A wedding at Lake Qarga, Kabul, in The Black Tulip.

Afghanistan has no film industry, which makes a new movie called The Black Tulip, about good people seeking some kind of normal life in modern Kabul despite the constant threat of violence, destruction and despair, doubly dangerous to have made and inestimably valuable to watch. Filmed entirely in a country where women’s rights are still tested daily and cameras are so verboten that even a tourist’s throwaway Instamatic is an invitation to trouble—and produced, written and directed by a woman, no less!—this is a gripping experience as politically enlightening and emotionally involving as it is educational and beautiful to look at. 

Writer-director Sonia Nassery Cole is an Afghan-American activist and filmmaker whose family fled to the U.S. to escape the invasion of Soviet troops in 1979, when she was 14. Three years later, having experienced first-hand the repression by a radical government as a child, she began her mission to free her country from tyranny—from the Russians and from the Taliban—by enlisting the aid of President Ronald Reagan and the United Nations. Working throughout the 1980s to aid the Afghan resistance movement, she raised millions to rebuild the lives of Afghan refugees and established the nonprofit Afghanistan World Foundation to provide care for land-mine victims and build a women and children’s hospital. With the new resurgence of Taliban terrorism, Ms. Cole’s role as an activist has accelerated to such a degree that I have no idea how she found the time to make a feature-length movie. When the leading actress had her foot amputated prior to production—according to the director, though this claim has been contradicted by Latif Ahmadi, head of the Afghan Film as well as the movie’s local casting director—Ms. Cole took over the role herself, and she is wonderful in it. Somehow, despite constant death threats and a bomb blast at her Kabul hotel, she finished The Black Tulip. The result is a remarkable film that shows the cultural heritage and everyday values of a courageous people united in a quest for family, faith and freedom.

The movie begins in 2001 with the retreat of the Taliban after 30 years of war, five of them under their deadly rule. Kabul is liberated and ready to savor freedom at last. A vital, arresting portrait of a modern city emerges, replete with pollution and gridlock traffic, but leavened by the fact that it is a place where a child can still laugh while flying a kite. The Mansouri family, guided by a matriarchal force named Farishta (beautifully played by director Cole) and her strong, devoted husband Hadar, will do anything to keep their two children from ever going back to a refugee camp. During the Soviet occupation, Farishta watched as her father was murdered and his book store, The Poet’s Corner, a symbol of literature and learning, was torched. Now, in the spirit of their new happiness and hope, the family reopens the old shop as a restaurant with the same name. Serving good food on linen tablecloths with crystal wineglasses, with a miked stage for poets and artists to read poems and sing songs that have long been condemned, The Poet’s Corner take two is an overnight sensation. The Mansouris are soon catering meals for the American military base, while the artists, whose voices have been silenced for years, form lines outside the door—two facts that also attract the attention of dark Taliban forces that still exist in the shadows, waiting to pounce. In no time, mysterious government “inspectors” arrive, offering “protection” from hostile elements. There’s more sadness and death on the way.

But The Black Tulip is not a war picture. It’s about the resilience of admirable people in a changing world. Girls still gossip and flirt. Students still wear burkas but they also carry backpacks ordered on the internet. Boys still play the centuries-old game of Buzkashi on horseback like the ancient Afghan tribes, but they do it in tight blue jeans. In the Mansouri family, Farishta’s beautiful, 24-year-old sister Belkis may come from an old respected family, but she is intelligent and independent, with progressive ideas of her own, while Akram Zabuli, her handsome, contemporary fiancé, has a father so steeped in tradition that he pleads for his wife to wear the old-fashioned burka and cover her face. Akram’s father believes a woman’s place is in the home. Conversely, Belkis’s family fully understands and encourages her goal—to finish medical school and open her own clinic. While these differences are resolved, the traditions of an Afghan wedding in a mountain village overlooking the rugged scenery of the countryside—still beautiful even after years of war—unite everyone with hauntingly beautiful music and festive costumes. But heartbreak ensues when the ceremony is disrupted by terrorists, and peace-loving Hadar is then forced to compromise his own pacifist views to take a stand—to save his restaurant and his family’s future.

Despite the inevitable tragedies that befall the Mansouris, the movie ends with a surge of optimism. Both sides of every issue are examined—old loyalties vs. new compromises, Western ideas vs. Islamic principles, the resentment of American presence vs. the ensuing fear that if the American military leaves, chaos will follow. The narrative is fictional, but rooted in truths that are self-evident. From the leading characters to the tertiary roles of dedicated waiters and customers to evil Taliban insurgents, the actors are perfect, without a false move in sight. Like The Poet’s Corner restaurant, Sonia Nassery Cole’s screenplay is a megaphone for freedom of expression. The title The Black Tulip is a stretch. There are no tulips in sight, black or any other color, and if anyone explained it in passing, I missed the subtitles. Consulting the film’s publicist, a fount of information, I have learned that the black tulip, blooming under the harshest conditions in the Pamir and Hindu Kush mountain regions of Afghanistan, is a symbol for the nation’s spirit. Growing amid ice and stone, the flower, much like the people, is able to prosper and survive against all odds. These are qualities the unconquered citizens of the country have possessed for centuries. The film is a deeply heartfelt experience that addresses the struggles of everyday people in a strange land most of us know nothing about. You will not go away unmoved. See it, and learn something.

rreed@observer.com

THE BLACK TULIP

Running Time 116 minutes

Written by Sonia Nassery Cole and David Michael O’Neill

Directed by Sonia Nassery Cole

Starring Haji Gul Aser, Sonia Nassery Cole and Walid Amini

3/4

Van Houten as teh tragic Jonker, whose poetry is inscribed in South Africa's history, as well as the flesh of those who carry it.

The trenches of South Africa in the 1960s, in the grip of apartheid—the equivalent of the American Civil War fought on foreign soil—continue to provide fertile material for movies fueled by the flames of morality, conscience and the struggle for human rights. Along the way, new heroes are discovered and old oversights corrected. The latest is Black Butterflies, a footnote to history about the rebellious, courageous and tragic life of South African poet Ingrid Jonker (triumphantly played by Carice van Houten, the rangy, riveting Dutch star who skyrocketed to world acclaim in Paul Verhoeven’s World War II saga, Black Book). She’s not the only person to defy the government and speak out against racism during apartheid, but her story is unique because the odds she faced to improve conditions and ameliorate the fate of the disgraced country she loved were overwhelming. As the daughter of Abraham Jonker, the powerful, mean-spirited minister of censorship, she had no one to turn to for approval. Understandably, she became an obsessive romantic with an intense passion for the kind of consuming love that always eluded her, further alienating her stern and reproachful father by moving through the bohemian literary circles of Cape Town, writing poetry from her heart, and sleeping with an assortment of other writers, all married and emotionally unattainable. Ingrid was not entirely likeable, and the movie makes no attempt to gild the lily. She had a talent for writing and a reckless spirit that antagonized critics and challenged conventions, but she was also an irresponsible mother with a child she often neglected, rejecting the security her husband offered for their daughter and eschewing respectability, while the baby slept on the floors of dirty hotel rooms. Tortured by the social injustice directed at black children while raising her own child in squalor, her priorities were screwy, yet she dragged both her baby and her typewriter around wherever she went, turning out so much memorable prose that her talent did not go unnoticed. Morose, tough-minded yet psychologically fragile, she was often compared, for obvious reasons, to her self-destructive contemporary American counterpart, Sylvia Plath. But she lived by her own rules, draining her lovers and enraging her father, who disagreed with her opposing political views that embarrassed him publicly and remained rife with frustration in his failed attempts to control her privately. Watching her squirm restlessly through the turbulence of the oppressive racist government he supported, he eventually drove her to a grim destiny with alcoholism and mental illness in an asylum in Amsterdam.

It’s not a pretty story, not always well served by an awkward narrative. But accomplished director Paula van der Oest, whose film Zus & Zo was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2003, fleshes out the shadows and conflicting mood swings that made Ingrid Jonger such a mercurial character. With her dark, sensitive but probing eyes and her arresting body language, you can’t take your off Ms. van Houten, who enlivens every scene, in contrast with the suffocating rigidity of Rutger Hauer as Abraham Jonker—cold, deeply prejudiced, convinced blacks are intellectually inferior and banning all their attempts to write truthfully about the experience of segregation. Mr. Hauer adds another laurel to his already esteemed reputation as the most versatile actor in the Dutch film industry. They are ably abetted by Ireland’s Liam Cunningham as novelist Jack Cope, the one great love of Ingrid’s life. While she was locked away in a mental hospital, he published her first book of poems, which her own father tried to censor before disowning her forever. The combination of acclaim and her own father’s terminal repudiation began a downward spiral that led to suicide. Rewards came late, but her prizes and accomplishments are not forgotten. Three decades after her death Nelson Mandela recited one of her poems in his first speech at the opening of the South African parliament in 1994. Today, there are Afrikaners who have her poems tattooed on their backs and others who swear she speaks to them from the grave. The title Black Butterflies is excerpted from her poem describing the bodies of black children littering an apartheid landscape after a massacre.

Neither another bland biopic about a self-destructive artist nor an historical scrapbook about a country in the grip of slavery, Black Butterflies is a dark, moving depiction of the life and death of a brave rebellious, idiosyncratic woman who made significant strides toward changing the world around her and paid a heavy toll for her passion. I found it immensely gratifying.

rreed@observer.com

BLACK BUTTERFLIES

Running TIME 100 minutes

Written by Greg Latter

Directed by Paula van der Oest

Starring Carice van Houten, Rutger Hauer and Liam Cunningham

3/4

Petanque!

Wednesday, July 13

Hoisted by Your Own Petanque

We’re in those post-Fourth doldrums, in which it seems the sticky heat won’t ever end—we miss our blazers! We used to look professional! But at least we’re one up on the men in sandals, waggling their ill-kept toes at us as we skulk over to the Mister Softee truck, playing its siren song … While we spend our weeks dreaming of weekend getaways (if anyone asks, we have a standing therapist appointment at 3 p.m. on Friday that we simply can’t miss, and we won’t be making it back to the office after that), those for whom getaway is a way of life dream of France, apparently. It’s Bastille Day on Shelter Island! The hotel La Maison Blanche hosts a petanque tournament co-hosted by hotelier Alistair MacLean. But what is petanque? We asked the hotel’s front desk. “It’s like you have small balls, and first you throw the smallest one and the other ones have to get close to it,” said the clerk, whom we thought had a French lilt to her voice (she was, she informed us, Polish). In any case, we’ll probably leave the playing field for the athletes and park ourselves in front of a bowl of moules marinieres. Remember, just because Bastille Day commemorates the storming of a French prison doesn’t mean that noshing on French food and playing French games implies support for the release of a certain Frenchman!

La Maison Blanche, 11 Stearns Point Road (Shelter Island Heights), 12 p.m., $30 entry fee to benefit Shelter Island Lions Club; call (631) 749-1633 for more details.

Thursday, July 14

Student Housing

We too were young once, and we remember that first New York apartment—we squatted in a cramped lair we found through a friend of a friend. (Everyone has to start somewhere! But don’t worry: that building’s a Whole Foods now.) Would that we’d known of The Next Step Realty, a brokerish for young would-be New Yorkers seeking a location to while away the post-Cornell years. “Our ideal client is someone who’s graduated from an Ivy League, NESCAC, or top Southern school. They’ve got a well-established job at a high paying company, media, fashion, a bank, corporate securities … Apple, Google … and moving to the city for the first time,” says co-founder Blair Brandt, a 2010 Richmond graduate. The company is by and for young masters of the universe: its founders are two prep-school types, with the non-Blair Brandt half still in college, the little darling! The Next Step is throwing past and future clients a party tonight on the patio of a rental building called, somehow, Truffles Tribeca. (Delicious! Could it be the Gilded Age once more, so soon?) Nothing but the best for these kids! Truffles has a staff, roof garden, courtyard, views of the Statue of Liberty—and we hear it’s all booked up! But never fear, “things will open up according to the market,” says a flack.

Truffles Tribeca, 34 Desbrosses Street, 6 p.m., with “surprise musical performance”; private event.

Friday, July 15

To MRKT, to MRKT

Is there such a thing as too much art? We started going to the Hamptons to drink a little rosé, maybe hang out with Ina Garten—and suddenly we’re getting phone calls from friends (sadly, not Ina) asking if we’re going to check out the paintings at the Bridgehampton Biennial or artHamptons. Um, that’s what Chelsea’s for? But we must stay culturally literate (that’s what the still-unread copy of Freedom on our coffee table is for—we should do something about that), so we’re dragging ourselves to the inaugural artMRKT Hamptons. The fair, organized by a Brooklyn-based group that’s bringing contemporary art to the grounds of the Bridgehampton Historical Society, opens today; last night was the Cadillac-sponsored preview party to benefit Southampton Hospital. Well, it’s for a good cause … “I just got a press release for the East Hampton Arts Show!” a pal Gchatted as we wrote this item. That settles it; we’re going to stay home and finish Freedom.

artMRKT Hamptons Preview Party, 5:30-7 p.m. with VIP Preview Party Thursday from 7-9:30 p.m., show to run Friday through Sunday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. (closes at 5 p.m. Sunday), at Bridgehampton Historical Society, 2368 Montauk Highway (Bridgehampton); visit art-mrkt.com/hamptons for tickets and information.

Saturday, July 16

I.A.Sea

If you thought the “Zombie Diana” cover of Newsweek, featuring an aged, hypothetically alive Princess of Wales, was bad, you should hear what former staffers are saying about the magazine since Tina Brown took over! (Let’s put it this way—the regal cover girl isn’t the only one who looks like the walking dead.) There’s a booze cruise of pre-Tina Newsweek-ers tonight to celebrate what was once the heavily trafficked Newsweek.com, before its beastification. A glory-days employee (Well, were they really glory days?) indicated that an Osama bin Laden-style burial at sea was planned for the domain name, which is being officially retired Tuesday. It’s the hottest ticket in town—catch all the refugees and ask them if the old covers about Jesus and Mary were really that much better!

Somewhere on the Hudson …

Sunday, July 17

Dancers From the Dance

Fire Island’s abuzz—and not from the usual chemical mélange that keeps the tea dances running past 3 a.m. No, this is all for charity—the Fire Island Dance Festival, home to lithe, hunky ballerinos and ignored-for-once-in-their-lives ballerinas—concludes its weekend-long run today at one of those schmancy shared homes. Cocktails to follow, of course! (It all raises money for Dancers Responding to AIDS, which is exactly the worthy cause it sounds like.) This is the second-biggest weekend on the island, after August’s Ascension bacchanal of men who only look like well-built dancers. Which event is better? You can spend “one watching dancers,” an F.I.-loving publicist told us, or “the other … yourself.”  We’d rather watch the dancers—we’ve had a bit too much Mister Softee lately!

Festival concludes tonight with 5 p.m. performance, after performances at 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. Saturday, 236 Beach Hill Walk; visit dradance.org/fireisland for tickets and information.

Monday, July 18

French Twist

Now, we know New York in the summer is bad—earlier this week we went to Shelter Island just to pretend we were in France. But some people can withstand even more travel than our L.I.R.R.-weary bones can, it seems: BAMtravel guests are bringing their tote bags and their hand-me-down opera glasses to Versailles, for a four-day jaunt to see the Baroque opera Atys in surroundings even nicer than Lafayette Avenue. (Our main source on operatic apocrypha, Wikipedia, tells us that Atys was “met with indifference” in its 17th-century bow, but, honey, times have changed.) The whole package includes, per BAM, “sumptuous treats, intimate meals, and private tours.” Sounds great, but wait for Atys to come to BAM in September. In the meantime, we’ll pop a DVD of Marie Antoinette into the laptop and eat some petits-fours from ChikaLicious in front of the full-blast air conditioner …

BAMtravel’s four-day trip to France runs from July 16 to 20; email travel@BAM.org for details.

Tuesday, July 19

Easy A

Gay marriage is now legal-ish, but we have to wait until July 24 to actually attend the first gay nuptials (We’ve already bought the gift—enjoy your Crock-Pot, boys!—though we’d be more enthusiastic about these weddings in a less icky-sticky season. What are the rules about wearing seersucker shorts to a gay wedding?). We’ll fill the nuptial-shape hole in our lives at the premiere party for season two of Logo TV’s A-List: New York, the reality show about so-called “gay housewives of New York” who pass the time between serious relationships by getting in fights and going to glam parties at one another’s grotesquely minimalist apartments. “Each cast member has really helped this cause,” a flack emails us about marriage equality, though we’re not going to this premiere for political discourse. We’re going to start some arguments and throw a few drinks, our TV-release signing pen at the ready.

District 36, 29 West 36th Street, 7 p.m.; tickets available at giltcity.com/newyork/logomtv.

Wednesday, July 20

Tables for Two Bits

Why is it called Restaurant Week if it runs for a fortnight? That’s a koan we could never hope to solve, as is the reason for the two pennies and a nickel we add onto our Restaurant Week-dictated $24.07 lunch bill. (As if calculating the tip weren’t already mathematically challenging enough!) For all those wondering why the Palm Court at the Plaza is suddenly swarmed with the besandaled madding crowd (Some diners just don’t respect a business casual dress code! We just lost our appetite—waiter, take back our beef carpaccio!), well, the two-week, citywide Groupon ends July 24, at which point you may stop going to nice restaurants—or choose to start going to them again.

Visit nycgo.com/restaurantweek for a list of participating restaurants.

Via Getty Images.

As reported by the New York Times last night, today, the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case reconvened today, and the former IMF chief was released from his bail on his own recognizance. He must only promise to appear in court, as the charges against him have not been dropped. More on the press conference and future of the case, after the jump.

This was not in the New York Times report last night, and this is not going to help the prosecution:

"She actually recounted the entire story to prosecutors and later said it was false."

And in the NY Daily News this morning:

"'The DA's office has concluded she materially misled the grand jury,' said a source close to the case. 'The case has gone to hell. It's a wreck.'" They also note that a perjury charge against the accuser is a possibility.

From the press conference, being carried live:

Zero Hedge notes that the current press line of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's only defense left being that of consensual sex "is a lie."

Prosecutor Kenneth Thompson noted during the press conference:

"When the victim walked into that suite she did so for one reason - to clean the suite. The victim here may have made some mistakes, but that doesn't mean she's not a rape victim." And later, explained that his client told him: "I will go to my grave knowing what this man did to me. I have nothing left now. I am going to come out and tell the world what Dominique Strauss-Kahn did to me.

At one point, the BBC had to stop carrying Mr. Thompson's press conference because of "the explicit nature of the lawyer's comments."

The New York Times has released the letter from prosecutors to the defense team.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn walked out of the courtroom with his wife, Anne Sinclair. He was smiling as the couple got into the car, and drove away.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Well, we rendezvoused at an Italian place downtown on Thompson Street that Alan had suggested. Lunch was a disaster. For one thing, the food was awful. The tre colore salad was soggy, and the little Italian flag that they'd planted in the middle of it didn't help. Plus, the waiters only spoke Korean. Then there was the conversation. All Alan could talk about was trying to start a Mahjong league in Bahrain. After a few minutes, we just stared at each other. We finally found a common subject and talked with relief about how to adjust our Facebook privacy settings. And that was it. I was furious. On top of everything else, I had rescheduled a doctor's appointment to meet Alan.

I was fuming about wasting my time and money like that until a few days ago. That was when the audience at the 92nd Street Y rebelled during a conversation between journalist Deborah Solomon and comedian Steve Martin. That was when history was made.

Ms. Solomon does the Q&A for The New York Times Magazine, but she is also an art critic. Mr. Martin is also an art collector who has just published a novel about the art world. The two friends thought they'd make art the subject of the evening. But the audience had expected Ms. Solomon to ask Mr. Martin entertaining questions about his career as a comedian and movie actor. Not only that, but the people who were watching them on closed-circuit television in synagogues and theaters across the country had come expecting the same thing. You can imagine the letdown.

The people watching on closed-circuit began sending emails imploring the staff at the 92nd Street Y to intercede and press Ms. Solomon to ask snappier questions. Not questions about kvelling over Rembrandt, but about what it was like to work with Goldie Hawn. Back in New York, the members of the audience began to murmur their disapproval. After a few minutes, someone from the Y stepped out onto the stage and passed an index card to Ms. Solomon. It was a note demanding that she talk to Mr. Martin about his career. This defiant message will be remembered the way Americans remember the first shot fired at Concord. Ms. Solomon promptly began accepting questions from the floor. As a result of the general disappointment, the Y decided to give refunds to everyone in the audience.

Messrs. Solomon and Martin, welcome to the age of the Internet! Welcome to the new participatory culture, where the paying audience determines the content of its cultural experience, not elitist gatekeepers and their flunkies. The passive discontent of the spectator has given way to the active control of the consumer. Aux armes, customers!

I read an account of the Solomon/Martin imbroglio and excitedly banged out an email to Alan. According to the receipt, my share of lunch was $38.62. With tip, the whole thing came to $46. Make it a money order, I wrote, just to be on the safe side.

That night, I slept like a baby. Thanks to the heroes of the 92nd Street Y, I had discovered IIR. Immediate Interactive Response.

I shot off a few more IIR's the next day. First to Facebook, thanks to which I'm out 46 bucks. They shouldn't pay? Then, to my health care company to dispute a charge. My doctor had told me that rather than suffering from the touch of bronchitis I thought I had, I had developed asthma. Asthma? Me? I had not made the trip to his office on a beautiful fall day, humming "How High the Moon" to myself on the train, to hear disrespectful news. I don't like to think of myself as asthmatic.

A few days later, I thought I'd get out of the house and treat myself to some opera. I went to a small opera company downtown to see a matinee of their new production of La Bohème. Now, I'm quite the opera buff, but for the life of me, I can't remember plots. Some people are no good with names; I'm no good with plots. So imagine my distress at having to watch Mimi lie there struggling to breathe. I pay $60 for an orchestra seat to lighten myself up after some doctor gives me an inconsiderate diagnosis of asthma, and now I have to watch someone wheeze to death. I jumped out of my seat, found an usher and whispered into her ear, "Give Mimi an inhaler." "What?" she said. The impudent colt. I said, "For heaven's sake, this is the year 2010. We don't sit around drinking absinthe and coughing. We have medication. Give her some Albuterol, and let's end this thing on a happy note." 

It was one big IIR week, let me tell you. I sent off a certified letter to Jonathan Franzen's publisher asking for a refund of the money I'd paid for Mr. Franzen's new novel, Freedom. A prominent critic in a major newspaper had written that Mr. Franzen had composed "an indelible portrait" of how we live now. Well, it isn't how I live. The prominent critic got an invoice from me, too. And her major newspaper. Next, a note to President Obama, who owes me for six "Yes We Can" coffee mugs and twenty-three "We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For" T-shirts.

Finally, an angry email to the producers of a recent production of "King Lear." Talk about a letdown. I had taken my young son with me to see the play because, somehow, with all the holiday bustle, I had confused Shakespeare's downer with The Swiss Family Robinson. So I made a mistake. So sue me. No, actually, I'll sue you. We left in the middle of the third act, the poor little kid shaking like a leaf. If they're going to put on a play like that during Chanukah, they should lighten the script.

To make a long story short, the refunds have started coming in. The gatekeepers are nervous. They'd better be. People will look back at the revolutionaries of the 92nd Street Y and see the beginning of one of the greatest protest movements in American history. The Matzoh Ball Party. Power to the paying people! You should just see the nice note Mr. Obama sent with his check.

lsiegel@observer.com

Today's events prove that time heals all lit-feud wounds. Franzen appeared on Oprah's show to discuss Freedom and from the outset both seemed intent to belie any concern for lingering tension -- in fact they were downright congenial to each other. Franzen may be the most hallowed literary figure to appear of the show since Cormac McCarthy's rare appearance in 2007, and the AP has a brief report on the landmark moment in Oprah's Book Club history.

"Bottom line is, I'm happy to have you," Winfrey said.

"I'm happy to be here," Franzen replied.

Winfrey said in September that she read "Freedom" after Franzen sent her a copy during the summer along with a note. She said she considered it a "tour de force" after the first chapter and called it a "masterpiece."

Flavorwire has a few more quotes from the interview, including this gem from Franzen about meeting President Obama.

“I got summoned to the White House. Someone told me that I had 20 minutes with Obama, which I was told was an eternity. And it kind of felt like one, I mean what do you talk about? I said, ‘You’re my hero,’ and that left 19 minutes and 45 seconds.”

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

And what was life like on that little unicorn ranch where the liberals were living? After a breakfast of cigarettes, snuff porn and speculation about the true origins of my God-given offspring Trig and his miraculous birth after a long labor flying from Texas all over real America to our perfect home state of Alaska, they sit around watching the unicorns graze, sipping their lattes with soy milk and pixie dust, while the farm chores are done by naturalized illegal immigrants not too different from the refuseniks in the Soviet White Russian Gulags I could see from my window until the Cold War was won by another great conservative who was mocked and deridiculed by those Beltway unicorn farmers, Ronald Reagan, and that's why I'm out here today and not in some stuffy political office, smoking cigarettes and watching pornos.

And in the evening time while real Americans watch real TV shows like DWTS, with our very own Bristol, or Glenn Beck, with his real and true lessons from books by Adam Joseph Smith and Francisco Van Hayak, the liberal unicorn farmers are tuned into the NPR echo chamber bereft now of Juan Williams, who knows that to see a man in some Muslim garb in an airport is like a stab in the heart of real America. Then the liberals make some plans to hike taxes, close mines and dismantle offshore drill, baby, drilling facilities, then they tune into some soft-porn show about smoking cigarettes called Mad Men.

But you know what the worst of it is? The unicorns! These animals should roam free the way God made them and this great country, free of deficits, entitlements, subsidies, regulations, bureaucracies, bailouts, Obamacare, Medicare, Social Security, cap and slave, welfare and the death tax. Unicorns belong in the wild! And somebody asked me the other day, Sarah, have you ever hunted a unicorn? I said, where do you think I got this nail polish? It's unicorn blood! First, you creep up on a herd of unicorns in your snowmobile, get one in the cross hairs, and pow! Then, if you want to do it the way we do in Alaska, you take a little saw out of your purse, saw off the horn of the beast and use its sharp point to disembowel the unicorn on the spot. Come the weekend, you can have the whole town over for a unicorn barbecue. And don't forget, all you small-business owners out there, to skin the unicorn for a cozy winter sweaters, and there's nothing like unicorn hooves for brewing up homemade glue!

The entire operation is indebted to the same things that inspire so many other feats of derring-do: boredom, excessive champagne, and an overwhelming infatuation with another man's spectacles. Inspired by all three, Fletcher scrawled a ransom note with a pen from the bar, and in the midst of some distracting chatter, nicked the glasses from Franzen's face. 

Then, the chase began.

After a few seconds I was already escaping through muddy grass and over sharp metal fences. I thought my freedom had been earned and held my prize in the air shouting and laughing with joy until I realised how many members of the security team wanted them back and, perhaps more importantly, to teach me not to damage their reputation as I felt I'd done. I ran towards the Serpentine Lake - my only route. As I approached it, senselessly and at some speed, I decided to cut through it and I dismantled my BlackBerry so that the circuits wouldn't short. I then ran into the water, wading quickly though the lake along the bank and into thick vegetation. I realised that the copy of Franzen's book that I'd helped myself to was also floating away and I eventually found myself almost shoulder-deep in the water under the branch of a tree, where I stayed for some time.

Just picture the copy of Freedom, a casualty of the heist, floating slowly away from the our hero-culprit. Priceless.

When the helicopters came, Fletcher was as surprised as any sensible human being would have been — "An airborne vehicle with infrared capabilities to track a suspect who'd stolen a pair of glasses?" — but he was on the lam, so he wouldn't let this total absurdity faze him. He treated the whole incident like the frivolity that it was, and when he was caught he even congratulated the officer on his work. 

To his credit, the usually super-serious Franzen seems to be taking the whole ordeal in good spirits. He told NPR yesterday that he would not be pressing charges against Fletcher, and insisted he kept his cool while representatives from the publisher were freaking the fuck out. "I've been laughing about the whole thing," the Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying on NPR, "and observing the anguish secondhand."

Fletcher also wanted to make it clear that he has no malice toward Franzen. In fact, he stole the glasses out of admiration. "He is one of the most talented writers out there and I have the utmost respect for the man," he said of the novelist.

To some people, it seems, holding a pair of glasses hostage is the highest form of flattery. 

nfreeman@observer.com

Twitter: @NFreeman1234

Franzen was already having a tough week. The edition of his new novel Freedom that was sent to British stores turned out to be an earlier draft full of rampant imperfection, and it took HarperCollins a week to replace them with the correct version. The uncorrected copies were pulped. 

The glasses theft incident, however, contributed an odd coda to his drama-wracked British tour. The Bookseller said two party-crashers (they claimed to work for Puffin) stepped up to the celebrated American writer at the launch party held at Serpentine Gallery. Then, without hesitation, one of the two punks swiped the glasses from Franzen's face while the other shoved a ransom note in his direction. "$100,000 — Your glasses are yours again!" the note read. The man left a hotmail adress on the note, so Franzen could email him when he decided to pay the $100,000 for his glasses. With that, the thieves fled into Kensington Gardens and Franzen, The Bookseller said, was "stunned."

Naturally, the authorities dispatched a helicopter to find the escaped criminals and the Freedom writer's stolen goods. "Apparently miscreants jumped into serpentine to escape," tweeted Bookseller news editor Graeme Neill, who was referring to the Hyde Park lake. The Guardian cited a tweet by its own Merope Mills, who said the publishing flacks were being "embarrassingly self-flagellating. 'Jonathan — we're SO SO sorry.'" 

The spectacles thief was, at last, apprehended in a bush, and the glasses were given back to Franzen. The Guardian said the writer will not press charges, and HarperCollins communications manager Susanna Frayn called the whole ordeal "a harmless prank."

Whatever the impetus behind the bizarre heist — money, fame, some sort of neo-dadaist cred for embarrassing the literary establishment — it provided us with another Jonathan Franzen anecdote that's emerged from across the pond this week. We expect that he's probably ready to come home.

The British operations of HarperCollins will pull nearly all of the 80,000 books from shelves and replace them with a corrected version, the BBC reports today. "They are minor corrections, things like typos and punctuation errors," a spokeswoman for the publishing company told the BBC, "but, obviously, if you're Jonathan and you have spent 10 years working on a novel, you want the finished product to go out." The novel, which came out a month ago in the U.S., was released in the U.K. earlier this week. 

The Guardian writes that at a London reading last night, Franzen acknowledged the errors — the printer had accidentally gone ahead with an old draft — and asked readers to hold off on buying the book until Monday. Readers will be able to distinguish the errorless version by a sticker with the book's (extremely positive) review in The New York Times, HarperCollins said in a statement.

So far, American booksellers and readers have not reported imperfections in the stateside version of the novel.