WARRIORS - POWER OF THREE: DARK RIVER. By Erin Hunter. HarperCollins Publishers. 334 pages. $16.99.

In life and in literature, cats have fascinated people for centuries. The source of that fascination lies in the felines’ unpredictable nature. They’ll act like your best friend one minute, then once they’re fed they’ll shun you and scratch at the back door to be let out.

In her series of novels for children, Warriors, Erin Hunter takes Native American motifs and applies them to a population of feral cats. There are clans, magic and medicine cats. The clans squabble and battle, forge friendships and treat Millie, a “kittypet” (domesticated cat) with suspicion.

The relationships between the characters are a strong hook for readers, and a knowledge of previous books is recommended before anyone tackles Dark River (it’s the middle book of a trilogy within the series, to boot).

There are 90 characters alluded to in the book, all saddled with names like Thornclaw, Berrypaw and Tawnypelt. With so many characters and scant description, the writing rapidly becomes repetitive; for example, the word “paw” is used ad nauseam, sometimes twice per sentence.

Somewhere in this book, there’s a solid story about an apprentice shaman. But unlike the capricious cats of real life, Dark River is sabotaged with plodding, predictable prose.

On Saturday I caught a production called Best of Balanchine by Charleston Ballet Theatre and I was reminded how long ballet intermissions are.

There were three short dances in the show - Serenade, Rubies and Who Cares?, all choreographed by the late great George Balanchine. But there was an intermission between each dance and some of them lasted longer than the dances themselves!

Okay, so the ballerinas need to go wipe the sweat of their backs and the male dancers need to adjust their packages. But surely ballet isn't all about the inter-dance drinking and schmoozing?



Thanks to a late start and the two intermissions, a show that should have been 90 minutes long was strung out to 2 hours 20 minutes. Why do ballet intermissions have to be so long? I think we should be told.

Maximum Brain Squad is a highly talented sketch comedy group based in Charleston, SC. I write a feature about them for the January 10th issue of the City Paper. Space was tight that week, so the article was heavily truncated. Here's the full version.


Industrial Strength
By Nick Smith

Uncle Sam is under attack. Standing tall with his stars & stripes hat and his Abe Lincoln beard, he’s beset on all sides by dark, evil wraiths with logos round their necks. The wraiths represent all-conquering corporations: IT giants, pile-it-high retail outlets, fast food fiends. Inexorably, Uncle Sam is overpowered by the ghouls and becomes their horrified puppet.


This tragic spectacle opens Maximum Brain Squad’s premiere one hour production, A Day That Will Live in Industry! As the dark humor of the Sam-bashing suggests, it’s not your regular Saturday night sketch show. While goofy characters and hit-and-run gags abound, a strong political thread gives the work extra depth and merit.


The Squad are perfectly placed to understand and comment on the commercial pressures placed on today’s youth. The average age of the group (Henry Riggs, Amanda Lester, Gray Robbins, Andy Livengood and Chris Drake) is 22.4. They love their iPods and digital whatnots as much as anyone. But is the amassing of gadgetry worth selling Uncle Sam down the river? Therein lies the crux of the show.


Riggs, Lester and Robbins will be familiar to audiences of Hobo: The Musical, a purposefully rough-and-ready show that wowed the unwashed during this year’s Piccolo Spoleto Festival. Hobo took a satirical look at authority, class and consumer culture. With a deft twist of comedy writing, A Day That Will Live in Industry! takes a satirical look at authority, class and consumer culture – this time using the sketch format.


The theme’s summed up in an observation made by Riggs: “America’s becoming lazy.” In the eyes of the Squad members and their co-writer Matt Perry, our nation is descending a slippery slope of apathy, sloth and an over-reliance on machinery. This is reflected in a show depicting a world one sidestep from our own where everything’s for sale and Apple products are the juiciest of forbidden fruit, lusted after by thoughtless characters who fail to empathize with their fellow human beings. The Squad address their concerns by savaging an era where, in Riggs’ opinion, “technology is accelerating so fast we’re becoming blind to actual human contact.”


Squad founders Riggs, Drake and Perry are anything but lazy. They tuck into the any-genre, any-length freedom that sketch comedy can bring, and they have a knack for creating memorable characters that deserve to return in future shows. There’s Tony Eyebrows, the gangster who’ll slay anyone who draws attention to his hirsute brow; Detective Finnegan, the worst sleuth ever to appear in a comedy sketch, who suspects everyone including himself; and a psychopathic iPhone marketing guy who’ll take your money or your life.


The murderous marketer is joined by a suicidal, bereaved youth, a rock star high on his own success and the overwhelmed Uncle Sam. The sight of his demise is amusing and disturbing at the same time. That ability to unsettle makes the Squad more than just another comedy troupe.


“We take a sarcastic tone, saluting America as the industry capital of the world,” says Riggs. “By taking a lighthearted look at what you’ve created, it makes it easier to analyze or deal with what’s happened.”



For now, that analysis is left up to the audience – the Squad finds the humor inherent in the problems of modern living, rather than providing solutions. But while We the People may have sold out for the sake of cheap consumables, Maximum Brain Squad hasn’t done the same to get cheap laughs.



With on-the-mark satire like Industry!, these comedians-come-commentators show great promise, which bodes well for the next generation of humorists. Perhaps Uncle Sam isn’t doomed after all.

Book Review: Mr. Sebastian & the Negro Magician

MR. SEBASTIAN AND THE NEGR0 MAGICIAN. By Daniel Wallace. Published by Doubleday. 260 pages. $21.95.

Mr. Sebastian has a similar style to Daniel Wallace’s earlier books, Big Fish, The Watermelon King and Ray in Reverse, but it’s less satisfying. It lacks the element that kept those previous yarns from unraveling; the sense that there’s a whole universe of fanciful stories out there just hinted at by the NC author.

That’s not to say that there isn’t plenty of fancy in this book. There are plenty of stories, too, as the life of Henry Wells (the Negro Magician) is documented or mythologized by a vivid parade of characters.

Wells has fallen on hard times and he’s lost his magic touch. Where once he was able to conjure gold dust and doves from thin, he now has trouble with the simplest card tricks. As we learn through the split narratives, Wells has lived a doomed life, crushed by the Great Depression, soldiering through World War II and living by his wits as a street scoundrel in the intervening years.

Mr. Sebastian has mesmerizing moments but it ultimately seems slim – as if something has vanished from the text. In his urge to write what he describes as his first fully-formed novel, Wallace has dumped his usual, loose anything’s-possible writing voice. This novel would be adequate if the rest of the writer’s oeuvre wasn’t such a hard act to follow.