The Wake

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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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, …

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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 …

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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 …

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March 3rd – Zep fans will rejoice and the spirits of Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones will rock in full glory as the Minnesota Orchestra performs the music of Led Zeppelin at the Target Center. Whether or not the entire orchestra has been sentenced to an eternity in hell for playing devil’s music is yet to be determined. But we do know that this is not the first time that orchestra members are letting their hair loose, so to speak. The one-night-only, March 3rd show is actually an encore in response to enthusiastic feedback from …

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The English language had no way to articulate the kind of immeasurable human suffering of WWII that can dismantle an entire people. We said “never again.” But in fact, it is happening again -Africa, and again the United States is unable and unwilling to act; unable to prevent genocide. Maybe it’s because the American public cannot face a crisis in which men are being slaughtered while their families look on, while their wives are being raped by man after man after man. Maybe it’s too unimaginable for us to do anything more than shake our heads while reading the World …

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Who: Terry McAuliffe
What: Author discusses ‘What a Party.’
When: Wed, Feb. 7th, 7:00 pm. FREE
Where: University of Minnesota Bookstore (Coffman Memorial Union)Who: Ray Suarez
What: The senior PBS correspondent discusses ‘The Holy Vote.’
When: Thu, Feb 8th, 7:00 pm. FREE; tickets required. Call 651.696.6203.
Where: Macalester College
1600 Grand Ave, St. Paul; 651.696.6000Who: Nuruddin Farah
What: Author discusses his writing
When: Thu, Feb. 8th, 7:00 pm. FREE
Where: The Loft Literary Center
1011 Washington Ave S, Ste 200 (Open Book), Mpls; 612.215.2575Who: Writers of Color Reading: Julie Bates; Jessica Lopez Lyman
What: Authors read from …

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Standing at the bus stop, I scratch at my chin,
feel rough stubble growing.
my sweat smells like cigarettes.A mantra runs through my head, A poem fueled
by alcohol and late nights sanitizing, purifying my thoughts:
:
I take it all back,
It bein’ The Fear
I’ll mail you the change.I’m told of an old man,
He smells of antibacterial soap and war stories.
He is going back to Energy soon.
Decades of stress leave the old man’s face
visibly every day, every time he exhales
the wrinkles smooth out and ancient toxins hiss into the air, …

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A basement room in Ford Hall was filled with a crowd of people who looked like they would be attending a talk about transgender rights. By this, of course, I mean people like me had gathered to hear Consolidating the Gendered Citizen: Trans Survival, Bureaucratic Power, and the War on Terror, a lecture put on by the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Department. The tattooed and pierced and poorly dressed bleeding hearts of the University of Minnesota had shown up full force, and it made me sad that the wrong people were going to hear the right message. It had …

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