Month: February 2003

David Cronenberg is infamous for his unique style of horror filmmaking. His films–among them The Fly, Naked Lunch, and Dead Ringers–gaze with icy formalism on worlds where biology has gone mad. They’re a catalogue of physical breakdowns, sexual dysfunctions, florid mutations and hallucinations. His latest, Spider, based on Patrick McGrath’s novel, stars Ralph Fiennes as a muttering, schizophrenic Londoner who obsessively scribbles notes in an invented alphabet, struggling to make sense out of his fractured relationship with his mother (Miranda Richardson, terrific in a triple role). Quieter and largely grue-free, it’s still a clearly Cronenbergian film, and his best in years. The Rake crashed into the director recently for a Q&A.

RAKE: Last time I was here at Nicollet Island Inn it was for a romantic evening with my wife. Now I’m back, on Valentine’s Day, with the director of "Crash," "Rabid" and "Videodrome." Is that a bad sign about the future direction of my love life?

DC: I had a very lonely experience last night. I was alone in my room. But it is rather romantic. I think you’re safe. I think you’re OK.

RAKE: What attracts you to the subjects you choose to make films about?

DC: It’s hard to say… For me, filmmaking is a philosophical endeavor. I’m talking to myself and trying to explain things. Trying to explain the human condition and existentially what I am and what society is and what culture is and what art is and all those things. And I understand too that the first fact of human existence is the human body. And that’s something people try to avoid accepting, because if you accept the body as the totality of your existence as an individual then you accept mortality, you accept death. That’s a very hard thing to do even as an exercise.

RAKE: You’ve said that your intention with Spider was less a realistic portrayal of schizophrenia than a story with wider resonance to the human condition. What do everyday people have in common with someone as eccentric as Spider?

DC: Imagine taking away from yourself those things that Spider doesn’t have. He doesn’t have a wife, a family, a job. He doesn’t seem to have a religion, doesn’t seem to have politics. If you take all those things away from most people, I think you’ll end up with someone potentially very close to Spider. That is to say, feeling very disconnected from the flow of life around him, confused about himself and who he is. Knowing he can’t deal with people. And then struggling with his memories. He’s trying to figure out who he is based on these constantly shifting memories. I relate to that. I can feel that in myself. And I know how fragile identity is, and how much creative effort we have to put into maintaining an identity.

RAKE: Given that, it’s ironic that Patrick McGrath changed Spider’s character so much when he wrote the screenplay from his book.

DC: Yes. In the first draft of the script Spider was writing in English and there was voiceover. In the novel, Spider writes the novel, that’s his job. And that means he’s very good with language and very literary. But hearing that spoken over the face of our Spider, who is very inarticulate, was unbelievable. I still wanted him to write in the journal, because I still wanted to give him something physical to do that would show that he was obsessively trying to remember things; basically he’s taking evidence of a crime for some future use. But I didn’t want us to be able to read what he was writing, so I had Ralph develop the hieroglyphics that he did. As soon as I made the decision to keep the journal, I was setting him up to be an archetypal … maybe a failed artist, whose writings are unfortunately in a language that nobody can understand.

RAKE: Although you do eventually reveal the central mystery of Spider’s past, it’s obvious you’re careful not to explain too much.

DC: There are some things that if you just say it right out, they actually lose their meaning. Some things cannot be expressed without destroying them. So it’s a matter of balance. You be evocative, you give the audience clues, but they have to come up with it themselves for it to have that sense of revelation.

RAKE: Are you making the kind of films that you want to make? Is it too difficult to sell, for instance, a David Cronenberg slapstick comedy?

DC: Well, I’ve never tried that. But I do think my films are generally quite funny, even Spider. But no, I haven’t had trouble that way. I’ve been offered all kinds of films that I haven’t done just because I didn’t want to do them. But I was always happy that people recognize I could do other things, that I had the technique to do things I’m not necessarily known for. I haven’t found that to be a hindrance.

RAKE: Has it become more difficult for you to make movies as an independent filmmaker?

DC: It’s pretty tough right now, just because [moviemaking] is a business and the economy of the world is very shaky. Given the impending war with Iraq, I’d say it isn’t going to get any easier.

RAKE: And you’re not likely to make the next Sergeant York.

DC: Definitely not. Although I did like that movie.

RAKE: On most of the movies you direct, you write the screenplay as well, even when it’s based on a novel like Naked Lunch or Crash. Spider’s a rare exception. What attracted you to this story above shooting one of your own scripts?

DC: Laziness. Like most writers, I’ll do anything to avoid writing. It’s really hard. To do an adaptation is easier. To have someone give you a good script is easiest. Although I was very arrogant about that as a young filmmaker, I felt that you weren’t really a filmmaker if you didn’t write your own script. I’ve come to realize you can have some very interesting experiences fusing your own sensibility with someone else’s, to do things you never would have come up with yourself. In the case of Spider, it’s almost not like an adaptation, because it was the script I read first, and the script was the basis of my decision to do Spider. So you pray that a great script comes to you — and particularly if it has financing already done, that would be great. But if not, then my fallback is to write my own script. A lot of directors don’t have that fallback, because there’s no necessary connection between directing and screenwriting. It ‘s only an accident that you can do both. There have been of course multiple directors that couldn’t write.

RAKE: What effect do actors have on the evolution of your stories? Ralph Fiennes did a lot to refine his character, like adding Spider’s constant incomprehensible mumbling, which is really effective in showing how he occupies his own mental space separate from the rest of us.

DC: He came up with the idea, but I had to say yes to it. That’s how it works. In a collaboration everybody comes up with suggestions, not just the actors. The costume people, the production designers, they all come up with possibilities and options. But the director has to say yes or no to them because the director is the only one who has the big picture. He’s the only one who’s there for every scene and every moment, and will be responsible for putting together the editing. But you don’t want your actors to just be puppets. That’s not acting. You want an actor to have a lot
of input. That’s why actors like to work with me.

RAKE: Spider drinks his tea with about four heaping spoons of sugar. Was that a reference to Jeff Goldblum’s coffee habits in The Fly?

DC: I try very hard not to worry about connections that people might make amongst my films. I’m not a self-referential filmmaker. But I didn’t take it out for that very same reason–to ignore the existence of this other movie I made and go with what I think his character would do. I thought it was an accurate observation that Patrick made about the way a lonely man like that might be, the way he drinks the tea. It was in Patrick’s novel that Spider keeps eating all that sugar. And certainly Patrick was not thinking of The Fly. There it had a different meaning, which was that [Goldblum’s] metabolism was changing [as he turned into the Fly]. In this case it’s just what lonely people often do, just this comfort thing. It’s an entirely different meaning.

RAKE: If you couldn’t be a filmmaker, what would you choose to do?

DC: I always thought I’d be a novelist. And I was kind of surprised to find myself in filmmaking. Often I much prefer to read a book than see a movie…. I don’t actually watch my own movies. There are too many associations. Maybe when I get senile and can’t remember that I made those movies, I might be able to judge them objectively.

Louise Erdrich is fighting sleep. This explains a lot.

It’s said that the threshold between sleeping and waking—the lucid yet lawless terrain of twilight—is a cracked door to enlightenment, a conduit to the divine. How apropos that, here in the grainy borderlands of consciousness, the Minneapolis novelist puts pen to paper and struggles (yes, struggles) to write. Writing becomes a talisman against sleep, as she strings one word after the next simply to stay awake.

Erdrich’s exhaustion is the well-earned reward of a life equally matched to the richness and complexity of her writing, and that’s the way she likes it. The demands of a writing life combined with motherhood—demands unveiled with rich clarity in her 1995 memoir, The Blue Jay’s Dance—are still fresh and concrete for Erdrich, who has a two-year-old and two adolescent daughters at home. As if to defy the constraints of traditional female domesticity, Erdrich writes prolifically, with 15 published books to date, including her latest novel, The Master Butchers Singing Club, in which she turns her attention to her German-American ancestry and in particular, her paternal grandfather’s experience of fighting in World War I on the German side, before immigrating to the United States and plying his trade as a butcher.

Erdrich, whose previous novels have rummaged the lore of her French-Ojibwa maternal heritage, primarily writes fiction. But she draws heavily from genealogical research, family legends, personal tragedy (she suffered the deaths of her son, and her husband, Michael Dorris), and the mythical landscape of her North Dakota childhood. She has published eight novels plus assorted poetry, nonfiction, and children’s books. She is a permanent fixture on bestseller lists and a favorite of critics and scholars, and her voice is celebrated as one of the most important in the annals of Native literature.

All of this is just not enough. Three years ago, Erdrich opened an independent bookstore, Birchbark Books, near her home in Kenwood. It is a gathering place for the Native American arts community and a repository for a hand-picked crop of books reflecting the convictions and idiosyncrasies of the owner: Native writers, local authors, small runs from independent presses, literary novels, and obscure volumes alongside classics in fiction, parenting, gardening, and spirituality. The entire southwest corner of the store is dedicated to what Erdrich describes as high-quality children’s books, the sorts of books you really want to read to your kids. Beside the parakeet cage is a tiny reading nook—The Hobbit Hole—tucked under the stairs and looking out at pretty red shelves topped with Native American Barbies and hand-crafted birdhouses.

This eclectic montage is scattered thoughtfully amongst other offerings. Displays of Native handcrafts—quilts, pottery, baskets, and paintings—punctuate tables and shelves, along with books and little glass cases of herbs, jewelry, and music. Erdrich refers to the bookstore as an extension of her home, and the warmly scuffed maple floorboards, birch-bark reading loft, and brightly upholstered chairs and rockers do create a comfy ambience. But for Erdrich’s true fans, the bookstore’s physical manifestation of her tangy sense of humor promises further delight. For example, a large, ornately carved wooden confessional towers against the eastern wall. Patrons are invited to sit and read, or just think, inside the confessional, where cleanliness is literally next to godliness. (Shelves on one side of the unit display Wash Away Your Sins body care products and handmade cedar soaps; shelves on the other side hold an array of lush hardcovers on spirituality.)

While Erdrich fends off sleep for the sake of another novel (her current work-in-progress begins in New Hampshire, where she lived for many years, and wends its way back to her homelands of Minnesota and North Dakota) and tours the nation to promote The Master Butchers Singing Club, new manager Brian Baxter (formerly of Baxter’s Books) runs shop at Birchbark and does his damnedest to manage Erdrich’s schedule as well. His first task may be to bring the shop into the black, since the hand-written FAQ propped near Birchbark’s cash register says the store currently operates at a deficit of three to five thousand dollars each month. But “We’re passionate about this place and what it stands for and we’ll hang in there until… either we make it or go broke,” the humble sheet of cardboard assures loyal customers. Profits, if and when they materialize, will go back to the Native community. Meanwhile, the bookstore is committed to providing a “grassroots outlet for Native gardeners, artists, a place for books—provoking, intelligent Native and non-Native literary books, noncorporate, out of the box, and cheerfully eccentric in a world dominated by monolithic interests.”

Not a simple mandate, but Erdrich enjoys life most when it’s “really complicated.” She thrives in the deepest and sometimes darkest interstices of human experience, personal and political borderlands where cultures collide, and where humor and tragedy, love and hate, success and failure, and life and death spill over the thresholds and become inextricably linked.

The Rake spoke with the overbooked Louise Erdrich about success, kids, writing, bookselling, and on a quiet Friday evening when her two-year-old daughter was too tired (or rather, too soundly asleep) to participate in the pow-wow Erdrich was otherwise committed to attend.

Can an all-night jazz club in downtown St. Paul survive on nothing more than caffeine, nicotine, and donuts? The owners of Brilliant Corners hope so. The plan is to fill this hip new space with all kinds of jazz, from the most modest local ensembles to major national acts—charging covers accordingly, and serving up nothing stronger than coffee. It’s a wonderful space. Bright orange and red walls collide above the stageless floor, the better to make jazz of all kinds more accessible at all hours (reportedly, closing time will be at 4 a.m.). The club’s gala grand opening should be exciting too. New jazz wonderboy Matt Wilson (no, not the Toolmaster of Brainerd) gigs here March 7 and 8. Serious fans of local heroes Happy Apple will know precisely what to do with this information. (651) 224-8642, brilliantcornersjazz.com

We love the Bell Museum, we really do. It is old, humble, a little bit musty, and very, very quiet—those carpeted walkways through the exhibit halls are ever so effective at creating a pleasant hush. It’s the perfect antidote to the sense-jangling overload that can be the adult experience at the larger, glitzier family museums in town. Visit the Bell during the week and you may very well have the place to yourself, unless your arrival coincides with a school group. Natural Wonders, the Bell’s current exhibit, gathers environmental art from more than 180 schoolchildren across Minnesota. Large albums contain photographs of all 750 submitted works, in which students explore their views of nature and interpret the natural world through painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and other media. Bell, 10 Church St. S.E., (612) 624-7083, www.bellmuseum.org

It is one of life’s mordant ironies that Macalester art professor Rudquist, who often painted skulls, would pass away in 2001 of brain cancer. But Rudquist had a streak of mordancy himself, expressed in such comments as “Bone, of any species, is an extraordinarily beautiful material.” This overview of his career does show the more buoyant side of his creativity as well, but the centerpieces are those images of death to which he returned throughout his career. The six-by-nine-foot “Great Skull” is arresting by itself, but more interesting is his “Must We Always Expect War” series. Executed over a 40-year span, it explores the human penchant for brutality through the repeated re-imagining of a monstrous, distorted bony head, reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes. Rudquist’s paintings are rooted in Renaissance ideas, but his bold and unexpected color choices put his personal stamp on the work. Janet Wallace Fine Art Center Gallery, (651) 696-6279, www.macalester.edu/art

Naked people have not yet become boring to the artists of the world. When Icebox owner Howard Christopherson put out a call for artworks based on the human nude, he was sent so many entries—500, from seven countries—that he doubled the size of the show. In total, 112 artworks made the cut, encompassing photography, body painting, watercolor and oil paintings, sculpture, and digital media. Naturally Christopherson has included a few items that frankly seem a bit, erm, erotic (“You have to. That’s part of the deal,” he notes dryly). But there’s an impressive range of mood on display, from Ken Weissblum’s Daliesque “Frames” to J.E. Jasen’s “Lover’s Brooch,” a wrought piece of jewelry with an eye in the middle to keep watch over straying sweethearts. Don’t miss the short but funny documentary on legally blind photographer Flo Fox and her (ahem) “Dicthology” series, a bawdy celebration of artfully costumed organs, and we don’t mean Wurlitzers. Icebox, 2401 Central Ave. N.E. (612) 788-1790, www.iceboxminnesota.com

Playwright Gavin Lawrence garnered good notices for Cut Flowers, a dark and often angry drama set among low-wage workers in Washington. His latest, warmhearted family comedy, Salt Fish, has a lighter touch. It’s based on the history of his own family, which emigrated here from the South American country of Guyana, and especially his grandmother, a nurturing matriarch who filled his head with stories and his stomach with the tasty piscine dish of the title. Lawrence directs and acts in this production, which also stars Karen Malina White of TV’s Malcolm & Eddie. Mixed Blood, 1501 S. 4th St., (612) 338-6131,mixedblood.com

In the classic arts, things remain decidedly nationalistic. Just as the Italians get most of the credit and attention for opera, the English seem to command center stage in dramatic theater. And bridging the two, though often dismissed, are the Germans, who not infrequently bettered their cultural neighbors in both categories. Wagner, no matter what you think of him, was a colossus of opera. And his poetic forebears, Goethe and Schiller, got as close as anyone will to equalling Shakespeare. Park Square offers here the world premiere of a “new adaptation” of Schiller’s classic play about Mary Queen of Scots’ sudden-death-overtime with Queen Elizabeth I. We’re not sure this classic needed a new treatment. But we’re all for a new staging of the play, widely believed to be the best treatment of one of the most popular dramatic subjects. Park Square, 20 W. 7th Place, St. Paul, (651) 291-7005, parksquaretheatre. org

Christian McBride made his name as a bright light among jazz bassists with five progressively more adventurous albums on the Verve label, culminating in 2000’s Sci Fi, which found him more sure-footed as a bandleader and skillfully interweaving the threads of his previous work. He moves over to Warner for his new fusion-friendly Vertical Vision, which wanders nicely between hard funk and mellow smoothness. His sidemen are strong players in their own right, especially saxman Ron Blake and keyboardist Keezer, each of whom provide splendid compositions of their own on Vision. Dakota, 1021 E. Bandana Blvd., St. Paul, (651) 642-1442, www.dakotacooks.com

There’s been no new Boiled in Lead record since 1998’s best-of Alloy, but nobody’s yet come along to take over the reins as Minnesota’s premier Irish band. Though even that title is ironic—or perhaps we should say Eire-onic—since the BiL crew’s penchant for rock and world rhythms makes clear that shamrocks are not the only things that make them shake. These days, the four principals are chiefly occupied with other projects. So Leadheads can fill up at a live show but twice a year—during Halloween if you’re down in Mexico, and the annual St. Paddy’s day bash at the Ave, which has been ongoing since 1985, and why stop a good tradition? First Avenue, 701 1st Ave. N., (612) 338-8388, www.first-avenue.com