The Wake

It’s still dark, it’s still jazzy, but since the smoking ban went into effect at 12:01 a.m. March 31, the Artist’s Quarter is oddly clean. The ban was signed by Mayor Chris Coleman almost a year after his predecessor Randy Kelly vetoed a similar bill. The fight to stay smoking wasn’t as fierce this time around, but there were still many dissenters. “It’s a jazz club, you should be able to smoke,” Dave Horst, bartender at the once smoky Artist’s Quarter, says. In the weeks after the revised smoking ban went into effect, the smokers of St. Paul have found …

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Counting on leaving Coffman bookstore with cash to start your summer in style, you eagerly inch up to the counter, hand over your pile of this semester’s textbooks and the counter clerk starts scanning away. Gazing at the screen, you notice you are banking $2 for a book that cost you $60. The clerk hands you a pathetic “stack” of cash—much more slender than the one you shelled out months ago to buy the books—and you’re pushed to the limit. And you’ve got reasons to be pissed. Students pay an average of $900 a year on textbooks, according to a …

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The Big Ten Men’s and Women’s Tennis Championships are near (April 27 to April 30), and both teams are aiming to win their respected conferences. But this will be a difficult task considering both the men and women will probably have to overcome division goliaths to win. The women’s conference goliath manifests herself as a wildcat. The Northwestern Wildcats have won seven consecutive Big Ten Championships and they are once again dominating the division with an undefeated conference record. The women’s conference championship will be held in Champaign, Ill. Meanwhile, the men’s division has been dominated by Illinois, with the …

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The Vikings 2005 season was filled with accusations and key injuries that led to some of the personnel moves made this spring. Mike Tice is gone and Brad Childress is in at Head Coach. Daunte cleared his name of any boat scandal charges and then was asked to clear his locker. The Vikings had an enormous amount of cap room to spend on free agents and they seized the opportunity accordingly. The Wake will break down the implications of key player acquisitions and give a preview of what the Vikings will be looking for in the NFL draft to be …

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After a convincing three-game sweep to begin its 2006 home schedule, Minnesota looks like a baseball team that’s finally found some power in its bats…By Minnesota, I mean the Twins. The Gophers? Not so much.Coming off a sub-par 2005 season, the Twins began its new season with 13 homeruns in its first nine games. The Gophers baseball team, on the other hand, knocked out five homeruns through its first 27 games. This had the beloved campus club ranking second to last in homers among its Big Ten competitors.Then came the 28th game, an April 12 non-conference game at South Dakota …

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Hi, My Name is _____________.If we have to have numbers, I claim 62. Recently, in my political science course, I got schooled in U of M privacy policy. In the classroom we regularly sign an attendance sheet. The sheet, which is passed from one student to another around the classroom, contains the first and last names of everyone in the class and apparently, is an infringement of our rights. By letting the other students know our names we are putting ourselves on the line to be victims of stalking, online predation or any other of a list of possible crimes. …

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Growing up in the southwest corner of Minnesota left me unexposed to lentils and bitter yogurt—I ate “hot-dish,” which is anything but exotic. The people in my hometown were mostly white and Lutheran. That’s not to say I wasn’t exposed to other cultures. Nobles County, the next county to the south of my farm, has 11 percent of Minnesota’s growing Hispanic population. They were drawn to the area by the now closed Campbell’s soup plant. Still, I had never been confronted with more cultural differences than when my college roommate, Ashama, turned out to be from India. Our lifestyles clashed …

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The Appleseed Cast is no stranger to concept albums. Their seventh CD, Peregrine, shows yet again why the Lawrence, KS-based quartet continue to do it better than anyone out there.Peregrine goes like this: in a wooded rural area a deranged father copes with murdering his daughter. She returns in the afterlife as a ghost to haunt him, and he struggles to live with the weight of her death on his shoulders. Later, in a type of mercy killing, a peregrine falcon ends the father’s misery. Pretty heavy stuff, but what about the music? This time around the Appleseed Cast brings …

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The evolution of the Flaming Lips’ music is nearly as trippy as the music itself. Starting out as a lo-fi indie rock band and progressing to fuzzed-out psychedelia, most recently they’ve been doing some of the best pop-friendly atmospheric noise orchestrations you’re likely to find. Half the fun of listening to their newest album, At War with the Mystics, is finding out what sound the band is taking on now.The thing is, there is no one sound to this album. It opens with a catchy ’60s-esque psyched-up singalong about the dangers of power, both personal and political. Immediately we’re transported …

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I was listening to “Traces,” the second track on the new Built to Spill album, and trying to figure out why they included some guy saying, “Who is Mike Town?” in the background. But it’s not that bad, I thought, it’s just strange. And after all, it is Built To Spill; there must be some reason. Then I heard it again on the following track “Liar,” and realized I am a fool. The real reason is that I have peeked, opened early. I stole the album and Mike Town is an electronic watermark. So there. I’m a thief, but it’s …

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With no flashy marquee to announce itself, the Bedlam Theatre took me a while to find, but you know you’re in for an entertaining night when your first task is to find the venue. Located behind Palmer’s Bar, in the shadow of the Cedar-Riverside housing complex, the small theater is easy to miss. The West Bank is home to a staggering number of performance centers, but none of them have the edge you’ll find at the Bedlam. John Francis Bueche, co-artistic director at the theater, says the Bedlam occupies a “unique niche” in the West Bank in its ability to …

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For the Master of Fine Arts Exhibitions at the University’s Katherine E. Nash Gallery, a vision is a vision no matter how twisted. The piece entitled “Surreal Fantastic” is not artist Jonathan Bridges’ favorite by any means. In fact, he finds it to be the most random of his selections.And still, there is something undeniable about it. “Surreal Fantastic” is, after all, an image depicting two nondescript clay bodies sculpted by Bridges in a rather compromising position. To top it off, his head is superimposed over both.“A woman who saw it said it best,” smiles the Kansas native. “No one …

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Blake Sennett’s thin, sweaty mustache and greasy, all-encompassing bangs overwhelmed the microphone April 10 at First Avenue. As he belted out the lyrics to yet another pop melody layered heavily with depressing lyrics about his parents and some girlfriend, I thought, “I’m so glad I didn’t pay for this.” The night wore on, and so did The Elected. Sennett’s mustache became thinner and sweatier, and his songs more and more predictable. They all sounded nice, but every three songs or so I would think, “Didn’t they play this already?” For all I know, they could have been doing some sort …

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On a day when you feel like you’re losing touch with what it is that makes you human, there is nothing that peels back the emotional layers more effectively than perusing through your high school CD collection. No matter what your taste, there was something that you discovered when you were thirteen that broke your heart and tangled it back together. Years later, when you smooth out the scratches with your shirt sleeve and push play, you are reminded of just how raw that connection can be. Though it was released just this year, Jenny Dalton’s Fleur De Lily …

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The museum was quiet. The rooms echoed softly with the wandering steps of the last patrons. It was closing time, but there were always a few stubborn people, who waited to leave until the last possible moment, a few who wanted their money’s worth. The security guards checked their watches, waiting until it would be appropriate to be pushy. Coffee had stopped dripping in the café, and the ticket takers lazily tapped their feet against the floor.But when the stranger came, he came fast. The doors flew inward with the force of his entry, and an air of mad, desperate …

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