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Alabama Slammer
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2004
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I'm not sure how many have read anything by this author, but after discovering him sort of accidently a couple of years ago, my admiration for his work just continues to grow.
You may have seen him on television and not even realized who he is. Along with being an author and accomplished poet, he's also a wickedly funny stand-up comedian, and he starts most of his comedy performances by pretending to be the stereotypical "drunk indian" heckler out in the audience.
I read everything he writes as soon as I can get my hands on it, and his movies, though independently filmed on a tight budget, get me so involved in the story that when I'm not laughing my ass off I'm unaware of the tears rolling down my face.
I found this article in the Grand Ronde tribal newsletter, Smoke Signals, and wanted to share it. For those who might be interested, here's his website - he's got some really good essays there that are definitely worth the five minutes it would take to read one of them. I Hated Tonto (Still Do) is probably my favorite, but they're all good.
The Sweet Science of being Sherman Alexie
Looking back, you'd have to say that vegans took the worst beating at the hands of Indian Country's premier novelist and poet.
Sherman Alexie ( Spokane ) was merciless on them during his two-hour show at Oregon State University 's LaSells Stewart Center on Thursday, May 19, and it must be a long-running shtick for him because, he said, “I've gotten death threats from vegans.”
But he wasn't afraid. “What are they going to do? Throw their Birkenstocks at me?”
He took down liberals and conservatives with equal gusto, moved on to Oprah and the military, men with little pony tails, Indians acting tough, anti-war demonstrators doing anything, fundamentalism in general and in specific, and Indian casinos, too, just to let you know that he wasn't playing favorites.
“There's nothing better than expressing our sovereignty by participating in the worst excesses of capitalism,” he said.
On the sweat lodge experience, he said, “Yeah, that's what I want to do — in flu season — crawl into an indigenous Petri dish.”
Not even childhood escaped. “People who say that childhood is wonderful are full of shit,” he said. “I fully understand why people throw kids out of car windows. You don't do it, but for a minute you think, ‘They'll bounce.'”
A Crush On The Big Indian… Sherman Alexie had some fun with Oregon State University Signer Samantha Hatfield (Siletz), a doctoral student. “How do you sign, ‘I have a crush on the big Indian?' Alexie asked her.
He started the show with a nod to the two young women who signed his program for the deaf. They blushed frequently as they struggled to translate four-letter words and to express such concepts as walking down the aisle of a plane in extreme gastric distress, but first, Alexie thoughtfully included them. He sidled up to the working signer, and asked her, “How do you say, ‘I have a crush on the big Indian'? Now, Alexie has perfect timing in his delivery, and he waited a beat before continuing. “‘I think he smells really good,'” he continued for her to repeat in signs. “‘I wish he weren't stading so close to me. He's making me sweat.'” He added for the audience, “You can say anything in sign and it looks great: “Please chainsaw my legs off,” he said.
His success on stage also included his powerful presence and the way he used physical humor. Alexie was in the second row of the audience when introduced. Later, as he was warming to his story, he came to a break point and paced in circles like a cat. Another time, he slunk back behind the curtain and poked his head out like a kid in trouble. (He was showing how Indians respond to men in uniform.) Then, there was the walk down the airplane aisle with altogether too much of some kind of flu bubbling up inside him.
“In case you came here to see a traditional Indian,” he said at the start, “you better leave now.”
Which is ironic in Alexie's case, because this author of 16 books — including I Would Steal Horses , The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven , Reservation Blues , Indian Killer , Ten Little Indians and the movies, Smoke Signals and The Business of Fancy Dancing — is among today's most acclaimed Indian writers.
Joyce Carol Oates, writing in The New York Review of Books , called him “a funny, irreverent, sardonic but sentimental, rebellious postmodernist voice set beside his elder and conspicuously more writerly and “spiritual” Native American contemporaries N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silo, and Louise Erdrich. Sherman Alexie is the bad boy among them, mocking, self-mocking, unpredictable, unassimilable, reminding us of the young Philip Roth whose controversial works of fiction “The Conversion of the Jews” and Portnoy's Complaint outraged an older generation for whom anything Jewish had to be sacrosanct.”
In his monologue at OSU last month, he showed all of this.
“I'm always amazed that white people turn to us for spirituality,” he said. “Have you been to a rez?”
Or, on that rant against vegans, he said, “Indians also think we're equal to the animals. Well, I'll quit eating meat when you get a cow out here to beat me at a poetry slam. Only so many words rhyme with ‘Mooo.' I mean, yes, we're supposed to be better stewards; yes, we're supposed to take care of the earth; yes, we're supposed to honor the sacrifices made by the animals; yes yes yes yes yes, but dammit, we're in charge, and you know why? It's because of these,” and he held out his thumbs.
He said that even vegans distinguish between the value of animals and vegetables because they eat vegetables. “Maybe you think that carrots are less important than cows. I think they're equal, especially in a sauce.”
But he was clearly angry at their efforts. “How self-centered, how arrogant,” he said. “Imagine the awesome privilege of living in a society where you get to choose what you eat at each and every meal…When I was a kid, I was a vegetarian and a vegan for long stretches,” he said. “I was a commodity cheese-atarian.”
While Alexie ripped through insult (to men wearing little pony tails, he said, “Give it up. You look like an idiot! The women are all laughing at you!”) after joke (“I'm a liberal. I'm a lefty, pacifist, Commie-bastard who hates liberals. I can't stand us…if somebody tries to blow up the plane I'm on, I'm going to kill them and eat them!”) after observation (“Homophobia is the only hatred that doesn't make sense. Find me a country that was invaded by gays”) after advice (in planning for anti-war demonstrations, he suggested a dress code), it was easy to forget that he had a personal story in process.
In the end, it was all just window dressing for Alexie to describe the complex nature of the love he has for his father.
“My father was a lifelong alcoholic,” he said, “but he was a kind, sweet, shy man.” He said that the two substituted talk about sports for telling each other, ‘I love you.'
“My dad would leave us for weeks at a time on his binges,” Alexie said. “And I would cry myself sick.”
The story circled around to how his grandfather, who was killed in the second world war when his father was only six, “was a war hero, but we didn't know that.” The family learned that the Defense Department had just never bothered to present the awards to the family.
“We were Indians,” he said in explanation.
“So Oprah calls,” he said, picking up the oft-interrupted narrative, and he went through the trip to Oprah's complete with the gastric surprise he brought to the show. Oprah, it turned out, had brought on some generals who had not the nine medals Alexie thought his grandfather was owed, but twelve, making him even more of a hero.
In the process, he talked about how — regardless of his own “Horatio Alger on the reservation” story — “nobody's protected.” He said that he paid more than $170,000 in taxes last year, but still, his son, Joseph, “came out dead and green. I'm thinking, ‘my wife cheated on me with a Martian.' I was so jealous.”
The doctors were able to save his son, and he's doing fine today, but the notion that nobody — particularly Alexie — is protected came up again and again. It came up in service to the story he wanted to tell about his father.
It went on to describe how his father chose to go off dialysis when he brought him the medals, how he had six good weeks, two bad ones and two more terrible ones before he died.
Alexie's mother was standing by a Smoke Signals poster on the door when his father died. His father looked at his wife and at the poster behind her and his last words, according to Alexie, were, “I should have married Irene Bedard (a Smoke Signals cast member whose likeness is on the poster).
Then, Alexi read his poem, “On the First Anniversary of My Father's Death,” in which he compared birds flying into windows with the actions of his alcoholic dad. He seemed to be saying that the two just liked to do stupid things. He gave no indication that he realized that birds don't see the windows they fly into.
Though he acknowledged during the show that he was probably offending half of the audience, the end of the show brought everyone in the full house to their feet. During the sustained applause, this man of smiles stood alone — in the largest sense of the word — on the stage. His face appeared masked in sadness. He seemed to be oblivious to the adoring audience.
His father was gone and neither cleverness nor brilliance, neither anger nor understanding nor love would ever bring him back.
You may have seen him on television and not even realized who he is. Along with being an author and accomplished poet, he's also a wickedly funny stand-up comedian, and he starts most of his comedy performances by pretending to be the stereotypical "drunk indian" heckler out in the audience.
I read everything he writes as soon as I can get my hands on it, and his movies, though independently filmed on a tight budget, get me so involved in the story that when I'm not laughing my ass off I'm unaware of the tears rolling down my face.
I found this article in the Grand Ronde tribal newsletter, Smoke Signals, and wanted to share it. For those who might be interested, here's his website - he's got some really good essays there that are definitely worth the five minutes it would take to read one of them. I Hated Tonto (Still Do) is probably my favorite, but they're all good.
The Sweet Science of being Sherman Alexie
Looking back, you'd have to say that vegans took the worst beating at the hands of Indian Country's premier novelist and poet.
Sherman Alexie ( Spokane ) was merciless on them during his two-hour show at Oregon State University 's LaSells Stewart Center on Thursday, May 19, and it must be a long-running shtick for him because, he said, “I've gotten death threats from vegans.”
But he wasn't afraid. “What are they going to do? Throw their Birkenstocks at me?”
He took down liberals and conservatives with equal gusto, moved on to Oprah and the military, men with little pony tails, Indians acting tough, anti-war demonstrators doing anything, fundamentalism in general and in specific, and Indian casinos, too, just to let you know that he wasn't playing favorites.
“There's nothing better than expressing our sovereignty by participating in the worst excesses of capitalism,” he said.
On the sweat lodge experience, he said, “Yeah, that's what I want to do — in flu season — crawl into an indigenous Petri dish.”
Not even childhood escaped. “People who say that childhood is wonderful are full of shit,” he said. “I fully understand why people throw kids out of car windows. You don't do it, but for a minute you think, ‘They'll bounce.'”
A Crush On The Big Indian… Sherman Alexie had some fun with Oregon State University Signer Samantha Hatfield (Siletz), a doctoral student. “How do you sign, ‘I have a crush on the big Indian?' Alexie asked her.
He started the show with a nod to the two young women who signed his program for the deaf. They blushed frequently as they struggled to translate four-letter words and to express such concepts as walking down the aisle of a plane in extreme gastric distress, but first, Alexie thoughtfully included them. He sidled up to the working signer, and asked her, “How do you say, ‘I have a crush on the big Indian'? Now, Alexie has perfect timing in his delivery, and he waited a beat before continuing. “‘I think he smells really good,'” he continued for her to repeat in signs. “‘I wish he weren't stading so close to me. He's making me sweat.'” He added for the audience, “You can say anything in sign and it looks great: “Please chainsaw my legs off,” he said.
His success on stage also included his powerful presence and the way he used physical humor. Alexie was in the second row of the audience when introduced. Later, as he was warming to his story, he came to a break point and paced in circles like a cat. Another time, he slunk back behind the curtain and poked his head out like a kid in trouble. (He was showing how Indians respond to men in uniform.) Then, there was the walk down the airplane aisle with altogether too much of some kind of flu bubbling up inside him.
“In case you came here to see a traditional Indian,” he said at the start, “you better leave now.”
Which is ironic in Alexie's case, because this author of 16 books — including I Would Steal Horses , The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven , Reservation Blues , Indian Killer , Ten Little Indians and the movies, Smoke Signals and The Business of Fancy Dancing — is among today's most acclaimed Indian writers.
Joyce Carol Oates, writing in The New York Review of Books , called him “a funny, irreverent, sardonic but sentimental, rebellious postmodernist voice set beside his elder and conspicuously more writerly and “spiritual” Native American contemporaries N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silo, and Louise Erdrich. Sherman Alexie is the bad boy among them, mocking, self-mocking, unpredictable, unassimilable, reminding us of the young Philip Roth whose controversial works of fiction “The Conversion of the Jews” and Portnoy's Complaint outraged an older generation for whom anything Jewish had to be sacrosanct.”
In his monologue at OSU last month, he showed all of this.
“I'm always amazed that white people turn to us for spirituality,” he said. “Have you been to a rez?”
Or, on that rant against vegans, he said, “Indians also think we're equal to the animals. Well, I'll quit eating meat when you get a cow out here to beat me at a poetry slam. Only so many words rhyme with ‘Mooo.' I mean, yes, we're supposed to be better stewards; yes, we're supposed to take care of the earth; yes, we're supposed to honor the sacrifices made by the animals; yes yes yes yes yes, but dammit, we're in charge, and you know why? It's because of these,” and he held out his thumbs.
He said that even vegans distinguish between the value of animals and vegetables because they eat vegetables. “Maybe you think that carrots are less important than cows. I think they're equal, especially in a sauce.”
But he was clearly angry at their efforts. “How self-centered, how arrogant,” he said. “Imagine the awesome privilege of living in a society where you get to choose what you eat at each and every meal…When I was a kid, I was a vegetarian and a vegan for long stretches,” he said. “I was a commodity cheese-atarian.”
While Alexie ripped through insult (to men wearing little pony tails, he said, “Give it up. You look like an idiot! The women are all laughing at you!”) after joke (“I'm a liberal. I'm a lefty, pacifist, Commie-bastard who hates liberals. I can't stand us…if somebody tries to blow up the plane I'm on, I'm going to kill them and eat them!”) after observation (“Homophobia is the only hatred that doesn't make sense. Find me a country that was invaded by gays”) after advice (in planning for anti-war demonstrations, he suggested a dress code), it was easy to forget that he had a personal story in process.
In the end, it was all just window dressing for Alexie to describe the complex nature of the love he has for his father.
“My father was a lifelong alcoholic,” he said, “but he was a kind, sweet, shy man.” He said that the two substituted talk about sports for telling each other, ‘I love you.'
“My dad would leave us for weeks at a time on his binges,” Alexie said. “And I would cry myself sick.”
The story circled around to how his grandfather, who was killed in the second world war when his father was only six, “was a war hero, but we didn't know that.” The family learned that the Defense Department had just never bothered to present the awards to the family.
“We were Indians,” he said in explanation.
“So Oprah calls,” he said, picking up the oft-interrupted narrative, and he went through the trip to Oprah's complete with the gastric surprise he brought to the show. Oprah, it turned out, had brought on some generals who had not the nine medals Alexie thought his grandfather was owed, but twelve, making him even more of a hero.
In the process, he talked about how — regardless of his own “Horatio Alger on the reservation” story — “nobody's protected.” He said that he paid more than $170,000 in taxes last year, but still, his son, Joseph, “came out dead and green. I'm thinking, ‘my wife cheated on me with a Martian.' I was so jealous.”
The doctors were able to save his son, and he's doing fine today, but the notion that nobody — particularly Alexie — is protected came up again and again. It came up in service to the story he wanted to tell about his father.
It went on to describe how his father chose to go off dialysis when he brought him the medals, how he had six good weeks, two bad ones and two more terrible ones before he died.
Alexie's mother was standing by a Smoke Signals poster on the door when his father died. His father looked at his wife and at the poster behind her and his last words, according to Alexie, were, “I should have married Irene Bedard (a Smoke Signals cast member whose likeness is on the poster).
Then, Alexi read his poem, “On the First Anniversary of My Father's Death,” in which he compared birds flying into windows with the actions of his alcoholic dad. He seemed to be saying that the two just liked to do stupid things. He gave no indication that he realized that birds don't see the windows they fly into.
Though he acknowledged during the show that he was probably offending half of the audience, the end of the show brought everyone in the full house to their feet. During the sustained applause, this man of smiles stood alone — in the largest sense of the word — on the stage. His face appeared masked in sadness. He seemed to be oblivious to the adoring audience.
His father was gone and neither cleverness nor brilliance, neither anger nor understanding nor love would ever bring him back.
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