The girls wind up in New York on the same day when Jane travels downtown to give the speech of her life in a competition for an Oxford fellowship and Roxy heads to the city too to take part in a Simple Plan video shoot and promote her band. Meanwhile, Roxy is being chased by a gung-ho truant officer played amusingly (despite the bad writing) by Eugene Levy. Disasters strike and the hostile sisters must work together to get through the day.
Soon after the House of Bling, another shock arrives in the form of a surprisingly affecting dramatic scene between the Olsens. I even found myself tearing up a little as the twins fought with tears in their eyes. Where did that scene come from?
After that, Andy Richter’s character, the very white “first adopted son” of Ma Bang, a Chinese dealer of pirated movies and music, becomes genuinely funny with his affected Chinese accent, whereas earlier in the movie the character was just … you guessed it, dumb (no matter how much I wanted to find him funny). Who turned the switch? Add to that a very funny scene between Levy and a pair of tourists from Minnesota, and another funny scene involving said tourists at the fellowship competition.
In the end, this movie may have just enough heart to earn it “So bad it’s good” status down the road. The puzzling presence of truly entertaining actors such as Levy, Richter, Darrel Hammond, and Andrea Martin (and an inspired “Wink wink” moment with Bob Saget) helps.
Bernice L. McFadden’s Nowhere Is a Place was an unexpected gem. I hadn’t a clue what it was really about when I picked it up, and it wound up being quite moving. A story within a story, an African-American woman and her mother drive cross-country to a family reunion in Georgia, but the narrative about the lives of their ancestors that springs forth from this road trip becomes the heart of the novel.
The thirtysomething daughter, Sherry, has long puzzled and frustrated her mother, known to family and friends as Dumpling, with her travels, her searches for meaning, and her relationships with white men (and men of other colors). In a loving relationship and newly pregnant, Sherry decides it is time to finally understand an event from her childhood: a violent and unexplained slap from her mother when she was six years old. She comes to find that slap was generations in the making.
Sherry and Dumpling are both readers and writers in the story, Dumpling presenting an oral history of their family’s roots and Sherry, after “reading” this history, novelizing it and presenting it for Dumpling to read. While I find the idea of Sherry writing this polished work during a few stops at motels and other spots along the trip a bit weak (that aspect of the plot becomes thankfully easy to overlook after awhile), Sherry and Dumpling’s roles as readers and writers are central to their eventual mutual understanding. Further, it is only after Dumpling comes to know her own story from an older family friend, giving Sherry the final pieces of the puzzle regarding that slap, that Sherry is able to overcome her reticence and let Dumpling in on her current story, allowing her mother to speak to the—white—father of her child on the phone.
In some ways, Sherry is the reader of this story along with us. Sherry’s open-mindedness on race and philosophy is in line with the “color-blind” way many of us think we see the world, or want to see it. Dumpling, meanwhile, sees the world in black and white. Reading their family history, we and Sherry come to understand just why that is. By the end, we have met in the middle, but not before being confronted with the brutal truths we conveniently like to forget about our country’s history and like to ignore regarding the reasons our racial divide is still so wide.
I must say that McFadden’s poetic prose, while sometimes gorgeous, is often just too much. This first printing of the book is also irritatingly in need of a proofreader. But McFadden is incredibly gifted in the art of creating vivid characters. Lou, Buena, Brother, Suce, Lovey, and Dumpling leave indelible marks, and I missed them when I was finished reading. The lost childhood of Nayeli, the Native American girl who is sold into slavery, named “Lou” after a dead family dog, and becomes the family’s matriarch, is tragic, and her choices and sorrows are shocking. Brother, Suce, Willie, and the others’ mundane but terrifying existence in the shadow of the big house and their crazed, bedridden master, unaware of their own freedom and then struggling for a way to claim it, is riveting. The sheer amount of this family’s history that is packed into the novel’s 280 pages—in the form of an engrossing plot—is stunning. McFadden has talents for both emotional punch and narrative structure. The book began slow for me—the first twenty-five pages were okay but not thrilling—but once Lou’s, and the family’s, story began, the work became a page-turner.
Nowhere Is a Place came out in 2006; McFadden has five other novels, and I definitely plan to check them out.
I went to this late show at the Double Door to hear the new songs OK Go are playing from their upcoming album (to be released this summer), and I left wanting the new album now. Having been a fan for years and having seen them play a gazillion times, I was sure as heck hoping the new stuff wouldn’t feel like a rerun. New stuff did not disappoint.
From the arrival of a big ol’ drum (I wish I knew the name of this particular piece of percussion, but I don’t—timpani perhaps?) in the middle of the tiny, tiny stage, I knew something different—or, at the very least, interesting from a performance standpoint—would be happening. It wasn’t the big, bouncing, banging “Do What You Want, Pt. 2” it could have been. Score! It was an entrancing, refreshingly acoustic-guitar-fueled little number that had me from the get-go. Bassist Tim Nordwind provided the steady drum booms. (Listen to a 3/27/09 live performance from Portland, OR, below.)
The band played seven new songs in total, and they’re all keepers. That’s only half of what’s to come on the new album, to be titled either Help Is On the Way or The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Color of the Sky (I prefer the latter), and between those and the b-sides the boys have apparently recently been recording, OK Go fans have a lot coming their way, and hopefully it will all taste as good as these first pieces have.
Some of it is dancey and slinky—“I Want U So Bad” is a sexy little funk song and “White Knuckles” sounds a lot like Prince and his protegees, the Time—but other songs like “Back From Katmandu” are gloriously melancholy and driven by messy guitars. (Listen to a live 3/25/09 “Back From Katmandu”--I’ll trust this title only when I see it on the album--from San Francisco below.) "I Want U So Bad" does include an unexpectedly rock-y guitar solo from Andy Ross alongside its dance groove.
“Last Leaf” is a touching love song that makes you want to reach out and squeeze the one you’re with. [An aside: It shows just how much of a snot-nosed smartass Damian Kulash always is onstage that he had to state plainly that the upcoming tune was an earnest love song.]
“Skyscrapers,” the studio version of which is available now on a compilation album from Banana Republic of all places, is an impressive tune for its moody depth and its inclusion of tubular bells alongside a dance beat. Some people are comparing this song to Prince, but it owes much more to Cheap Trick than the Purple One, as the song somehow, and not unpleasantly, morphs into CT’s “Gonna Raise Hell” in its second half. Singer Damian Kulash’s successful falsetto invites Prince comparisons, but his all-out screams in the middle sound more like an attempt to be Robin Zander than the Artist Formerly, and regardless of whom he might be aping, lemme be clear on this point: it doesn’t work. I’m not sure if I rolled my eyes at the show or just cringed, but my eyes have been rolling every time that section comes in my listens at home. (Hear the 3/27/09 live version from Portland, OR, for yourself below.)
Dan Konopka’s drums at the beginning of “This Too Shall Pass” (check it out from the 3/27/09 Portland, OR, show, below) sound bizarrely like U2’s “Bullet the Blue Sky,” but the rest of the song, whose title tricks you into thinking there’s a ballad on the way, doesn’t—it’s one of the upbeat, hooky numbers. But its hook is of a rocking variety rather than candy-coated pop (more toward Oh No than their self-titled debut), which is just fine by me. Damian's repetitive, spit-out vocals toward the end are fabulous, and the song actually sounds a lot like their pre-debut track “Unrequited Orchestra of Locomotion,” and you can’t go wrong with that.
Overall, the new stuff is heavy on the rhythm section, guitars, experimental instrumentation, and straightforward, emotional lyrics, making the whole endeavor feel much more organic than the band’s last two albums. My personal hope is that the melancholy bits outweigh the dance bits this time around, but we shall wait and see.
As for the other songs they played, “Get Over It” and “Oh, Lately It’s So Quiet” could go away at this point without me raising a peep. “Don’t Ask Me” and “Invincible” don’t seem to have lost their punch, however. “Do What You Want” felt like just another song rather than the rousing showstopper it once was—I think it has run its course. “It’s a Disaster” is floating around in my head as unmemorable. Some people are sick to death of “Here It Goes Again”; I’m not, so I enjoyed it. “A Good Idea at the Time” still has its swaggering appeal, but it became more humorous than swaggery when Damian sang the same verse three times. “A Million Ways” was fun to hear live because I think I’ve only seen it played live one other time; all other times, I saw it danced. And then there’s “What to Do.” The boys have put together another performance piece to boggle the minds of audience members: OK Go as a handbell choir. When I watched this YouTube vid weeks before the show,
I sat in stunned silence alternating between a jawdrop and a stupid grin, filled with warm, fuzzy amazement similar to what I remember from watching the “Here It Goes Again” treadmill video for the first time. The boys can still floor you. Unfortunately, when I saw it live only a couple weeks later, without spastic, repeated watchings of the YouTube video in the meantime, mind you, it already felt like a gimmick. The tricks have come to the point of diminishing returns; it may be time to leave them in the backyard.
The band also went extremely heavy on the confetti gun, to the point of comical and the edge of annoying. I lost count of the confetti blasts, and in that small venue, each one counted. One fan hilariously referred to the three-inch layer of fallout as “confetti carnage.” I wish I had taken a picture of the floor.
I wish badly that Oh No's “No Sign of Life” had stayed on the set list, but what are you gonna do. The wallpaper slideshow backdrop has gotta go, though; it’s been around since 2005. Having not seen them live in a year and a half, I was shocked to see it appear at the start of their set.
Overall, the group was tight and showed what a good live band you can become, musically, when you tour for years on end. But as a show itself? So-so. As an album preview? A+.
Openers U.S. Royalty gave a good performance despite the cramped confines (with both their and OK Go’s gear up there, the stage looked like a storage closet—in size and contents) and terrible sound that was so extremely heavy on the bass it was shifting my internal organs and likely could have caused a spontaneous bowel movement. Very hairy singer John Thornley has charisma and rocks an organ. Their standout song had some connection to New Orleans in a voodoo kind of way—I of course cannot remember the song’s title or find it anywhere online. Black … something? “Spell”? Anyway, it was a rocker. I don’t foresee these guys taking over the airwaves, but they’ve got some good songs and are a worthwhile live band.
Heads Will Roll Yeah Yeah Yeahs Back and sassy. I haven't heard the whole album yet, but I sure like this. "Off with your head/Dance till you're dead": a killer disco-ey dance track with a great, dark electronic groove.
The Great Defector Bell X1 What a three-way between the Talking Heads, Soft Cell, and Sufjan Stevens would sound like. Orgasmic!
The Fear Lily Allen Pop perfection + satire of the E! Network set = a fantastic song that feels like spring & summer.
Sometime Around Midnight Airborne Toxic Event Adam from U2 likes them and recommended them on U2's recent "radio takeover" hosted by Shirley Manson of Garbage (who has become an actress. She's on that Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles show or whatever it is. Weird.) The song starts off slow but builds big, and it has this great line: "You just have to see her to know that she'll break you in two." Wow. Check them out. Listen loud.
I'm Falling Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 The verses have a nice, easy feel to them, and the more rousing "Take it away" chorus is great.
What Are You Like Indigo Girls Good, happy tune about how nice it is to have someone who knows you better than you know yourself. Aww.
Crap Sex on Fire - Kings of Leon I don't understand why this song is such a hit and everyone's crazy about Kings of Leon. This is one of the dumbest songs I've ever heard, and I hate how Caleb Followill sings in general. If the song were even slightly sexy, I'd feel differently, but it's just stupid, Followill's singing is irritating, the guitar during the chorus makes my skin crawl, and the lines "Your sex is on fire/Consumed with what's to transpire" make me want to never have sex again. The ironic thing is that Followill didn't even like the song when he started writing it. He thought it was "terrible," but the other guys encouraged him to keep going. Follow your gut, songwriters everywhere ...
Stranger Than Fiction is a wonderful movie. It is the story of a man who begins hearing the voice of a British female narrator in his head, chronicling his life as it happens, and discovers, with the help of an eccentric literature professor, that he is the protagonist of said British author's latest, long-unfinished novel and that she intends to kill him.
Harold Crick is an IRS agent who lives a by-the-numbers existence, alone. Shortly after he begins hearing the maddening voice, he meets Ana Pascal, a nonconformist young baker he is auditing. The development of their relationship is not too sappy, not too flashy--I liked it. As he develops a desire for Ana and as he comes to know Professor Hilbert, who prompts him to examine whether his life seems to be a comedy or tragedy, Harold begins a quest to make his life worth living. Again, this is done in a way that is not too flashy, not too sappy.
Meanwhile, Karen Eiffel, the chain-smoking, down-on-her-luck author steering Harold's life, does not know that Harold is real. Until she learns this, her struggle is simply to come up with a way to kill Harold in a fashion that her novel deserves and finally finish the thing after ten years--without abandoning her artistic principles, despite the presence of Penny, an "office assistant" sent by her publisher to help the writing process along. When Karen meets Harold, the question of how the story should end takes on a very new meaning.
Will Ferrell gives a perfectly understated performance as Harold (yes, Will Ferrell: understated). Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of the professor is great and took me back to my college days, especially when he quoted Italo Calvino. Emma Thompson gets the job done, as always, as Karen Eiffel, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is believable as Ana, the opinionated but sweet bakery owner who hates paying (part of) her taxes. Queen Latifah is perfectly capable as Penny, Karen's publisher-assigned assistant, but I'm not sure what the point was of putting a big name in that role.
The movie is warmly entertaining throughout--nice humor, an intriguing mystery, and an exploration of life's mundaneness without getting too heavy--but its best part is the ending, which shows that life's greatness is in its seemingly small moments, not its great tragedies. The question of whether great art will triumph over real life is satisfyingly answered. Rent it!
Grade: A
Notable: it has a great soundtrack. The arrival of Spoon's "I Turn My Camera On" (from Gimme Fiction, an album I am now nearly four years late in acquiring, which is just plain silly, considering how great 2007's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is and that Gimme Fiction is supposed to be better ... I digress) was a highlight for me. The Jam was fun, too. And Will Ferrell's a pretty good singer when he's not hamming it up. Also notable: Tom Hulce's turn as an unhelpful, aging hippie therapist. WOW, he's aged.
Interesting fact: Spoon singer Britt Daniel co-wrote the movie score.
Interesting fact II: The movie was filmed entirely in Chicago, and I hadn't a clue while watching it.
Nov. 24 - Goodbye
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Well, I've made a decision and this time it's final. This blog is done and
will be deleted. If anyone wants to keep in touch with me you can still
find m...
