The Wake

Sometimes life can be a little pastiche. That is to say, there are so many different things going on that they seem random, or unrelated. According to the late American playwright Arthur Miller, “…theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.” And so it is. Jason Robert Brown clearly reflects the seemingly disjoint aspects of everyday life in “Songs for a New World,” a musical made up of 16 different songs, each of which stands alone as its own story. To Nicky Fritz, this sounded like a challenge she was willing to take.Fritz is …

Read more →

In case you missed it, the temperature was well below zero in downtown Minneapolis last Friday night. But as they say, the show must go on. On this freezing night about 75 people showed up to see First Avenue’s 11th Annual Cover Song Contest at the 7th Street Entry. Eleven area bands were given a half-hour to prove that they could play other people’s songs and a case of cheap wine awaited the winner.The night started with a thud. The Fillmores, moonlighting as Who’s the Boss and the E Street Band, opened the competition with a set of Bruce Springsteen …

Read more →

Chasing sun on water we glide
on husks of metal across
earth or sky not knowing
which end is up. Wind slides between shirt
and skin causing
bodies to search for heat,
thigh against thigh.His profile cuts
horizon, searching
infinite blue asI watch ripples recede from oar,
wooden, smooth, and slender.I grab his hand as we slip
through water like glass

I saw the tree and it was knotted and twisted
Its face was hidden from me.
It was twisted,
her body was twisted.
Right around the middle she was twisted.
And she was there.
Rooted and hunched and twisted.
She was rooted and hunched and twisted.
She was winding in her waiting,
growing more twisted,
waiting and growing,
…

Read more →

At the entrance of the Atrium Gallery in the Andersen Library, an old-fashioned marquee reads: “Now Playing: Blackface(s) in Film, The Givens Collection of African-American Literature.” The exhibit celebrates black film pioneers like actor Sidney Poitier and directors Oscar Micheaux, Spike Lee and Gordon Parks, who became Hollywood’s first major black director with The Learning Tree, 1969, and also happens to have spent some of his life in St. Paul, Minn.I walk the miniature red carpet into the exhibit and am greeted at the end by a mannequin, dressed like a ticket-taker in black pants and a gray suit jacket …

Read more →

The story of Bob Dylan is as mythological a tale as any ever told. No iconic figure has loomed larger in the cultural conscience over the last forty-five years. How could any single tale or any body of work claim such longevity? The new Weisman Art exhibit does its best to piece together the puzzle while paying due tribute to Minnesota’s favorite son. The exhibit kicked off on the night of February the 2nd via a preview party featuring several area musicians. “Spider,” John Koerner, and Tony “Little Sun” Glover, Dylan’s contemporaries on the Dinkytown folk scene, were the first …

Read more →

Think, for a moment, of all the Jewish actors, directors, musicians, comedians, writers and other pop culture icons that you can. Is your brain overloading or are you drawing a blank? A long list should probably come to mind, Rafi Samuels-Schwartz of Hillel says. According to the JCSC Fellow, the context in which pop culture exists is one that was shaped by “Jewishness.”In Hillel’s entrance lounge, Samuels-Schwartz and nine others gathered for a discussion entitled “Just how Jewish are we anyway?” to talk about the influence Jews have had on American culture. “This much,” one student joked, holding his thumb …

Read more →

The Coffman Memorial Union Theater crowd’s enthusiasm was almost startling. The smiling faces are those of the children and their families from New Orleans who lost nearly everything except each other to Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005. “Children of New Orleans, Still Weathering the Storm” was sponsored by Mercy Corps, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts/Riverfront and Operation REACH, Inc.; each of which are organizations contributing to the rebuilding of New Orleans. The speakers were eleven children sharing the documentary they made during six weeks at Gulfsouth Youth Action Camp. Before the film was screened, a slideshow displayed …

Read more →

Herpes is spreading quickly across the state, and it seems possible that cage fighting will do the same very soon and be just as nasty.Thursday night at the Myth Nightclub, Elite Fighting X-treme celebrated its one-year anniversary the only way they know how: they hosted a jaw-dropping, tongue wagging, drooling spectacle of mixed martial art fighting along with strippers and ring girls dancing between matches.The crowd, sufficiently amped and drunk, enthusiastically cheered for every takedown, haymaker and arm-bar inside the octagon. The action was quick inside the cage with all but three fights lasting past the first round. The arena …

Read more →

On November 8 of last year, President Bush sawed off a dead leg as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “resigned.” Americans insofar had sat quiet through the exodus of the neo-cons, the members of President Bush’s cabinet who are largely responsible for the war in Iraq and the Bush post-9/11 platform of war profiteering and expansive executive power. The timeliness of Rummy’s resignation carries with it a weight that the previous exits of Powell, Ashcroft, Card, Fleisher, McLellan, Tenet, Wolfowitz, Feith, O’Neill, Veneman, Thompson, Snow, Norton, Evans, Paige, Martinez, Mineta, Principi, and Ridge, (to name a few) didn’t. With Rumsfeld …

Read more →

By the time they smeared the warm oil across my forehead, buying the shred of a soul my mother insists I have, it was already too late. When I first lost my dignity, I was fourteen years old and dolled up in a suit at the front of the Basilica downtown with my fellow confirmation class byproducts. Slightly less than a decade and a half earlier my uncle was holding my gelatinous body and unformed skull while this dude, not the same person as the one with the oil, but close enough, poured water down my forehead. I imagine I …

Read more →

Arriving for the show at 10:00 p.m., courtesy of Campus Circulator Luanne’s dance party commuter, I was informed I had missed out on show opener Tarlton. Several sources further informed that I hadn’t missed much more than an embarrassing display of bass guitar and lack luster drumming. “It was like background music, for talking over,” says one unenthused man. Others expressed similar sentiments but having not seen them myself, I can’t confirm or deny those claims. Luckily, none were appalled to the point of departure, as what transpired next will go down in Dinkytown history.The Varsity Theatre is truly a …

Read more →

As chilly hipsters stepped in past the graffitied walls of the Intermedia Arts gallery in Uptown Minneapolis this past Friday night, they were immediately greeted by a complete sensory experience. The sound of the Pixies’ “Wave Of Mutilation” and the warm light of the room were a welcome change from the howling wind and shades of gray outside. Minneapolis 55408, the latest exhibit at Intermedia Arts, held its opening reception on Friday, January 26th. The event drew friends, neighbors and art enthusiasts alike in from the cold to admire work made by artists in the community.In its eleventh consecutive year, …

Read more →

Taking a history class? Has your professor just unloaded a monster reading assignment? Well, my friends To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie have the cure for your homework ills: Retire Early EP by this Richmond, VA, duo is stuffed to the gills with image conjuring sounds sure to make your assignment a far more imaginative read. Like experimental, ambience rockers Massive Attack and Portishead before them, they’ve captured a mood conducive to thinking nostalgically upon times far more romantic and violent than those we may be currently stumbling through. The group’s name was drawn from an era of French history. “The …

Read more →

This Liverpool quartet began playing nine years ago. Visitations is their fourth album, but it’s a fresh start in the direction of absolute gold. They released their debut album in 2000, titled Internal Wrangler which landed them a tour with Radiohead. In 2002 they came out with Walking With Thee, and then in ’04 with Winchester Cathedral, a gloom and doom record teetering on the edge of scary. On the other hand, Visitations has plenty of mood setters, and some of their most optimistic lyrics to date. Album opener, “Family,” features fuzz to the guitars and bounce to the vocals …

Read more →