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THE JBfk SUN Section www.sunspot.nettoday TODAY Tuesday, September 2, 2003 Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 For Spade, there's no stopping his career From 'SNL' to now, the laughs continue Susan Reimer 'Thirteen' advances extreme view of teen life WRITINGS FROM A WAR ZONE A Naval officer's dispatches in poetry and prose illuminate a complicated place, and a man who cared. ByLisaPollak: SunStaff THIRTEEN, A SAVAGE film about a middle-school girl gone horribly, horribly bad, has everyone buzzing. Movieland is buzzing about first-time director Catherine Hardwicke, who took top honors at the Sundance Film Festival of independent films. About 15-year-old Nikki Reed, who co-wrote the screenplay based on her own life and who portrays the seductive but toxic Evie. And about young Evan Rachel Wood, who plays the part of Tracy, whose semi-normal life is hijacked way out of bounds by Evie.

And, Thirteen has parents buzzing about its unstinting view of the secret life of our middle-schoolers. Soccer team phone trees are alive with "See it!" and "Don't see it!" as well as "Take your daughter!" and "Don't take your daughter!" advice. It is hard to know what to make of this movie or what to do with it. As the movie begins, it is the first day of seventh grade for sweet kid Tracy, who realizes immediately that she is way behind the fashion curve. She is drawn like a moth to Evie, so popular and so bad.

Evie smells Tracy's vulnerability from across the school yard, and, in one of the swiftest tumbles from grace imaginable, Tracy's life is in ruins. In just cinematic minutes, she is stealing, smoking, drinking, snorting, dealing, piercing, tattooing, huffing and sexing. Holly Hunter is Tracy's divorced and struggling mother, Melanie. She is distracted by money troubles, by her own battle with alcohol and by her here-today, in-rehab-tomorrow boyfriend, but she adores her kids and tries to keep them close. She just can't keep it together, and her inconstancy, distracted-ness and naivete make just the hole in the fence Evie and Tracy need.

The movie ends with Melanie clutching a wretched Tracy in desperate love, but you leave the theater without any hope that her grasp will hold. Hard to believe all of this happened in the first four months of seventh grade. Thirteen puts our bewildered and bewil- See Reimer, 2e By Ron Dicker SPECIAL TO THE SUN For someone 5 feet 4 inches tall with a choirboy face, David Spade is a resilient fellow. Bad reviews do not stop him. He has bounced back with another solo vehicle, Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, after critics skewered his last movie, Joe Dirt.

"The great revenge is having it make so much money on video," he said of the latter. Bad assistants do not stop him either. After his former personal aide, David Skippy Malloy, shot him with a stun gun and robbed him, Spade found more reliable help. "I just made sure I could take her," he said. "She weighs about 100, and now and then I make her flinch.

I pull out my fist to let her know it could happen any time." Spade, 39, is serious about show business. He launched his career on Saturday Night Live and has proven to be one of the show's more enduring graduates. Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, opening Friday, is a goof about a sitcom actor who made it big while in grammar school and now wants to reclaim the childhood he never had. He pays a normal family to let him move in with them. He hopes that experiencing real life will land him a role in the next Rob Reiner movie.

Dickie Roberts has no father to speak of, and his new family has a wretched dad. In Joe Dirt, Spade played a stuck-in-the-'80s doofus who loses his parents. In real life, Spade was abandoned by his father and his war-veteran stepfather killed himself. Not to get too Dr. Phil about this, but is Spade working out a few issues in his movies? "I know that in my real life as a kid I didn't freak out that bad about it, but it does affect you later," he said.

"There's things deep down that happen when the dad splits." But, he added, "It wasn't my intention to put my boo-hoo life in there." The ha-ha life has worked out well for Spade. Although the sitcom Just Shoot Me was canceled last spring, Spade's six-year stint as the boss' pet at a women's magazine earned him an Emmy nomination and proved that sketch comedians do not have to fade away. He is one of the few Saturday Night Live refugees to land on a hit network series. "The second you leave Saturday Night Live, they get the new crop," he said. "When you go, if you're not working on a show, it's always hard to get work if you're not working.

I got lucky with Just Shoot Me. I probably would have drifted off somewhere." Spade keeps his SNL connections. Fred Wolf, the head writer, has co-written many of Spade's movies, including this one. Adam See Spade, 4e (5 "ltiT''j CHRISTMAS 1993 While overseas, Kylan Jones-Huffman, a Naval officer, posted the poem below to friends in an online poetry group. On the last Sunday in June, Lt.

Kylan Jones-Huffman, a Navy reservist stationed in Bahrain, e-mailed a poem to members of his online haiku group. He said he dedicated the poem to his friend Marianne, "whose good friend was killed this past week, somewhere south of Baghdad." late night call the remains will arrive on Thursday the weather here not much different from Iraq Jones-Huffman might not have known the soldier who'd been killed, but "I'm sure I passed over the report in the daily summary," he wrote. "It would have read something like this: 16 significant actions, 6 initiated by coalition forces seeking contact; 1 US KIA, 8 US WIA, 2 Iraqi KIA, 4 Iraqi WIA, 27 But they all blur together, and I am not reminded often enough that each of those numbers is its own tragedy." It's hard to say which is more haunting now, the poem or the prose that followed it. What is certain is that Jones-Huffman's life ended in tragedy, too. On Aug.

21, the 31-year-old U.S. Naval Academy graduate and College Park resident was shot and killed by an unidentified gunman while riding in a vehicle in a town south of Baghdad. Last week, in the midst of preparations for a private memo- lost: a serviceman with a scholar's mind and a poet's soul, a student of history and languages who yearned to play a productive role in rebuilding Iraq even as he struggled to make sense of the operation that sent him there. "Now that we've gotten into this mess, we have to make it work, and not just for the sake of the Iraqis," Jones-Huffman wrote in a July 4 e-mail to Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan with whom he'd corresponded frequently in recent months. "Whatever arises in Iraq had better be worth the deaths it will take to get there The professor had never met Jones-Huffman in person.

Neither had many of the poets in the online haiku group. These people knew the man only from his writing; the depth of their grief is a testament to the power of his words. gaunt children selling old bayonets noonday sun summer solstice women in black abayas wade in the sea twelve hour watch: the morning threat report in rhymed couplets Officially, he was a Navy reserve officer based in Bahrain. But unofficially, he was a writer of haiku observing the world, distilling experience, conveying so much meaning in so few words. See Writings, 5e angry men point to damaged buildings and then at me rial service, Jones-Huffman's brother, Niko Huffman, said the grieving family did not wish to speak to the press about Kylan.

And yet in his poems and other writings composed in the final months of his life and made public after his death Kylan Jones-Huffman speaks for himself. His eloquent, honest reflections on the war and its aftermath are both a rare glimpse at the conflict through the eyes of one who was there and a harrowing reminder of what the world has Music column Critic Tim Smith is on vacation. His column on will return Sept. 16. Clothes encounters in art INSIDE Liz Smith: An interview with George Clooney.

Page 2e Abby: Blackout may be date-rape drug related. Page 8e Comics 6e Crossword 6e, 7e Movies 4e Television 3e Horoscope 3e Bridge 3e Coming tomorrow Taste: Cooks see if they can stand the heat of the kitchen. In Couwenberg's works, we are what we wear by one aunt, she noticed hints of an uptight demeanor and regimented mannerisms. And in the less-than-perfect creations sewn by a second aunt, she saw material evidence of a laid-back approach to life. In clothing, Couwenberg began to see metaphors for life and relationships.

She discovered that the family's "textile tradition" something that she wanted to carry on had deeper roots in sociology than in clothing design. Instead of making high-fashion garments, she began to create art, "celebrating the craft" of her ancestors through thought-provoking pieces that focused on the social and cultural meaning of clothes. Now chair of the fiber department at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Couwenberg over the years has made representational forms of corsets, girdles, cuffs and collars that explore how what we wear controls and restrains our bodies. And she has used sewing patterns and embroidery techniques to create two-dimensional pieces through which she questions the roles of women in society. In her newest body of work, part of a faculty exhibit on display through See Textiles, 5e TASTE By Sarah Schaffer SUN STAFF Clothes have always fascinated Annet Couwenberg.

Decades ago, as a child in the Netherlands, she spent long hours watching her mother, aunts and grandmother craft clothes as part of their weekly chores. Their hands moved quickly as they pinned and marked the dress panels. The fabrics draped softly as they sewed and hemmed the garments. She was enthralled by the intricate stitch work, the feel of textured cloth. But years later, after working for a short time as a fashion designer in New York, she realized that clothing was not what really interested her.

It was the people who wore them. "The clothing was really reflecting their character, their personalities and their culture," Couwenberg says. In the stiff yet expertly sewn dresses created I I (X)kS BfcS ANDRE F. CHUNG SUN STAFF Annet Couwenberg's art grew out of a girlhood spent watching female relatives sew..