The Wake

In 1940, Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land is your Land” in response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Berlin’s standard song romanticized a false concept of America: “Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free, let us all be grateful for a land so fair.” Even to this day, Americans sing this song as one of many anthems of the nation—its ideas are what created America. However, Berlin’s song unintentionally introduced the paradox of American freedom: in order to be free in America, one must sacrifice his or her freedom. Guthrie challenged Berlin and America by simply demanding that …

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Choose your poison, because in this land of polarity you’re bound to be labeled with one side of the American body image scale. That may sound dramatic, but with over two-thirds of American adults considered clinically overweight and disorders such as anorexia and bulimia on a constant rise, body shapes and sizes are losing their shades of gray. Early this January I sat with a close friend as we contemplated all the messages about how to fix our bodies that had been shoved down our throats since the New Year had begun. Food labeled “lean” this and “low-carb” that being …

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Erik Appelwik was not on time for his interview. Nor was he late. I sat at the Purple Onion for almost an hour before I found what had happened to the plans we made the day before. As 20 minutes and then 45 minutes passed, I began to wonder if he had gotten held up, if he had forgotten, or if I was being blown off. Finally my phone rang. “Jenny? I am soooo sorry. I totally forgot.” Figures. Erik was mid-move and at the top of a slew of repair people coming that day. He also had no indoor …

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The last place you’d expect to find a former member of the androgynous pre-punk band New York Dolls is in a Mormon Temple, but that’s exactly where documentary filmmaker Greg Whiteley found bass player Arthur Kane. Arthur, whose nickname was “Killer Kane” when he played with the Dolls 30 years ago, discovered the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints in 1989. This journey from rock excess to Mormon piety is the focal point of Whiteley’s documentary New York Doll. Filmed in the months leading up to a reunion show in 2004, the film uses archival footage of the New York …

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A charred canvas punctured with small, circular holes. Patches of muddled orange paint seeping to the surface like dried blood. Rows of paper bolstered by wire. This is “Baghdad Smoke,” Iraqi artist Hana’ Malallah’s haunting abstraction of a land under siege. It’s part of a collection of 17 Iraqi book artists’ work touring the U.S. in an exhibit titled Dafatir, or “notebook”, in Arabic. Each row of the canvas, which hung like a banner from the ceiling of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA), can also collapse upon the next until it’s a neatly compressed rectangle, small enough to …

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“Sign this or you will be burned alive.” Her breathing halts, her eyes glisten with unblinking anguish, and her face throbs numbly as she slowly and deliberately twists her head first to one side, then to the other. An excruciatingly low, morbid drone of electrostatic and dragging metal makes the walls quiver. “Even if you part my soul from my body, I will confess nothing.”The gruesome scene depicted above is The Prisoner, an intensely dark and emotive 12 minutes and 26 seconds of cinematic experience by Minneapolis artist Abinadi Meza, raises harrowing questions about the implications of captive interrogation, asking …

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“This is a story of four souls bound together in their love for one another,” proclaims Johnny Oliver, an actor in University Theatre’s production of Las Meninas. He intends to continue his emotional-expressive delivery of this key monologue, but something is not quite right.“Do it again,” says director Tisch Jones bluntly, observing him from the front row of the arena theatre in Rarig Center, where Las Meninas opens Feb. 24. “And don’t say anything this time. Show me.” Oliver looks confused. She explains, “Pretend you cannot talk, but you still have to make this story work. Make me understand. And …

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The corpse of a fan dancer announces the end of the world in the first act of Clive Barker’s Frankenstein in Love. The bodiless head of a middle-aged man is stabbed for refusing to silence his screams, and a “Bogey Man” shows up in the aftermath of a bloody South American revolution to take control of the tiny nation in which this play is set. Curious commencement for what playwright Barker calls a “romance.”“For me it’s a mix between a Wildean comedy, and Titus Andronicus,” says Nic Hager, director of the Xperimental Theatre’s production of Frankenstein in Love, and a …

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This is the first hazed morning of the twentieth year of my time.
My bloomed perennial hands unfolding to button flies in the dark of morning.
a blanket cracked open and shivered as I leave to
gas the pedal over four lane interstate,
back to the city in which I sleep.The expectant wisdom of this day
is groggy mute
still from the chloroform of adolescence,
and I have left my chest’s thumping furnace
still nineteen laying with you in rest.I do not need this—
aged calm.
Hoping still to believe
that the earth is flat.I have found no …

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In a pair of your sister’s
pink socks
you had a dance party— through the phone
I could hear the
shuffle of your feet on the carpet,
I could see your free
hand wave above your head, your
eyes squeezed
shut, smiling, and I could hear in
the back the beat
of the News, though you claim not to
know the Power of Love—
but I Know you Know it, you
pink footed dancer, you
brown-haired wonder-girl, you
singer of secrets!

Are you real? The
sycophant news junkie writhes
on the couch wondering sees
the world in your eyes the suffering
hunger war victory speeches passion
so passionlessly read dispassionate face
clear eyes, furious frenzied desperate to
prove your body exists
from the waist down desire erection
something under your pants no smooth
Ken Doll Groin covered by modular
plastic faux wood panel
naked
from the screen down are you real?

I walked out of an exit poll
and into an opinion made ready and pinned
onto my sleeve green epaulettes tarnished
dull we get more
information in one day than
Einstein’s library our relative
stupidity a quantum chasm dog
politicians speak and no one
asks where the bones are
buried.

Known for her essays, Cheryl Strayed, a fellow Minnesotan, has published three works over the past six years. She published two essays, “Heroin/e” and “The Love of my Life” in The Best American Essays 2000 and The Best American Essays 2003 respectively. Strayed also published her first novel, Torch, last month. Strayed’s essay, “Heroin/e,” takes on the tragic reality of her mother’s death, as well as her own addiction to heroin. This is her first essay and was written with such care that each word hangs in the back of my head as I read it.Maybe it’s the music (I’m …

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After the break-up of the Soviet Union, the gaze of “western Europe” and others in the international community has shifted farther and farther east. Recently, with the EU beginning to consider Turkey a candidate state for membership, the university has followed suit. “The U has devoted more and more resources to this part of the word,” says Eric Weitz, director of the Center for German and European Studies, adding that the university has begun teaching Turkish as a foreign language.However, with this newfound examination of Turkey come unpleasant revelations of human rights violations in the country’s treatment of its …

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The Steelers battled the Seahawks, but neither tin-man nor bird stole hearts in Coffman’s Great Hall on Super Bowl Sunday. This year, the dog was all the rage.The Chinese American Student Association (CASA) brought in the Year of the Dog with a celebration in the Great Hall Feb. 5th, Super Bowl Sunday. More than 350 students and community members skipped the big game for dinner, dancing and music at the Chinese New Year’s party.“I was gleaming inside … I was so surprised how many people came, and especially how many people stayed,” said Albert Leung, president of CASA. CASA originally …

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