Going Gothic
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performs Carmiina Burana, May 1-4

Even if you don't know Carl Orff from Karl Rove, you know Camina Burana, the German composer's one-hit wonder of a cantata. Or at least you know its two-minute opening movement, "O Fortuna," which has been borrowed by many a heavy metal band and TV commercial. A thunderclap of timpani, a frenzied whirl of glockenspiel, a thousand voices wailing in Latin over a lumbering Godzilla beat—it's one of the most instantly recognizable choral works around, and its infectious barbarian-rampage aesthetic has long made it go-to orc-attack music for Hollywood moviemakers. (King Arthur and friends gallop around to it memorably in John Boorman's film Excalibur.)

Carmina Burana sounds convincingly medieval, and the twenty-five songs in the hour-long cycle are indeed based on 13th century poems written by randy goliards—ne'er-do-well monks who wrote satiric verses about love, lust, drunkenness, and other secular pleasures. But the mock-Gothic music is pure 20th century. Influenced by Stravinsky, Munich-born Orff composed it in 1936, on the eve of World War II, and the cantata is considered the best classical work to come out of Nazi Germany. While Orff was not a party member (and, indeed, the Nazis were said to have frowned upon the work's earthy origins), there's still a kind of spooky fascist grandeur to the music itself: It's propulsive, simple, irresistibly rhythmic, and catchy as all get-out.

Critics have tended to be cool to crowd-pleasing Carmina. "The most basic means are pressed into service to generate effects of wild abandon," sniffs the Grove Dictionary of Music. But BSO music director Marin Alsop is an unabashed fan: She conducted the Bournemouth Symphony in a well-received recording released on the Naxos label in 2007, and Orff's outsized icon feels like a good match. "It's a spectacle," she told NPR's Scott Simon in 2006. "It's about extremes and excess." Alsop will marshal a crowd of more than two hundred musicians and singers, including the Baltimore Choral Arts Society and the Peabody Children's Choir, when she rattles the windows of Meyerhoff Symphony Hall on May 1, 2, and 4, with a performance at Strathmore on May 3. Release
the hounds!

—David Dudley



THEATER
Artistic License
"Art" at Everyman Theatre, May 21–June 29
A New Brain at Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre, through May 18

When Yasmina Reza's play "Art" was produced in London in the mid 1990s, passionate discussions about what constitutes art were the order of the day. After all, it came on the heels of Charles Saatchi's Young British Artists show, which featured Damien Hirst's controversial dead shark in formaldehyde. In "Art", close friendships are put to the test when the character Serge buys an outrageously expensive white-on-white painting. Chain link fences in Mount Vernon notwithstanding, contemporary local audiences tend not to get as worked up over art, but according to director Jeremy Skidmore, the tension that arises between friends with clashing opinions is especially relevant in an election year. In "Art", an esoteric discussion of the meaning of art escalates into an examination of values. "It may bring to mind the contest between Clinton and Obama," says Skidmore.

Now 31, Skidmore saw the original London production and recalls finding it refreshingly "character- and dialogue-driven" at a time when many playwrights preferred a clipped cinematic style. "In the last year," he says, "playwrights have started moving away from cinematic-ness and are getting back to long scenes and great dialogue between real people." The director is clearly comfortable with both the traditional unity of time-place-action found in "Art" and with more avant-garde styles: Last year at Virginia's Signature Theatre, he directed Crave, by the controversial British playwright Sarah Kane, who frequently dispensed with plot and character.

The former artistic director of Washington, D.C.'s Theater Alliance, Skidmore is also directing David Hare's caustic Stuff Happens at the Olney Theatre, June 18 to July 20, which will run concurrently with "Art".


William Finn's A New Brain celebrates "the healing power of art," according to director and choreographer David Gregory.

Finn, who created Falsettos, the early-1990s musical about a married man's coming out of the closet, wrote this similarly autobiographical 1998 musical about his experience with arteriovenous malformation, a massing of blood vessels in the brain. Gregory, who once worked as a trauma technician in the emergency room at Johns Hopkins Hospital, is well equipped to style this tale of how a man's brush with death affects his relationships, career, and dreams. "I'm using the medical setting and environment to tell the story," he says.

—Martha Thomas



JOURNAL
Hard Boiled
Murdaland: Crime Fiction for the 21st Century

The fiction journal Murdaland specializes in "dark tales for tawdry times," as its back cover says. Founded in 2007 by Baltimore writer Cort McMeel, the journal takes a 21st-century approach to the crime short story: Forget the trenchcoat-wearing, cigarette-smoking private eye made famous by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The world of Murdaland is murkier, more ambiguous—from the morality of the characters down to the definition of what makes a crime story.

Editor-in-Chief Michael Langnas, who has taken the helm with assistant editor Sean O'Kane while McMeel writes a book, says the journal is a home for both literary crime fiction and literary fiction that contains crime—books and stories that might not be shelved in the crime section of a bookstore, such as those of Flannery O'Connor or Charles Bukowski. "We'll be liberal with what constitutes a crime story," says Langnas, who hails from Pittsburgh, "but give us dark, well-written fiction set in a credible sociological milieu the writer knows, and psychologically believable characters. No one [has to be] too cool. No one even has to be too sympathetic."

The second installment of Murdaland  (which, Langnas says, was named before McMeel was aware of the Wire connection), came out this past December and contains tales by both national and local writers, including Baltimore's Rupert Wondolowski, co-owner of Normals Books and Records in Waverly. There's also an anonymous report from the battlefields of Iraq and an excerpt from Don Carpenter's out-of-print 1966 novel Hard Rain Falling, which, Langnas says, adheres to the Murdaland code.

Reading these stories is like nursing a shot of whiskey at a dive bar while your fellow patrons trade tales and maybe punches. There's the murderer-for-hire Roachkiller of the eponymous story by Rafael Narvaez, fresh out of prison and doing everything he can to keep his loyal grandmother safe. There's Aunt Ivy in Scott Phillips' "The Emerson, 1950," on a crazed hunt to see her dead-and-buried cat one last time and get back the candlesticks her neighbors stole.

But the most haunting character is Vivian in Harry Hunsicker's story "Vivian and Bobby Ray," who suffers from apotemnophilia, the medical term for a person with a fetish for being an amputee. She and her companion Bobby Ray burgle convenience stores and bars to pay for her surgery; in the meantime, she simulates the impending amputation as best she can: "‘We got three thousand and twenty-seven dollars,' Vivian said. She was on the bed, naked, with her left leg bound again, calf to thigh. Light from the ancient Magnavox that they'd bought from the pawn shop next door flickered across the room, the sound down low. Oprah was on, talking to some fat chick with orange hair."

—Marianne Amoss

*Murdaland is printed once or twice a year. For a listing of where you can buy the journal, go to www.murdalandmagazine.com.



ART
On Your Mark
"Notes on Monumentality" at the Baltimore Museum of Art, through May 25
"Baltimore Ink: Patterns on Bodies" at the Baltimore Museum of Art, May 31

"I am interested in monuments as a kind of urban decoration," says Mark Alice Durant, guest curator for the Baltimore Museum of Art's experimental rotating exhibition space, Front Room. Durant's exhibition, "Notes on Monumentality," features the work of twenty-two artists spanning various media and time periods, two-thirds of which were plucked directly from the vaults of the BMA's permanent collection. "It was a great opportunity to present works trans-historically," says Durant, "so we can see how attitudes towards the monumental shift and change depending on the culture's attitude towards its history."

Baltimore artist Deirtra Thompson's video Monument features grainy black-and-white footage of cheerleaders. Only one minute in length and playing on a loop, the video shows members of the squad lifted into the air over and over again in an endless choreographed routine that becomes, as Durant puts it, "everything that a monument is not—ephemeral, flickering, and insubstantial." Thompson's video from 2006 is juxtaposed with more historical and literal odes to the monument, as in Philip Galle's fanciful 16th century engravings of ancient statuary. On view until May 25, "Notes on Monumentality" re-contextualizes notions of the monument, a nice complement to the nickname John Quincy Adams bestowed upon Baltimore—"the Monumental City."

If you're looking for an edgier urban decoration, don't miss the BMA's special event "Baltimore Ink: Patterns on Bodies," presented in conjunction with the last installment of "Meditations on African Art: Pattern." "We wanted to tie the historical perspective of patterning on the body with one that was contemporary," says BMA deputy director of education Anne Manning, who helped organize the Baltimore Ink event. On the evening of May 31, tattoo artists, authors, and the editor of Skin & Ink magazine will lead a discussion on tattoo culture, culminating in a runway show and after-party that will be sure to shed new light on the role of body adornment and pattern in contemporary society.

—Ding Ren



BOOKS
Return of the Native
by Susan McCallum-Smith

The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins, 2008)
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown and Company, 2007)
The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins (Simon & Schuster, 2007)

Before the Europeans arrived, it was said that if you knelt and placed your ear against the soil of the North American West, you would hear the buffalo herds on their migrations across the plains of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North Dakota, and Minnesota. In 1885, Louis Riel, a charismatic but possibly loopy Canadian rebel, led a failed uprising to secure an independent Michif nation encompassing this territory, for his people, the Métis, descendents of marriages between native tribes and French, Scottish, and English explorers and trappers. After his capture, Riel was executed for high treason by the Canadian government.

More than one hundred and thirty years later, the spirit of Riel and the thwarted aspirations of indigenous North Americans haunt the small town of Pluto, North Dakota, the setting of The Plague of Doves, the new novel by Louise Erdrich.

In 1911, members of a local white family are discovered murdered in their homestead, and Pluto's townspeople, blinded by revenge, lynch several Indians innocent of the crime. Over the years, whites and Métis and Ojibwe from the neighboring reservation met, and mixed, and married; now, the town's present-day descendents are a tangled blend of the perpetrators and victims of these long-ago crimes.

Erdrich is a respected and worthy chronicler of the everyday lives of the First Nations and the Métis. In her clear, sensual, story-within-a-story style, she unravels these tragic lineages via many voices, through "tales of extravagant encounter": a broken-hearted man who drowns himself in two feet of water; a woman who is transformed by her kidnapping; a snake-handler who uses her gifts to outwit a cult run by her charismatic Métis husband, reminiscent of the prophesizing Riel; and Evelina, named for Riel's first love, whose grandfather, the adorable old rascal, Mooshum, had witnessed the events of 1911. "Nothing that happens, nothing, is not connected here by blood," comments the local judge about Pluto's history.

Despite the town's decline, hope survives in Pluto, though it's in short supply on the Spokane Indian reservation that serves as the setting for Sherman Alexie's terrific young-adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, where his punchy style is superbly complemented by Ellen Forney's illustrations.
   
Fourteen-year-old Junior suffers more than his fair share of disadvantages. Other kids on the "rez" call him "Globe" and "Orbit" because of his enlarged skull—a physical deformity caused by an infant illness. He also suffers seizures and has an undernourished frame and eyesight requiring thick plastic Indian Health Service-issued glasses.

Isosceles triangles, however, make Junior "feel hormonal," and his humor and curiosity blossom in his cartooning, which helps him navigate the reefs of alcoholism, poverty, and despair on the rez: "I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats," he says.

A teacher, recognizing Junior's potential, tells him to leave as soon as he can. "Son," he says, "you're going to find more and more hope the farther and farther you walk away from this sad, sad, sad reservation." Junior takes his advice and transfers to the nearest "white" school, risking not just the wrath of his community, but also that of Rowdy, his one and only friend, with whom, Junior has calculated, he's spent, like, forty thousand hours.   
   
"What was I doing at Reardan, whose mascot was an Indian, making me the only other Indian in town?" Junior asks of his new school. "I didn't deserve to be there. I knew it; all of those kids knew it. Indians don't deserve shit." Sometimes his parents remember to pick him up, sometimes they forget, and sometimes they can't afford the gas, so Junior hitches or walks the twenty-two miles home at the end of each day. Life improves once he meets Gordy, a geek who gets boners from reading. "Well, I don't mean boner in the sexual sense," Gordy clarifies. "But you should approach each book—you should approach life—with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point." (I like this kid.)
   
Knock-you-down-ain't-never-getting-up tragic things happen to Junior, but he has Heart (worthy of a capital H), parents who love him, and, most of all, Hope. Alexie doesn't sugarcoat the spiral of lethargy and addiction endemic to many First Nation reservations simply because the book is aimed at a teenage audience. The Part-Time Diary is a refreshing anecdote to all those schmaltzy clichés about needing only to look inside ourselves to be free. Bullshit, responds Alexie; sometimes the answer is to run away as far and as fast as you can.

Alexie's book provides a blunt reminder of the modern reality of indigenous life compared to our romanticized image of the "noble savage" whose beautiful Hopi pots and Navajo rugs we covet (OK, I covet), and whose wise, enigmatic features we imagine, based, most likely, on the photographs of one man, Edward S. Curtis.
   
"They are beautiful to look at. But they're lies," says Marianne, the protagonist of Marianne Wiggins' astonishing novel, The Shadow Catcher, a fictionalized account of a Curtis biographer and of Curtis' relationship with his wife, Clara. "They're propaganda … bought and paid for by Big Business." Marianne sits in a Los Angeles restaurant with movie executives anxious both to option her Curtis biography and to airbrush out any complexity that contradicts his enduring image as the dashing, empathetic chronicler of a threatened people.

By big business, Marianne stresses to her unresponsive lunch dates, she means J.P. Morgan and Union Pacific, the same railroad that bulldozed indigenous land. And although Curtis' photographs, with those beautiful sepia tones and atmospheric teepees, look as if they were taken in the mid-1800s, they are, in fact, artifacts of the early 20th century. Curtis paid a fee to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to work inside the reservations "after they'd all been neutralized, confined in high-security encampments … deprived of their livelihoods, forced into the manufacture of ‘Indian-ized' tourist junk, their children forcibly assimilated into Christian schools."
   
The Shadow Catcher dips into stories about Curtis' wife Clara and her erstwhile husband, Edward, and although these sections are intriguing, it is in the modern-day meditations of Marianne that Wiggins' writing swoops, hurtles, and shines. Marianne composes a hymn to the American road and the myth of the West: "the great promise … that if we load the TV in the truck and move just three states over we can start anew."
   
She ponders the blasé ironies caused by our disassociation from our ancestors' complicity in the subjugation of Native Americans. "The American road is an Indian nation," she writes. "FIREBIRD. CHEROKEE. MUSTANG. WINNEBAGO. Is there any other country in the world that appropriates the names of clans for cars?"

At several stages, Marianne attempts to classify the sound of America, deciding at one point that it's the sound of a train, "the siren's sound of the iron road, a haunting whistle." But in the final pages of this remarkable book, she reconsiders and reaches a more fitting conclusion: "Before the Train, the grasslands teemed with herds of buffalo so thick and mythic in their numbers it was said that when they ran they ran as thunder raining on the earth … maybe that's the sound I think I hear inside a train, the sound of animals, a sound the living earth once made, a plaint, the sound of history's demand to be remembered."



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