High energy Ginkgoa performs at Barkley Theatre

Some seats are still available for the Ginkgoa show in the Barkley Theatre at the Oats Park Art Center tomorrow night. They are known for their lively, high-energy shows.

Their show here is part of an extensive North American tour. The French-American ensemble has played some of the world’s most prestigious venues—including the Montreal Jazz Fest, Global Fest, the Kennedy Center and the Festival International de Louisiane.

Doors and the Art Center’s bar will open at 7 p.m. and the show will begin at 8 p.m. Tickets are $17 for CAC members, $20 for nonmembers and you can pick yours up at Jeff’s Copy Express on Maine Street or ITT @ NAS Fallon. You can also call Churchill Arts at 775-423-1440.

ERICKSON’S ‘SHADOWBAHN’

Steve Erickson teaches at the University of California, Riverside and among his many awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the author of 10 novels—including “Tours of the Black Clock” and “These Dreams of You”—as well as two collections of non-fiction.

His latest novel is “Shadowbahn” (Blue Rider Press). The Twin Towers have suddenly re-appeared in the Badlands of South Dakota some twenty off years after they fell, as a kind of “American Stonehenge.”

People are drawn by the hundreds, then by the thousands to the site. The towers appear to sing, but everyone hears a different tune. There’s, perhaps, a mysterious figure, Jesse, on the 93rd floor who could be Elvis Presley’s still-born brother.

A brother and sister—Parker and his adopted African sibling Zema—head out from L.A. to visit their mother somewhere in Michigan. Along the way, Zema discovers she has the uncanny ability to function as a speaker playing their father’s long-lost mixtapes.

Erickson successfully blends a variety of landscapes, the twins of a hostile and divided populace (there’s the Union and the Disunion) and the fractured backdrop of the history of the American songscape, from John Coltrane and John Lennon to Ray Charles and Laurie Anderson. During the course of their voyage along a detour/road that doesn’t exist, the siblings discover there is no music anywhere anymore, except for what Zema plays.

Add to the mix a JFK who did not win the presidency and appears in a wheelchair to confront Jesse along with Warhol’s Factory Crew including Valerie Solanas just before she shoots Andy, and set them against a series of sidebars dealing with songs well-known and over-looked, and we’ve only just begun.

The novel is a provocative and thought provoking assaying of our divided country, of counter-histories, what was, what is, what might be, the shadows of the other lives, the other paths that led us to the fractured and disintegrating spheres we think we know.

Kirk Robertson covers the arts and may be reached at news@lahontanvalleynews.com