Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
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Also this issue: Worlds of Wonder 20/20 Vision “A Night at the Casbah” Baseball panel discussion Louis Faurer: A Photographic Retrospective Bloomsday Celebration Frankie Avalon A Picasso |
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June 12-18, 2003
artpicks
Sherman Alexie
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He is the world's four-time heavyweight poetry-slam champ. He directs and writes films, including the recent The Business of Fancydancing, winner of the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival Audience Award. And now he's also a stand-up comic. Without a doubt, at just 36 years of age, Sherman Alexie has become American literature's most versatile showman. And for good reason: Alexie might be the only short-story writer alive today who can make audiences wet their pants with laughter.
The good is news is that Alexie's show comes to Philadelphia this week, with a reading from his most recent book, Ten Little Indians. A play off the racist nursery rhyme, the stories in this new collection chip away at Indian stereotypes by presenting a range of characters, none of whom live on a reservation or drink themselves silly. Instead, he writes of Indians who are successful urban professionals, yet find themselves alienated both from the mainstream and their reservation roots.
Alexie, who grew up on a Spokane reservation until he began attending a white high school, knows well the pain of being between two cultures, belonging to neither of them. Most often, he deals with such emotions by lambasting them with humor, as in "Can I Get a Witness," where an unhappily married Indian woman chuckles at her husband's knee-jerk patriotism, "How could any Indian put on an U.S. military uniform and not die of toxic irony?"
Sherman Alexie, Wed., June 18, 6 p.m., free, Borders Books, Broad and Chestnut sts., 215-568-7400.
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