STAGE: A Powerful 'Enemy'

An Enemy of the People
By Henrik Ibsen
Directed by Jim Petosa
Olney Theatre Center
Through Aug. 27

Christopher Lane, Jeffries Thaiss, and Tim Getman

By Alexander C. Kafka

“You have an inveterate tendency to go your own way,” says Peter Stockman, the mayor of a small coastal Norwegian town to his physician brother, Thomas, early on in An Enemy of the People. “… Someday you’re going to pay for it.”

Someday soon, it turns out, in this classic dissection of righteousness amid parochial hypocrisy and treachery. The town’s on the verge of becoming a tourist center, thanks to its new spa baths, and Thomas has unfortunately discovered that the water system is full of “reeking waste from the mill,” a veritable breeding ground for gastritis- and typhoid- generating bacteria.

The way the townsfolk treat him and this information still makes, in this centennial year of Ibsen’s death, for powerful drama, particularly in the masterful hands of this committed troupe and its director, Jim Petosa.

It’s a timeless play but an unsentimental one, and as complicated politically as it is dramatically. For Thomas, though heroic, is also a megalomaniac, and becomes elitist and not a little unhinged. He starts off terribly naïve, figuring that once he presents his irrefutable evidence of the pollution, the town will simply “see things right” and re-lay the whole water system higher up. He counts on the backing of Hovstad, publisher of The Courier, the local newspaper, a muckraker who decides the polluted baths are the perfect wedge issue with which to overthrow the town’s establishment. “A journalist of my radicalist leanings can’t let an opportunity like this pass by,” Hovstad explains cunningly to Thomas.

Thomas also counts on the support of Aslaksen, the printer and leader of the local small businessmen. Though moderate in approach, he is nonetheless keen to see the bath problem fixed to secure the long-term prosperity of the merchant class.

Thomas also enjoys the warm encouragement of his wife, Katherine, daughter, Petra, and sons, Morten and Ejlif.

“It’ll all go smoothly,” he assures Hovstad. “We’ll see,” says the latter, his nose crinkling condescendingly.

Of course, instead, it all goes to hell. Peter, whose relations with his brother are obviously strained to begin with, threatens Thomas, who, as the bath corporation’s physician, technically answers to Peter as the corporation’s head. The consummate two-faced machine pol, Peter explains that re-laying the water system would take two years and cost “several hundred thousand crowns.” Bath-caused illnesses can be quietly seen to by Thomas, he implies, adding that this stance is “for the good of the town,” rather than to save his own reputation as leader of the spa's construction.

Thomas has right on his side. But getting back at his bullying brother would feel good too. And his righteous indignation—“I want the opportunity to look my boys in the eye,” he says sympathetically—soon turns to a less healthy kind of feverish martyrdom. Once he’s decided to fight the powers that be, he’s discouraging Hovstad from allowing the townspeople to organize a parade in his honor and equating himself, literally, with truth. “Whatever I do will be in the name of truth,” he declares. He also starts equating all his foes with the invisible filth of the waters, prescribing that “it is the whole society that has to be purged and disinfected.”

Sadly, once Peter explains to Aslaksen the trouncing that local commerce would take were the water system to be redone, Aslaksen, who’s already articulated his fear of going up against local authorities, turns into a veritable Norwegian Grover Norquist. Seeing which way the wind’s blowing, Hovstad, too, deserts Thomas, as does Hovstad’s exuberant right hand, Billing, a would-be Marxist who also has one eye on a cozy little position in the town clerk’s office. Soon, Thomas, so recently the man of the hour, is an utter outcast, his family too paying a terrible price for his singleminded quest to do the right thing. Not only does Thomas lose his job, but so does daughter Petra, a teacher, and their one staunch ally, Captain Horster. Thomas loses his house lease too. All this, it’s repeatedly said, not because their employers and landlord and friends really think ill of them, mind you, but because these decent folk “don’t dare not to” ostracize Dr. Stockmann and his family.

One only needs to read the headlines to see that this is heady and timely stuff—thus its inclusion in Olney’s summer Potomac Theatre Festival, which emphasizes classic scripts with contemporary resonance. It’s also a hellishly demanding role for Thomas—the thespian equivalent of an endurance sport—and Christopher Lane is superb in it. He inhabits Thomas’s being right down to his vocal hem-and-haw ticks and burns through the character’s enormous tirades without losing his momentum or his focus (or his voice, even though it seemed Lane was fighting a nasty cold and hoarseness Tuesday night).

Jeffries Thaiss as Hovstad is also top-notch. “Lay snares for your readers?” says Petra to Hovstad in reference to some subpar romantic fiction he wants to publish as sugar to make the medicine of his radical political content go down a little more smoothly. “You’re not a spider,” she tells him. Oh, but he is, and both she and her father are caught in his silky but ungiving web. The character’s every creepy calculation glints from Thaiss’s lively eyes. James Slaughter is a frighteningly convincing Peter, too. There’s something so square and cocksure about him that you know he’s crooked and desperate to his civic-minded bones.

Other standouts are Kip Pierson as Billing, who practically jumps out of his skin in anticipation of either violent revolution or that tidy civil-service job, whichever comes first; and Tim Getman as Aslaksen, as decent-seeming and completely untrustworthy as any shady chamber-of-commerce president you’d ever run into. Richard Pilcher, as Thomas’s father-in-law, is a little over the top, but in a welcome way given the play’s oh-so-sober context. He has fine comic timing and, in his stage-aged cackle, a real way with lines like, “Make monkeys out of them, I say.” Julie-Ann Elliott and Lindsey Haynes, as Katherine and Petra, have thankless peripheral roles, but carry them off with sweetness and dignity, and a hint of feminist indignation that nicely suits Ibsen’s views and this production.

James Kronzer’s clever set combines grand, oversized wooden doorways with screens that serve as abstract wallpaper or newspaper headlines, depending how they’re back- and floor-lit by Daniel MacLean Wagner. Costume designer Howard Vincent Kurtz and costumiere Jeanne Bland have handsomely outfitted their charges with fine period suits, coats, dresses, and work clothes.

This isn’t fun date-night kind of entertainment. Enemy is brilliant, but it’s also hectoring, and smug, like its protagonist. For all that, it’s too relevant to the big lies of, yes, ours but also every other era. It should be seen and mulled over and discussed, and its insights taken deeply to heart.

Why? Because we don’t dare not to.

WEAR WOLF: Notes on the Women's Fall Standouts

At About Women's Fashion, Cynthia Nellis succinctly sums up and illustrates the 10 fall trends in the women's collections: sweater knits; menswear prints; the new suit; leggings and tights; shorts and knickers; the dress; black, white, gray, and red; the wide belt; vests; and the extras--boots, big bags, and gloves.

At Style.com, you can relive the fall '06 shows in an amazing photo data base, with a Look Book program that lets you sit by the runway and take your own notes. Here are a few of our favorites:

From Philip Lim's 3.1 collection.

"Street elegance," he calls it.

Clothes, Donatella Versace says,

"for a woman who stands up for her opinions."

This and following photos by Marcia Madeira, from Style.com

Which tempts you more?

J. Mendel's superb silver gift package...

...or Giambattista Valli's gold ...

Still, sometimes you want to just lounge around the house

and throw on any ol' thing--

say this breezy little outfit from Gareth Pugh...

-Sasha Triella

TUNE HEAD: Adam Green's Latest

Adam Green
Jacket Full of Danger
Rough Trade Records

et us now consider the musical oddity that is Adam Green, a 24-year-old New Yorker who, with three solo albums and Moldy Peaches work prior, continues to totter through his psychological minefields, genre cocktail to his smirky lips, in perky, psychedelic oblivion.

His surreal ditties, delivered in a confident but slightly hokey baritone, bring to mind a cheerier, less intense Jim Morrison with a tiki-bar backing band garnished with some genuinely polished string arrangements, courtesy of the album’s cellist, Jane Scarpantoni. His somewhat hodgepodge sound is the kind that invites critics to throw in a half-dozen comparisons that aren’t quite fair to them or him. Let’s not do that to Green, or to Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, Elvis, Roy Orbison, or any of the other roster that one’s tempted to turn to in an understandably frantic attempt to describe Green’s sound or content. Let’s not do it to the free-associative lyricist Tom Waits or the adultly playful Jonathan Richman or the respectfully retro rocker Robert Gordon, either. Oops.

Let Adam be Adam and measure his weird, sweet, sick little reveries on their own merits, and we come out—well—ever intrigued yet still not entirely sold. Here smolders talent, for certain, a deeply poetic mind with a well-honed musical instinct, and a refreshing thirst for whimsy. He’s best when he reins himself in, as in the dime store-country ballad opener, “Pay the Toll.” “How do you need me so much? No amount of love could satisfy you,” he croons. “…Any kind of love is a needle in the hay.” There’s a straightforwardness that suggests he learned that for real, and the hard way.

It’s when he aims for what looks like too consciously clever that he distances himself and sheds our emotional trust. “I’ve been a deconstructive madman,” he gargles on the early-60s-sounding kitschy “Hollywood Bowl.” But it’s when he’s a deconstructive sane man that his lyrics curdle and coil most interestingly, and even his accomplished band hones its gentle sound around that quiet intimacy, as in the meditative “Vultures,” the most affecting and least affected tune on the album. “Golden fabric torn from the devil girl’s hair. Cheap medallions gleam from the vanity fair. Seen so many vultures, split so many creatures down there,” he sings. Now that’s a dream story worth telling, and requires no Vegas vibrato to tell it. The couching of his mental innards is couch-worthy, but moving too. “Fight me gladly, leave before the battles grow. So good night crazies, I’ll leave them feeling lazy, but I’m the god tonight.”

Don’t get me wrong. No artist so sage should write off artifice entirely. There’s some bold Brecht, as well as Beck, in the boy Weilling away the hours in stagy but provocative tunes like the stark sex sketch “Novotel” — “down in the factory when their faces blow a fuse it’s a miracle.”

And the pretension bests the hold-over juvenilia of the homage “Drugs”—“I like to do drugs. I like to have drugs. I like to hold a cigarette full of grass in my hand,” he proclaims. Ya don’t say.

Green seems more than a little eager to either churn or bail out of the rock history he sloshes in, singing, in “Hey Dude,” “Bob Dylan was a vegetable’s wife, game over hope you had a good life.” Yet he offers a protest song of sorts in “Hairy Women,” proclaiming, “I’m embarrassed by injustice that shuts doors on hairy women.” Speak truth to power, man.

The neo-Zeppelin blues bomb “White Women” perks up the ear in its contrast to the laid-back numbers, and gives guitarist Chris Isom room for a nice fuzzilicious solo. But the pointlessly, or pointedly, raunchy lyrics are a step back, though I concede a fondness for, “Rolling you lady is running me down, scrubbing the cages each town after town.”

Hard to reconcile that with the romantic earnestness of another of my favorites here, “Cast a Shadow,” which also offers some sunny Wurlitzer bursts from keyboardist Nathan Brown. “The sandman is giving me a special gift, a sleepy dream memory of our first kiss. Cast a shadow in my direction. Bring back shadows of your affection.”

But then man is neither angel nor devil, the French philosophe Blaise Pascal said. We’re all neither/nor, echoes this deconstructive madman. He’s working hard—too hard?—to avoid the bland confessionals of so many singer-songwriters. Fair enough. But is that really a worry for the man who wrote, "Fellas in umbrellas in the middle of the night, what you gonna do when the Mennonites bite?" I think not.

And it’s the more melancholy, self-searching balladeer within Green who seems to have the most stories to tell, and the best. The bravest artistry might be, in a case like this, the least obviously bold. Maybe the madman will let the poet out to play for a while in calmer pastures. Given Green’s cult following, especially in Europe, that might be a little mad after all. So that, at least, should comfort him.

-Alexander C. Kafka

POETRY: Stephen Cushman

After the Bombings

After the bombings it’s hard to hear
any seduction in the sound of sirens
harrowing streets sapped of traffic,

as though this weekday, fed up with its workload,
had suddenly quit to become a sabbath.

Even an upstart day of rest
must have its share of usual stabbings,
smaller states of private emergency,
the overdose here, attempted rape there,
which some of the sirens must be announcing,

or is the worst not nearly over
and this the music of final uncovering
when cruciform you, church, tree, or friend,
will fold me in your transept arms?


Stephen Cushman is a professor of English at the University of Virginia.

STAGE: The Peanuts Gang, Dazed and Confused

Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead
By Bert V. Royal
Directed by Keith Alan Baker
Studio Theatre's 2nd Stage
Through Aug. 6, 2006

James Manno as CB

By Alexander C. Kafka

Hard times have fallen on Charlie Brown's old gang. His pen pal hasn't written back in years. Sally's gone goth—Wiccan, to be more precise. Linus, traumatized when CB and Lucy burned his blanket, has turned into a stoner. Pigpen's cleaned up his act, but at the expense of becoming an obsessive-compulsive, glue-sniffing, homophobic jock. Schroeder's a terrified, bullied recluse who, it seems, was abused by his now-jailed dad. Lucy is in the loony bin because of an unfortunate incident involving fire and the Little Redheaded Girl. Peppermint Patty and Marcie spike their lunch milk cartons with booze, and there are bitchy insinuations that Frieda is a bulimic Jesus freak.

Good grief, Charlie Brown! We’re in high school.

That’s the hideous and hilarious premise of Bert V. Royal’s Dog Sees God. But, alas, despite an appealing cast, it works better as a campy thought experiment than it does as theater.

The obscure title refers to a line from Schroeder, who like all the characters, has had his name tweaked (in his case, to Beethoven), no doubt for legal reasons. “They say a dog sees God in his master,” Schroeder tells CB while attempting to console him about the recent death of his beloved beagle. Yes, that’s right. Snoopy’s been put to sleep after contracting rabies and eating Woodstock. And CB, understandably, is in a pretty morbid state of mind.

Linus (or Van, in this show), tries to console CB with his rambling Buddhist-inspired explanation of why nothingness is preferable to reincarnation. That might explain, too, why he recently smoked his burnt blanket. “We all handle grief in different ways,” he muses.

Pigpen, now called Matt, sees the expression of grief primarily as a way to trick girls into having sex with him.

Sally (CB’s Sister) thinks CB’s embarrassing—the way he invited all their friends to Snoopy’s burial. (None of them came, needless to say.) She might miss the pooch, but she’s got other things on her mind, like her one-woman performance-art show (which she’s worked up in her one-woman drama club). It’s called Cocooning Into Platypus.

Fruitlessly taking his friends’ readings on the meaning of death, and in passing recalling the simpler, if not easier, days of their youth, CB makes other key adolescent discoveries too. At some point around the hot-tubbing during an ecstasy party at Marcie’s house, that shakes the whole gang’s world.

James Manno is a sympathetic CB. He looks constantly a little bewildered and terrified—as if A.J. Soprano wandered into A Charlie Brown Christmas. James Gardiner, as Schroeder a.k.a. Beethoven, is wonderful in his sinewy, palpable fright and suppressed eagerness to connect. You suspect he’ll either go on a headline-making rampage or become David Byrne. Lauren Williams stands out as the Sally figure, her cocooning both in and out of drama club palpable in her every hormone-pumped, excitable, neck-craning syllable. Evan Casey makes Linus—er, Van—a sort of philosopher in early-90s Matthew McConaughey mode. (His buzzed rant on the illogic of cafeterias’ Mexican pizza is a hoot.) And Regina Aquino is memorable in her brief appearance as Lucy all grown—and grown psycho—still playing major head games with her pal CB when he goes to visit her in the institution.

But the drama’s pacing is scraggly, and its multi-rectangled Stage 4 set, while geometrically apt for a neo-comic book tale, is too sprawling to give us a sense of intimacy with these troubled folk.
The real problem, though, is a mediocre script that doesn’t live up to its clever initial concept. It takes some gawky, polemical turns. But worse, it doesn’t persuasively connect these characters with the Peanuts gang they were, nor does it flesh them out enough to be interesting personalities in themselves. Adolescence may be a kind of limbo—but not that kind.

Nonetheless, there’s a real emotional spark now and then, particularly toward the end. “I never wanted to feel this much,” CB and his sis intone in unison. But then Charlie Brown always was the sensitive type.

Maybe he thought if he could just be normal enough, he’d outgrow that sensitivity. For all its faults, Dog Sees God makes you glad he hasn’t, and gives the rest of us hope that we too might buck against our story frames and someday reach each other with our sad, lonely little speech bubbles.

Photo by Scott Suchman, courtesy of Studio Theatre

STAGE: 'Divas' Delight

3 Mo' Divas: A Musical Celebration of Class, Sass and Style
Created by Marion J. Caffey
Musical supervision, orchestrations, and arrangements by Joseph Joubert
Musical Direction by e'Marcus Harper
Arena Stage
Through Aug. 13, 2006

Jamet Pittman, N'Kenge, and Gretha Boston

By Alexander C. Kafka

On the heels of its Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill, the one-woman show about Billie Holiday, 3 Mo' Divas sustains Arena's savvy summertime transformation into a turbocharged nightclub. While Lady Day was lushly melancholy, Divas is hard-driving and, for the most part, upbeat with a vengeance. While the former treated the source music with a careful, if not curatorial, care, this show treats its musical source material confidently but sometimes roughly in its variegated bright packaging. Fortunately, its stars and dashing production values play up its best qualities, making the revue a rousing summer treat.

The gimmick, echoing that of creator Marion J. Caffey's 2000 production, Three Mo' Tenors, is that the divas perform works from the last several centuries. But gimmick is really what that amounts to, given that the first of those centuries is handily disposed of almost by the time you're fully settled in your seat.

The demanding show is double-cast. To musical supervisor Joseph Joubert's piano accompaniment, Sunday's divas--Gretha Boston, Jamet Pittman, and N'Kenge--established their operatic credentials elegantly in such standards as "Quando M'En Vo" from Puccini’s La Boheme and "L'Amour est un oiseau rebelle" from Bizet's Carmen. And, in the Puccini, the stereotypical divas’ penchant for upstaging one another is nicely sent up.

Still, as if to confirm that this classical opening was the tasteful but dutiful braised asparagus to the satisfying tenderloin to come, lighting designer Richard Winkler’s cool blues warm to reds as Dale F. Jordan’s splendid deco-arch-framed set reveals, in scrimmed silhouette, a half-dozen band members. And only now, as the divas move from La Scala to Broadway, does the show fully shift into drive.

This is also when the women’s stage personalities blossom. For this show’s purposes—though we can be sure their ranges are miles broader—N’Kenge is the bright, brassy, cute and sexed-up soprano. Pittman is the earnest, lyrical, doe-eyed, emotive mezzo. And Boston—the evening’s musical and dramatic center point—is the supremely controlled low alto with a voice so casually and artfully powerful that, when she wants it to, it will toast your day’s distractions, then melt your heart and spread it over them. Often her opening gambit—and that of some of her best numbers here—is the simple declarative, so instantly persuasive that it’s sad and funny at the same time, like “You’re mean to me” from Ain’t Misbehavin’. Her “Downhearted Blues” was another Boston solo highlight, as was “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” during the divas’ rousing gospel sendoff.

Pittman shone most brightly in “Your Daddy’s Son” from Ragtime and “Solitude.” Though her self-accompanied rendition of the Oleta Adams hit “Everything Must Change” was not Pittman’s musical peak of the night, she so obviously enjoys the tune, is so clearly connected and comfortable with it, that Sunday’s audience lapped it up.

N’Kenge, blaringly versatile even in the context of this versatile trio, draws dashingly from Rent’s “Seasons of Love,” The Wiz’s “Home,” and even—so sportingly—from Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher.” She’s also a splendid model for costumer Toni-Leslie James’ superb lace-over-silver dress in the opening and a neo-Calloway zoot suit, among other items.

The trio’s harmonies were exceptionally sharp and vibrant throughout, particularly striking in “Harlem Nocturne” and “Moody’s Mood for Love.”

Joubert’s ensemble was tight in the good sense, and invariably sensitive to the divas’ pacing and intensity. But the instrumentalists were also sometimes tight in the not-so-good sense, hanging back, for whatever reason, when a blues or R&B number practically begged for, say, a collar-loosened sax or guitar solo. The synth strings would have blended better if they were a little quieter, and the synth horns were grating against the group’s overall quality. Where's a real trumpet player when you need one?

Some arrangements and song selections were also unfortunate. Maybe it’s because the more powerfully stark version of “Strange Fruit” from Lady Day still resonated in my mind, but despite Boston’s and Pittman’s faultless rendering, the pseudo-operatic version here sounded, well, a little pretentious. And I’m sorry, but giving a powerhouse like Boston “Memories (The Way We Were),” is like asking Mahalia Jackson to sing “Raindrops Are Falling On My Head” or a timpanist to do “Flight of the Bumblebee.” It can be done, yes—but for heaven’s sake why?

Unsurprisingly, the production pleases least when trying hardest. Medlies, which should perhaps be classified as a felony in any circumstance, serve these superb performers particularly poorly. A trace of “Seasons of Love,” for example, in the Broadway/Movies Medley doesn’t leave us wanting more in the classic showbiz sense—it just feels unfinished.

And the Divas Soul Medley, if it weren’t for these amazing voices, would feel at home at a theme-park musicale. It’s simply unworthy of these women. The show’s self-promotional subbed lyrics in “Let the Good Times Roll” are forced and unnecessary, too.

If the show is tweaked, or followed with a Mo’ Tenors/Mo’ Divas combo production (whimsically but logically suggested by Paul Harris in a Variety news feature), let’s hope that Caffey and Company ease up on the high-concept throttle a bit and let their wonderfully cast stars shine in the way they shine best—by singing. They’re real divas, after all, so give ’em some space.

Photos by Scott Suchman, courtesy of Arena Stage

POETRY: Lisa Russ Spaar, Ken Pobo, and J. Fisher

Five Fetish Poems by Lisa Russ Spaar

Swallow Fetish

I want to join their
sagittal muster
sculling summer’s muslin sky,

capsized now from air to sea
& back again by motions
broadcast, cant, & infidel –

my earthbound body,
sleave of shadow,
nothing but a scree of cloud

& all distance between us
turned into this plural force,
seminal & fleet,

a sum of thirsty sound
held, mouthed,
& sewn by wings.




Cicada Fetish

If bliss be fleet, how then
this weird undressed exhilaration

in tree arcade above, this fermata
isiration, this stretto, this aria?

How such trussing, nacreous,
now so strenuous in jet-trailed striae

of scroop, of tesselated sustain?
How this high torching duration

of filament, of summer metabolizing
in incessant minus, in valance of vanishing?




Rose of Sharon Fetish

In trance, lovesick,
I travel the bosk suburban vale

of hedge, curb, cul-de-sac
for glimpse, beyond fence

or carport, of your chaliced,
scar-leafed wicker

flocked with crimpled
chaste pleatings & claret-lipped

bells, each corolla throat igniting
the edges of my love’s absence

& offering one wet pistil
to this historic, toxic heat.




Russian Olive Fetish

Tree caparisoned with lush,
verdigris flosses,
orioles, titmice, bladed stems
beaded with black, crimped fruits

until the hush
of pre-storm fervor
stammers your plural mantles,
weird embroideries

silvering with torque,
wind divorcing leaf from under-
leaf – dressed,
then undressed –

smote tongues imbrued
with nacreous, tidal foam,
devouring our history,
our lost home –




Sumac Fetish

Fields folding into winter’s sallow diptych,
pallid shuck scut under a scleral sky,

then, in rutting ambush, anarchic as let blood,
this crimson pinnated & purple-druped drag saint

of the ditches – tatter-sleeved mendicant
bearing scarred antler crown, an empty cup

on fire, a retinal burn against which, now,
a barbed starling flock lifts its roweled shroud.

Copyright 2006 Lisa Russ Spaar

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of Blue Venus: Poems (Persea Books, 2004) and Glass Town: Poems (Red Hen Press, 1999), for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. Twelve of her new poems appear in Exquisite History: The Land of Wandering: Poems & Prints (The Printmakers Left, University of Virginia Press, 2005). She is also the author of two chapbooks of poems, Blind Boy on Skates (Trilobite/University of North Texas Press, 1988) and Cellar (Alderman Press/University of Virginia, 1983), and is the editor of Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbia UP, 1999). She is editing an anthology of London poems, forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press in 2007. Her work has appeared in many literary quarterlies and journals, including Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Image, Shenandoah, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Spaar is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, where she is an associate professor of English.

***

Three Poems by Ken Pobo

Soften

In the Iraq War,
women, kids,
killed,
whole faces
scraped off—

in living rooms
across “the greatest country
in the world,”
TV beams
gadgets, creams,
ways to soften
wrinkles.

Let Me Get This Straight

Friends ask me to write
and read a poem. Their wedding.
How to write encouraging words
from behind wire—
wish them well as they do

what we can’t. You’ll be sitting
in a pew, alone, while I’m up
at a stand, the bride and groom

hand in hand. My poem
for friends who marry
while we risk our lives
on most streets, or worse,
in a church like this.

Blue State Blues

Pennsylvania is a drag—
a red state
in blue clothes.

One Senator stabs gays.
The other shrugs,
money-eyed, blank. Fire ant

churches poison. Family values
carry concealed weapons
in a Reading mall. I’m blue--

blood seeps past my ankles,
reddens my knees. Soon
I won’t be able to breathe.

Kenneth Pobo teaches Creative Writing and English at Widener University in Pennsylvania. His book Introductions came out from Pearl's Book'Em Press in Atlanta in 2003. He enjoys gardening and collecting obscure 1960s music. Starting in September, his "Obscure Oldies" radio program can be heard online at WDNR.com each Saturday from 6-8pm EDT.

***

Two Poems by J. Fisher


under seige in the Garden City

she asks
“why do you always drink so much?”
as she crosses those
$70.00 legs like
closing the gate
on a local hot-spot
where i’m no longer welcome.
the spit bubbles plunge southward in my pint
as i struggle against lust
and the light pollution
of an afternoon drunk
to form a hot answer
this hustler will believe
to keep her buying.
‘ ... well, it’s simple really
the local dealers don’t carry any Algren
or Nowlan
you’ll never find ’em used
so, i’m off to suffer
the indignation of retail
and everytime i ask
someone who should know
they send me
somewhere else
where another book geek
regrets to tell me
they don’t keep stock
’cause the copies don’t sell
and then i freak out, i mean
what the fuck is going on
in these oversized book warehouses
when there’s not a thing
worth reading?
and it gets me down, so
i make my way back home
and there’s always
a pub, always
a cold beer store
on one corner
or the other ... ’

it’s no good.
her eyes glaze
and she crosses those
heavy paying legs
even higher.
the bolt is thrown.
the waitress comes by
says "...well Eden, you wanna notha round, Hon?”
Eden points at me and says
“na, i’m fine
but bring this bum another
he’s no good for much else
can’t even tell tales like he used to.”
i grin down at my glass
and rate the battle
that just cost me
the war.


skyrocket pocket blues

ass rashes mix
with mysterious blisters
lesions on the skin-contact dermititis
egged-on from the heat
like making out
in the back of a blue van
spewing licks of flame.
it makes no sense
to open the mail
so i kick out the glass
and fall forward
down the concrete reminder
to the liquor store coolers
struggle thru the plastic
people and aluminum vessels
to extract the pretty yellow liquid.
sweat-soaked and moaning
ringed around the pits, making
bouillabaisse in the loins i
command no respect
like a modern Boris
or Ivich with
none of the incestous overtones, parting
the shit broth crowd
stumbling back
towards the heartless apartment
i fake a smile
and a swollen skyrocket
to keep the Angel from guessing
the full extent
of our impending
depression.

J. Fisher's first collection, Death Day Erection, was published by Frontenac House in 2004. He lives in downtown Victoria, Canada.

WEAR WOLF: Suits Ya

"The gent who's evolved from South Padre to Club Med, from styrofoam Bud-can insulator to gin fizz at sunset, might also consider swimming against the tide, as it were, taking body and look as seriously in paradise as he does at Equinox, and braving the brief."

When it comes to swimsuits, too often “sensible” is synonymous with “dowdy.” Doesn’t have to be so. Modesty really is becoming in this Victoria’s Secret one piece from DKNY--and surprisingly sophisticated, too, say these superb offerings from the Australian company, Jets.

The tasteful ring on that Jets halter, from the line's White Label--not too ludicrously big and '70s--is echoed all over this year, as in Lisa Curran's Shimmer Gold Ring One Piece.

The ring's keyhole cousin is popping up in unusual contexts, too, like Brette Sandler's sleek string bikini. And in general, accents like tassels, beads, and other ornaments are making cameos on otherwise classical string designs, like this pink Mara Hoffman.

If you're looking for maternity swimwear, a great beginning might be this Great Beginnings, with built-in shelf bra.

WW's not a big fan of print jams but likes these bold Ralph Lauren board shorts.

The gent who's evolved from South Padre to Club Med, from styrofoam Bud-can insulator to gin fizz at sunset, might also consider swimming against the tide, as it were, taking body and look as seriously in paradise as he does at Equinox, and braving the brief. There's always the classic Speedo black racer. But the man with the right body, poise, and waxing appointment might venture further, to Undergear's Greek or even Italian cutaway.

Hmm. Looks like that might require foregoing that second slice and second pint for a few weeks, or months, or years. Hey, beauty requires sacrifice--just ask your s.o., who's been slaving away every spring on the elliptical while you yanked on those same quick-dry Nike shorts without a second thought figuring, jeez, that's what drawstrings are for.

Whatever you go with, remember, more exposure requires more sun protection. One vastly undervalued form is the indoor pool. Short of that, WW seeks shade umbrellas as large as--no, make that larger than--our erstwhile Upper West Side studio. But if you insist on worshipping the sun, at least do it with the appropriate pagan fear and awe. We've had success with Blue Lizard Sunscreen, carefully reapplied every hour to hour and a half. For more casual protection, Neutrogena's Sensitive Skin Sunblock Lotion SPF 30's done nicely, though despite its non-comedogenic boasts, it left us feeling a tad shellacked and had a slightly odd citrusy sent. Olay Complete SPF 15 or 30 absorbs better and smells just mildly floral.

-Sasha Triella

Fashion images are from the designers, shopbop.com, and amazon.com. Top image is by Hansjoerg Morandell via stock.xchng.

CAREER: Managerial Focus

"Avoid being among those who mistake activity for forward motion."

By Jim Stroup

The two great elements of competitive advantage, so clearly obvious yet so elusive, are mission and execution. Simply put, know what it is you do, then do it. Very few organizations are able to develop even an adequate focus on these elements. Those that do possess an inherent competitive advantage of inestimable value. It is a tool that offers an intellectual framework and an organizational sense of balance, increasing both momentum and agility.

KISS

Albert Einstein purportedly said, “Physics should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Not just physics, but everything should be no simpler than possible--and no more complicated than necessary. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly difficult to find, and to consistently navigate, the safe zone between. Managers are often seduced by oversimplified formulas touted as solutions, but which inevitably prove to be shallow and inflexible. On the other hand, there are temptations in every quarter driving us to overcomplicate. While we often reel with disappointment from one simplistic promise to another, it is the insidious tendency to overcomplicate that proves the more enduring and damaging.

There is great satisfaction in creating complex procedures and Byzantine organizations. It helps convince managers that they are intelligent and accomplished. It also constitutes a sort of flak which they can throw up to confuse those, whether analysts or shareholders, who keep pressing them for results. But the truth is that these ungainly concoctions are not the result of managerial brilliance but the sclerotic accretions of ill-discipline.

Montaigne said, “No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.” Unfortunately, these days, an awful lot of wind is used up in just identifying the port. Forget the poetry and the lofty rhetoric. Leave the consultant-facilitated vision-drafting sessions for senior executives in glamorous off-site locations. Let your misguided competitors indulge in unveiling the marble-engraved products of such nonsense in their corporate headquarters. As for you, keep it simple.

The best way to find out what you do is to ask those most likely to know (and, by the way, senior executives are typically not in this group). Ask your front-line employees. Ask your sales staff. Ask your vendors and your customers. Ask your competitors. You might be surprised--even inspired--to learn what others think it is that you do. Then, ask certain of them, especially your customers, what they want you to do, what they would like to be able to gain from your services. Ask them what problems they identify with your organization.

This is the critical step, so do it right. The greatest--and most common--error made in problem-solving is failing to properly frame, or define, the problem. Take the time to learn what object you should be directing your attention to. Avoid being among those who mistake activity for forward motion.

The lazy and the stupid

Years ago, a German field commander observed that since all military officers are either smart or stupid, and also either energetic or lazy, it is relatively simple, really, to classify them for assignment. The smart and energetic ones, for example, treat every tasking with equal importance, and they work as hard as can be on all of them. As a consequence, they make great staff officers: devoted, tireless, and, best of all, undiscriminating.

The smart and lazy ones, on the other hand, make great commanders. They prioritize with ruthless institutional selfishness, determining which of their taskings are really vital to mission accomplishment, focusing on those, and, with the most blithe disinterest, simply ignoring the rest.

As for the stupid officers, the lazy ones can be tolerated, but the stupid and energetic ones are a grave danger, and need to be discovered and weeded out before they destroy the unit from within.

There certainly is an often-missed organizational lesson in the moral of the stupid and energetic manager, but let's stick here with that of the smart and lazy one. Managers like this are more accurately seen as disciplined and focused. What, exactly, is their secret?

Managerial laziness

They have developed command focus. This is the threefold ability, or discipline, to: 1) keep your eye on the goal, 2) prioritize by working only on those activities that advance you toward your goal, and 3) prioritize by ignoring all the distractions which will run you aground short of your goal.

Remember, this is really only practical when the validity and efficacy of the goal is inherently sensible and widely acknowledged and agreed. If your organization's strategic vision and operational goals are only found hanging, impressively framed, in the lobby, then forget it: You're doomed to drift aimlessly and to wash up on the first reef you strike, confusing it for your destination. If, however, your strategy and goals are sharp and straightforward, then you know how to identify the fair winds from the foul, and how to trim your organizational sails to them.

The flip side of activity

Prioritizing doesn't mean what to do first, or what to do in which order. It means what to do, and what to ignore. The hardest part, and the one that actually requires the greatest and most ruthless discipline, is to be inactive where that is vital to advancing (or, more typically, to removing impediments to the advancement of) your organization toward its goals. These temptations come from both without and within.

Warren Buffet once remarked that CEO’s must know when to be active--and when to resist the temptation to act. When everyone is doing M&A deals, downsizing, globalizing, process re-engineering, aggressively expanding their markets, “visioning,” or the like, maybe you should just take a look at your business model and, if you're on track, stay there. Your obligations are to your shareholders and your business--not to the press or the consultants banging on your door. Your goal is to define what is good for your business and to execute it--not to let others make those determinations for you, and to simply slot in alongside all the other cows in the herd stampeding along, panicked to avoid missing the latest managerial fad.

But avoiding ill-disciplined activity within your organization is just as important. Discipline is defined as doing that which advances you toward accomplishment of your valid goals. Is your method of operating your business doing that? Take a look at your procedures, your reporting requirements, and your intra-organizational communications. Which are really necessary, and which not? Which actually inform and advance organizational productivity, and which simply satisfy an ill-disciplined and ill-defined instinct for accumulation of irrelevant detail and imposition of pointless control?

The competitive organization's managerial culture is one that implicitly subjects every proposed activity to this sort of scrutiny--and not just by managers, but by employees. Everyone should know what the organization's goals are, and how what they are doing contributes to achieving them. If they don't see that connection, they should be encouraged to question the tasking. Doing so will reinforce the goals, and either remove pointless activities or increase organizational energy directed at relevant ones.

The competitive organization has the institutional discipline to be both smart and lazy. Does yours?


Jim Stroup is an organizational leadership and strategy consultant, and the author of Managing Leadership. See http://www.managingleadership.com, or e-mail jhs@managingleadership.com.

Photo by Michal Koralewski via stock.xchng

PHOTOGRAPHS OF INDIA: Frances Borchardt

Frances Borchardt lives in Churchton, Maryland. She can be contacted at francesborchardt@comcast.net.