The Wake

A cold Sunday afternoon finds the normally bustling Lake Street barren. Several blocks between Bloomington and Chicago Avenues are blocked off from normal traffic by police but the beating of drums seem to pull pedestrians from all directions to a crowd that is gathered in front of the Chicago-Lake Liquor store. Here in the shadow of the restored Sears building is a symbol of hope for economic change that citizens from all walks of life have gathered to support—to demand a change for immigrants’ rights.The March For Immigrants’ Rights, held on Sunday, Feb. 12, was meant to promote “immigrant dignity” …

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National Freedom to Marry Day was well on its way. The bathrooms were marked “unisex,” assortments of rainbow-colored balloons adorned the room and 150 people gathered in the Great Hall of Coffman Memorial Union Feb. 12 as the Queer Student Cultural Center kicked off its celebration to end discrimination against gay marriage.This event is the first time the QSCC has thrown a gala in recognition of National Freedom to Marry Day. “This event is usually much smaller,” says QSCC co-chair Jen Mohnkern. “Previously this has been an open house or lunch event mostly focused on the students who stopped by …

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After dominating the Western Collegiate Hockey Association for six seasons, the University of Minnesota’s Women’s Hockey team is adjusting to life in the middle. The Gophers put up their worst regular season record since the inception of Women’s Hockey in the WCHA, but when “worst ever” is third place is it really that bad?The Gophers opened the season with a bang. An impressive five-game winning streak in October left fans saying “Natalie who?” But after their streak-ending loss to Duluth they struggled; often failing to win back-to-back games. Most notably the weekend of Feb. 10, when Minnesota reached 20 wins …

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The World Series of baseball, an annual October tradition that brings to mind the pinstripes of New York, the jokers from Beantown and most recently the overachieving lads from the Windy City.But why are the victors considered the World Champions? Granted there are players from around the world participating in the event, but aside from a Toronto surge in the mid-’90s, all teams were based in the good-old United States.Perhaps it’s time for the ultimate baseball showdown to prove which country is the true World Champion. Players lured to the United States by big contracts could return to their homelands …

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In 1940, Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land is your Land” in response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Berlin’s standard song romanticized a false concept of America: “Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free, let us all be grateful for a land so fair.” Even to this day, Americans sing this song as one of many anthems of the nation—its ideas are what created America. However, Berlin’s song unintentionally introduced the paradox of American freedom: in order to be free in America, one must sacrifice his or her freedom. Guthrie challenged Berlin and America by simply demanding that …

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Choose your poison, because in this land of polarity you’re bound to be labeled with one side of the American body image scale. That may sound dramatic, but with over two-thirds of American adults considered clinically overweight and disorders such as anorexia and bulimia on a constant rise, body shapes and sizes are losing their shades of gray. Early this January I sat with a close friend as we contemplated all the messages about how to fix our bodies that had been shoved down our throats since the New Year had begun. Food labeled “lean” this and “low-carb” that being …

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Erik Appelwik was not on time for his interview. Nor was he late. I sat at the Purple Onion for almost an hour before I found what had happened to the plans we made the day before. As 20 minutes and then 45 minutes passed, I began to wonder if he had gotten held up, if he had forgotten, or if I was being blown off. Finally my phone rang. “Jenny? I am soooo sorry. I totally forgot.” Figures. Erik was mid-move and at the top of a slew of repair people coming that day. He also had no indoor …

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The last place you’d expect to find a former member of the androgynous pre-punk band New York Dolls is in a Mormon Temple, but that’s exactly where documentary filmmaker Greg Whiteley found bass player Arthur Kane. Arthur, whose nickname was “Killer Kane” when he played with the Dolls 30 years ago, discovered the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints in 1989. This journey from rock excess to Mormon piety is the focal point of Whiteley’s documentary New York Doll. Filmed in the months leading up to a reunion show in 2004, the film uses archival footage of the New York …

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A charred canvas punctured with small, circular holes. Patches of muddled orange paint seeping to the surface like dried blood. Rows of paper bolstered by wire. This is “Baghdad Smoke,” Iraqi artist Hana’ Malallah’s haunting abstraction of a land under siege. It’s part of a collection of 17 Iraqi book artists’ work touring the U.S. in an exhibit titled Dafatir, or “notebook”, in Arabic. Each row of the canvas, which hung like a banner from the ceiling of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA), can also collapse upon the next until it’s a neatly compressed rectangle, small enough to …

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“Sign this or you will be burned alive.” Her breathing halts, her eyes glisten with unblinking anguish, and her face throbs numbly as she slowly and deliberately twists her head first to one side, then to the other. An excruciatingly low, morbid drone of electrostatic and dragging metal makes the walls quiver. “Even if you part my soul from my body, I will confess nothing.”The gruesome scene depicted above is The Prisoner, an intensely dark and emotive 12 minutes and 26 seconds of cinematic experience by Minneapolis artist Abinadi Meza, raises harrowing questions about the implications of captive interrogation, asking …

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“This is a story of four souls bound together in their love for one another,” proclaims Johnny Oliver, an actor in University Theatre’s production of Las Meninas. He intends to continue his emotional-expressive delivery of this key monologue, but something is not quite right.“Do it again,” says director Tisch Jones bluntly, observing him from the front row of the arena theatre in Rarig Center, where Las Meninas opens Feb. 24. “And don’t say anything this time. Show me.” Oliver looks confused. She explains, “Pretend you cannot talk, but you still have to make this story work. Make me understand. And …

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The corpse of a fan dancer announces the end of the world in the first act of Clive Barker’s Frankenstein in Love. The bodiless head of a middle-aged man is stabbed for refusing to silence his screams, and a “Bogey Man” shows up in the aftermath of a bloody South American revolution to take control of the tiny nation in which this play is set. Curious commencement for what playwright Barker calls a “romance.”“For me it’s a mix between a Wildean comedy, and Titus Andronicus,” says Nic Hager, director of the Xperimental Theatre’s production of Frankenstein in Love, and a …

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This is the first hazed morning of the twentieth year of my time.
My bloomed perennial hands unfolding to button flies in the dark of morning.
a blanket cracked open and shivered as I leave to
gas the pedal over four lane interstate,
back to the city in which I sleep.The expectant wisdom of this day
is groggy mute
still from the chloroform of adolescence,
and I have left my chest’s thumping furnace
still nineteen laying with you in rest.I do not need this—
aged calm.
Hoping still to believe
that the earth is flat.I have found no …

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In a pair of your sister’s
pink socks
you had a dance party— through the phone
I could hear the
shuffle of your feet on the carpet,
I could see your free
hand wave above your head, your
eyes squeezed
shut, smiling, and I could hear in
the back the beat
of the News, though you claim not to
know the Power of Love—
but I Know you Know it, you
pink footed dancer, you
brown-haired wonder-girl, you
singer of secrets!

Are you real? The
sycophant news junkie writhes
on the couch wondering sees
the world in your eyes the suffering
hunger war victory speeches passion
so passionlessly read dispassionate face
clear eyes, furious frenzied desperate to
prove your body exists
from the waist down desire erection
something under your pants no smooth
Ken Doll Groin covered by modular
plastic faux wood panel
naked
from the screen down are you real?