The Wake

A man named Pete King is running for re-election as the representative of New York’s third district. He’s a really swell guy. Despite being a Republican, he has sustained a long and friendly relationship with the local Islamic center and has regularly garnered support among minority voters during his fourteen-year tenure. In the last election, he won with 63% of the vote. He attributes his success to courage and “outspoken integrity,” and that’s a quote from Newsday. Did you know that this same man recently said that 85% of masjids (mosques) in America are run by extremists who are …

Read more →

Posters for artists such as The Fuck Yeahs and Styrfoam’s Duck Eufios consume most of the wall space in Radio K’s main office. There are also radio promotional stickers and old CD’s lining the edge of the ceiling that glimmer silver, purple and green. Retro music is playing faintly in the background as students and volunteers mill around, and a wooden monkey with red polka dot coconuts, a green grass skirt, and a Radio K headband sits on top of the employee mailboxes. “Have you seen Aimee?” DJ Katie Amundson yells as she walks through the door, looking at the …

Read more →

Departing from the cynical and oft-political sentiments found with her synth-riff and cross-genre band, Metric front woman and Broken Social Scene/Stars collaborator Emily Haines (together with a collection of musicians she calls The Soft Skeleton) has released a collection of tracks written between 2002 and 2006, under the title “Knives Don’t Have Your Back”. It’s hard for anyone to outdo current successes by releasing previously-made material, and Haines, unfortunately, hasn’t proven to be an exception. She has, however, made a few of the bigger alt-crowd hits in the last few years, so Knives shouldn’t be immediately dismissed. The first three …

Read more →

Strengthened by the infectious melodies of their self-professed electro/indie/disco-house songs, The Battle Royale has turned heads at Radio K and First Avenue, where they won 2005’s Battle of the Underage Underground competition. The win secured them a one-record deal with local label Afternoon Records, who produced their debut full-length, “Sparkle Dust Fantasy.”The Battle Royale consists of four local high school students. Mark Ritsema covers keyboards, vocals, and beats, Sam Robertson’s on organ, Grace Fiddler contributes bass and vocals, and John Pelant sings and plays guitar. The group, named after a gruesome Japanese flick, has constructed a surprisingly dense album in …

Read more →

After releasing a split record and a pair of EPs in 2004, Springfield, MO troupe Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin produced their first full-length album, Broom, in 2005. The band has since signed to Polyvinyl Records, with Broom garnering a remastering and re-release for Oct. 24. The band consists of lead singer, songwriter and guitarist John Robert, lead guitarist and songwriter Will Knauer, singer, songwriter and drummer Philip Dickey, and Jonathan James on bass guitar and drums. The quartet has crafted a fragile, melancholy pop outing in Broom. The album has up-tempo moments, but the real highlights are …

Read more →

Sometimes silence is the most beautiful sound of all. The film Cosmic Dissonance is proof. J. Roberts Larsen’s movie is a dialogue-free exploration of the landscape of Armageddon and how easily it can be found–even right herein the Twin Cities, where the film was shot. Using Minnesota’s winter as the backdrop, one lone woman (Jennifer Bahe) backpacks through desolate areas, including a junkyard full of debris and rusty bicycles, a frozen prairie, and graffiti-covered train tracks. Along the journey, our heroine takes time to explore, climb trees, try on makeup in an abandoned apartment, roller skate through an industrial parking …

Read more →

Yo-Yo Ma, Michael Jordan and several not-so-famous folks are putting their best faces forward in Northeast Minneapolis this fall. Internationally-celebrated portrait photographer Marc Hauser is displaying over 50 photographs in a solo exhibit at the six-year-old Rogue Buddha Gallery.The show, Hauser’s first in Minneapolis, is a 40-year retrospect of the native Chicagoan’s work. His first portrait, a sepia-tone image of a gentle-eyed teenage boy on a local beach (‘B.F. on the Beach’), is one shot of ‘regular people’ mingling with original celebrity photographs. A few famous muses captured by Hauser are John Mellencamp, Sofia Loren, Mariel Hemingway, Jim Morrison, and …

Read more →

feelin’ desperate
reelin’ from all the past actions, threats, and passing aspirations
tryin’ to connect a reason with breathe and the rest of existence
bobbin’ for apples in a sea of emotion
“persistence” she whispers
and i see a light while drownin’
then presence overcame the conscious
and i woke up floating,living life like a leaf on the current - searching for virtue
waiting for an angel to come hold me, take me home or show me
that there’s more to this body than the core
there’s more to a rose than the thorns
and though it feels like a …

Read more →

We buried our ancestors here,
atop these bluffs
overlooking the river.
The ones who took this land and
made it holy,
we buried them here.
The mounds mold mirror images of
what we will become,
what we will hold sacred.
God doesn’t talk to me here,
but the Mississippi does so
we buried our ancestors here

“It is a great pleasure to be with you,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Tuesday, Oct. 3 when he spoke at Northrop Memorial Auditorium. “At this stage in my life and career it’s a great pleasure to be anywhere,” he said, followed by laughter from the crowd. Powell continued by talking about the transitions that we make in life. Powell joked about a time when he had his own 757 and the red carpet that went with it. “One day you’re the Secretary of State and the next they give your plane to ‘Condi,’” Powell joked.After retiring …

Read more →

The four American designers highlighted in the exhibit at McNeal Hall on the St. Paul Campus emerged in the 1940s and are considered monumental in closing the gap between European and United States fashion. Together, Norman Norell, Pauline Trigere, Geoffrey Beene and Bill Blass transformed America into a flourishing world of fashion in a post-World War II environment.Norman Norell was born in 1900 in Indiana. He broke new ground by translating French couture into fresh-looking, ready-to-wear apparel. He made New York’s 7th Avenue garment district the rival of Paris at the end of WWII. By 1928 he had become the …

Read more →

Nov. 21, 1981 marked the last Golden Gopher football game played on campus grass. The Gophers led in the fourth quarter only to fall to border-rival Wisconsin 26-21 at Memorial Stadium. A year passed, and the home team moved off-campus to the newly-built Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis. Ten years passed, and empty lots replaced an aged athletic amphitheater. Home field advantage became a memory.Nearly twenty-five years later and with Stadium Village a little quieter, the groundbreaking of the new TCF Bank Stadium on Sept. 30 brought football fever on an unseasonably warm afternoon. U of M …

Read more →

Across the Midwest, hundreds of immigrants and refugees are detained in county jails contracted by the Department of Homeland Security. According to the National Immigrant Justice Center, these immigrants spend months, even years in remote detention facilities, isolated from attorneys and criminalized by society. They face obstacles in due process and are often refused basic rights.Barbara Frey, director of the Human Rights Program on campus, along with the Midwest Coalition of Human Rights, is working to change all of that through education and advocacy. In a lecture at Elmer L. Andersen Library on Sept. 26, Frey touched on the many …

Read more →

You may not have heard the names John James, Jeff Johnson, or Lori Swanson, but come No. 7 you will have to decide which of these three you want to be Minnesota’s next attorney general. This year the “AG” race was noted early on for its drama, following Matt Entenza’s withdrawal and subsequent scramble by DFLer’s to replace him. The response of the candidates has been to keep low profiles. Swanson won the DFL endorsement in the Sept. 12 primary and faces Republican nominee Johnson and Independence Party candidate James in the race. Entenza’s withdrawal was certainly the most high-profile …

Read more →

I wandered into what was unknown territory for me — I’m not really a hockey fan. As I walked downstairs to the basement of Mariucci Arena I thought to myself, “Damn, you should have worn a short skirt and high heels or have had Craig, my editor, do this part.” I watched as hockey players took turns talking to various media reps. Mariucci is once again buzzing with the anticipation of another record-breaking season.The Maroon and Gold finished last year’s season with a 27-9-5 record, earning a number one seat in the NCAA Tournament for the fourth consecutive season. The …

Read more →