by Katie Baker

by Malcolm Jones

Geoff Muldaur is a reluctant headliner. You’ll find his name as the leader of the Texas Sheiks on the spine of the CD case, but the front cover of the new album just says “Texas Sheiks.” Likewise, while he is far and away the best and most unique vocalist on the album—this is the man who inspired Richard Thompson to say, “There are only three white blues singers, and Geoff Muldaur is two of them”—he seems more than content to equally share vocal duties with the rest of the band. He’s made his share of solo records, in a career that stretches back to the '60s, but they are outnumbered by the collaborations he’s been part of—with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band (a band that inspired everyone from the Lovin’ Spoonful to the Grateful Dead), with his former wife, Maria Muldaur, with a Woodstock ensemble that included Paul Butterfield, Ronnie Barron and Amos Garrett, and most recently as the arranger catalyst for a big band recreation/reinterpretation of the music of '20s jazz great Bix Beiderbecke. Oh, and many year ago, his definitive version of the song “Brazil” inspired and sustained Terry Gilliam on his way to making the film of the same name. Muldaur gets around, he just doesn’t seem to like to stand out.

When members of the Tectonic Theater Project descended on Laramie, Wyo., a few weeks after the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in 1998, local residents didn’t quite know what to make of the actors and writers trolling around town with tape recorders. They weren’t “real” journalists, after all. When told that the troupe would be writing a play about Shepard’s death based on their interviews, some citizens shrugged—what would the effort really amount to? Some might have imagined a shoestring production in some dark basement on the Lower East Side of New York, said Moisés Kaufman, Tectonic’s cofounder and artistic director.

But when the drama group showed up in town 10 years later for a follow-up, that initial work, The Laramie Project, had become one of the most frequently produced plays in America, and Shepard’s death had come to define the community in ways Laramie could not have imagined in those first raw months after the killing. This time, “people were editing themselves a lot more,” Kaufman said—if they consented to interviews at all. The local newspaper even ran a pointed editorial aimed at Tectonic's efforts: “Laramie is a community, not a project.”

That reticence and veiled hostility are very much a part of the troupe's new work Laramie, 10 Years Later, which debuted with a reading in New York on Monday night, the 11th anniversary of Shepard's death, and simultaneously in 150 other theaters in all 50 states and in 14 countries.

Somebody could ask Hollywood the same question. Fall movie season is usually the time when the studios haul out their dark dramas for awards consideration, but this year's batch seems especially bleak. The themes they touch upon include incest, murder, AIDS, cancer, abuse, layoffs, and lots of unexpected, tragic deaths (and we're not even counting the dead vampires in the Twilight sequel). This probably isn't just coincidental. This fall's slate was written at the end of the Bush administration, when most of Hollywood—at least the predominantly liberal part—was under a cloud of gloom. Now, we're all feeling gloomy; the economy is in tatters, and the unemployment rate continues to soar. Does anybody really want to go to the movies this year to feel even more depressed?

Gavin Creel, star in Broadway's revival of Hair, will march on Washington, D.C. this weekend for gay rights. He joined us in the studio beforehand to talk about his musical roots, his hatred of auditions and his feelings on American foreign policy.

Last week, Ramin Setoodeh and I had the honor of interviewing Maurice Sendak, Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers at Mr. Sendak’s house in Connecticut. It was the only time the creative team behind Where the Wild Things Are would be getting together to speak to the press. This morning, Newsweek posted the magazine version of our exclusive conversation, which you can read here. We think it’s the definitive WtWTA interview.

Instead of reblogging portions of the official transcript, however, we thought we'd do something different on Pop Vox: share some of the stuff that we couldn’t squeeze into print. To find out what death, danger and Discovery Channel documentaries have to do with kiddie lit, read on…

NEWSWEEK: Why write about death in a children’s story?
Sendak: Well, it’s a great subject. There’s a lot of charm to it. I remember when we did Hansel and Gretel, the opera. All of the kids are out in the open, unprotected from the weather, and so we had one of the little girls die. And the opera people and everybody was: “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s Hansel and Gretel.” But I said: “Hansel and Gretel is one of the scariest stories ever written! Psychotic mother; stupid, inane father. What the hell are you talking about? Of course there’s going to be somebody dead in it.” After the show, the kids came backstage and they wanted the autograph of the dead girl. [laughter] Like, I was just like chopped liver, they walked right past me. “Where’s the dead girl?”

There’s something in that, though—danger and rebellion are the things that are thrilling to you when you’re a kid.
Sendak: Kids are barbaric. They really have to be. They don’t know what it is to be polite or nice. There is a toughness to being a child. Childhood is a very tough time. I always had a deep respect for children and how they solve complex problems by themselves.

How did this translate when you sat down to write and illustrate Wild Things?
Sendak: Well, Max and his mother - it’s not that good a relationship. But it’s really what a lot of relationships are like between children and parents. A lot of yelling and losing of one’s temper and throwing of things, and then you’re sorry you did it. I’ve always been interested in how children maneuver and figure out how to live. 
Jonze: And how do they? 
Sendak: Cleverness, shrewdness, fantasy, and just plain strength. They want to survive. The kids in Hansel and Gretel¬ she is the heroine, she saves her brother’s life. Little girl saving a little boy’s life - when do children have to confront such terrible ordeals? But they do! They do. 

What was it like to see the Wild Things embodied onscreen with the voices of James Gandolfini and Forest Whitaker? Did it clash with the image of them you’d kept with you all these years?
Sendak: Yes, but at the same time, I fell in love with the new versions. They were gentler, they were kinder. Underneath, of course, they were capable of the same terrible things. One of them puts Max in her mouth. There always is the possibility that something might go wrong, and you’ll get eaten. And you don’t know what it is that might go wrong. What you’ll say or what you’ll do that will provoke a Wild Thing to eat you. I love watching animal movies on television. One of the only things I like. And they always say, don’t do this and don’t do that, don’t run away and don’t turn your back and don’t lie flat. I love that. It’s from my childhood. How do you prevent dying? How do you prevent being eaten or mauled by a monster? I still worry about it. 
Jonze: When we went to shoot the movie, we actually watched nature documentaries, and wanted to feel like we were watching animals-
Sendak: Good.
Jonze: -and that’s part of the reason we shot it out on location. We wanted it to be not on soundstages and not with greenscreen, but in real places. The camera doesn’t know where these creatures are going to go. What’s motivating them is unpredictable, unknowable, and the cameraman is just there, trying to document these wild animals, from the point of view of Max, who knows just as little as we do of what they’re going to do. 
Sendak: Yes, he doesn’t know what’s to come next. I mean, that’s gotta be scary for a kid, but it’s also gotta be what a kid likes most. It’s that enticement of what might or might not happen.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

Photo: Matt Carr─Getty Images

(Editor: Last month we ran a much shorter version of our chat with the comedian. Here is the longer version.)

by Malcolm Jones

What exactly does it mean for Herta Müller, the Romanian-born novelist, to take home a Nobel Prize in Literature? Most concretely, it means collecting roughly $1.4 million. That's not chump change, but after that, the benefits become more nebulous. If you've languished in semi-obscurity before winning the prize, it means a brief period of instant celebrity, a period in which critics play catch-up with your work and publishers lucky enough to have bought the rights to your work in leaner times now rush to get your books into print, if they're not there already.

by Joshua Alston

There are issues so polarizing, so emotionally draining, so morally fraught, that we never really solve them as much as we table them for a while. Euthanasia is one such issue, which has come back to fore during the vigorous debate over American health care. But it’s an equally important issue in the world of entertainment: when is it finally time to pull the plug and kill a TV show? I know there are emotions involved, believe me I do. But I have to be the cold realist—there are some shows that have to die. It’s simply too painful to see them in their current state. I can’t bear it, and I’m willing to make the tough choices that others can’t. What follows is a list of the shows that must be taken off the respirator post haste.