If you’re in Hyde Park on Sat­ur­day, please come see me read my poems at Majel Con­nery’s fan­tas­tic Salon per­for­mance series.

On the Program:

Larry Zbikowski (guitar)
Harold Olivey (voice)
Michael Rob­bins (poetry)
Des Pickard (singer/songwriter)

at the home of
Sidney Nagel & Young-​Kee Kim
4913 S Kim­bark Ave.
Chicago, IL
7:30p doors
8:00p performances

& if you’re in Hyde Park tomor­row night, please come see Nick Demske & Gina Myers read their poems at Series A, at the Hyde Park Art Center!

Niggas just write
I rec­ol­lect
I really lived it, man
—Young Jeezy

Those blessèd struc­tures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
some­thing imag­ined, not recalled?
—Robert Lowell

I must have done some­thing right lately because I sure hit the tri­fecta this weekend:

Friday Night: The Thin Place at the Inti­man Theater

I’ve been hol­ler­ing about this play for months. Friday night I finally got to see it, and forty-​eight hours later I’m still mar­veling. Huge props to my friend Sonya Schnei­der for turn­ing a near-​dozen real-​life reli­gious nar­ra­tives into a compelling—I’m tempted to say Pentecostal—story about losing and living with faith. Con­grat­u­la­tions also to Gbenga Akin­nagbe, whose con­jur­ing of eleven wildly dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters was noth­ing short of remark­able. The play’s open until June 13, and if you’re within three states of Wash­ing­ton you’ve got no excuse for not find­ing your way here to see it. Buy your tick­ets here.

Sat­ur­day Night: Mark Morris Dance Com­pany at the Para­mount The­ater

I won’t be coy: get me on the par­quet and I’m a pretty good dancer. But what I know about modern dance wouldn’t fill a postage stamp. Luck­ily, the MMDC was made for people like me. We got three excel­lent pieces—”Lake,” “Gloria,” and the best of the bunch, “Jesu, meine Freude.” If Morris & Co. swim within your range, be sure to catch them.

Sunday Night: The Oath at Har­vard Exit Theater

The sur­prise of the week­end. My fiancee and I walked down to the Har­vard Exit The­ater plan­ning to see the Argen­tine film The Secret in Their Eyes. While we were in line for tick­ets, the direc­tor Laura Poitras (who made the Oscar-​nominated doc­u­men­tary My Coun­try, My Coun­try) approached and offered us a pair of tick­ets to her new movie The Oath, which is screen­ing as part of the Seat­tle Inter­na­tional Film Fes­ti­val. The Oath is billed as the story of Salim Hamdan (of Hamdan vs. Rums­feld fame) but the movie’s real sub­ject is Hamdan’s brother-in-law Nasser al-​Bahri (aka Abu Jandal), who was a body­guard to Osama bin Laden and also Al Qaeda’s Emir of Hospitality.

Al-​Bahri is engag­ing, intel­li­gent, and canny, and Poitras does a ter­rific job of cap­tur­ing the com­plex­i­ties of his char­ac­ter and com­pli­cat­ing any sim­plis­tic notion of who ter­ror­ists are and why they do what they do. (In fact, if this excel­lent doc­u­men­tary has a fault it’s in making it too easily for us to forget that al-​the charm­ing al-​Bahri, unlike his brother-in-law, was an active enemy of the United States.) After the movie Poitras and her cin­e­matog­ra­pher were joined for ques­tions on stage by some of the heroic lawyers from Perkins Coie who have assisted the JAG corps with Hamdan’s case. The Oath will show up on PBS some­time soon; until then, check out this con­sid­er­a­tion at the Times.