The Wake

You’re chain-smoking outside a cocktail party on a Saturday night and the conversation turns to politics. Chances are at least 90 percent of the well-spoken socialites around you are pulling their information straight out of their asses. Today, The Wake will help you become a part of that other 10 percent. I know, I know – making opinions based on actual facts is a fresh and dangerous idea. But that’s what we’re all about here – fresh and dangerous.

On Conservation and Energy

Science!

John McCain (R): “I believe climate change is …

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I like to think I didn’t arrive at the University of Minnesota as a starry-eyed, giddy freshman. I took classes my entire senior year of high school at a college, so I knew relatively what to expect when I arrived on move-in day. I was even excited about Welcome Week, an introductory program instituted this year for incoming freshman such as myself. I thought it would be great to be on campus for a week without any classes and only my fellow freshman as neighbors. I wanted to keep an open mind. That is, until I saw the schedule of …

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Photos by Matt Miranda and Scottie Tuska

D-day. Convention week. September 1st-4th. Republican Christmas. Call it what you will, the atmosphere in St. Paul that week was truly bizarre. Amongst the commotion surrounding the MSNBC Free Speech Stage® a Tucson cop buys himself a hocked McCain-Palin T-shirt. A man in a suit claims to be McCain’s second choice for VP. A group of antiwar feminists decry the nomination of Sarah Palin and a group of radical Christians chant passages from the Letters to Corinthians. If we’re all doomed to hell, then what was that place?

…

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Blending the lines between play and musical, the Guthrie’s latest production “Old Wicked Songs” may get you to turn off the TV and check out a real theatrical production. There is no other play in the Twin Cities where music speaks as much as the actors do. The cast is comprised of two top-notch actors and a stage, reminding the audience of the importance of music among politics and current events.

“It’s a beautiful, funny and poignant play,” Peter Rothstein, director of “Old Wicked Songs” said. “Though this is not a musical, music is a central character in the play.”…

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Pop music is shamelessly obsessed with love. From the “my baby left me” blues of the early 20th century to the “He’s the kind of boy you can’t forget” language of girl group invasion, love has been on the mind of many a musician. The Kerchief wearing heartthrob of a frontman Arthur Lee is no exception to this fondness of infatuation. Lee and his rock and roll outfit Love were manifestly
conceived within the boundaries of the themes listed above. On the bands 1966 self-titled debut, Arthur Lee and Co. bash through fourteen disparate tracks that are coherently fused as a …

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The debut Doomtree album has been a culmination of many years of building, growing, burning bridges and grinding teeth, symbolized in the piles of black books, show flyers, scribbled notes and candid pictures adorning the album’s liner notes. You can hear the work in the songs: It’s clear that each song on the CD traveled a tough road to be deemed worthy.

Doomtree

If you’ve been following the group at all, you’ve probably heard a good amount of these songs in concert, and you may well have bought their False Hopes …

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Ian Andersen is doing interviews with Japanese magazines. He and his mates from One for the Team have been trotting the country for several months and, after a quick break in Minneapolis, will continue on to the east coast where they’re already fairly well known. Two of them attend the U of M. They’ve put out two records (Good Boys Don’t Make Noise and Build Up), live in Dinkytown, and drive a fifteen-passenger van to their shows. What’s more, Ian claims that playing Minneapolis is “a bit of a crapshoot” because the city has yet to take notice of their …

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Live from Denver

For many people, electing Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama into the White House is not just part of a political race, it is a movement for change. Supporters of Obama range from students to celebrities. Much of the most vocal support comes from musicians, who have the ability to spread their message easily to their listeners. Music has become an important tool for politicians. The musical artists that the Democratic National Committee invited to play at the DNC were already known supporters of Obama. Artists like Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas (along with John Legend and the …

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Beatrix*JAR are couple Bianca Pettis (Beatrix) and Jacob Aaron Roske (JAR), and together they create innovative soundscapes using assorted tampered-with electronics, a technique known as circuit-bending. Any battery-powered, sound-producing device is fair game, and Beatrix*JAR utilize quite the impressive array of drum machines, keyboards, children’s toys, and other non-traditional instruments to play music they describe pretty accurately as “fuzzy sound collage”. On top of performing their music live, the couple also holds circuit-bending workshops in which they teach the art …

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Many, if not all, of us here at the University of Minnesota have experienced the loud, claustrophobia-inducing walk from the East Bank to the West Bank as a result of the fencing put up on the pedestrian bridge spanning the Mississippi River. Not unbearable, but certainly not enjoyable. Thus, the fact that the restrictions placed on the bridge are finite gives us something to look forward to with the coming of spring. And with the reopening of the Interstate 35W bridge peeking around the corner, things are looking up for traffic conditions at the U of M.

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According to Wikipedia, the term “Ivory Tower” refers to “a world or atmosphere where intellectuals engage in pursuits that are disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life.”

Tusk

Despite these snooty, even disparaging connotations, the Ivory Tower journal is really quite the opposite. The focus of this student group is to help student artists and writers alike publish their work in a university-affiliated journal, providing them with material to present to future employers. Working nonprofit toward improving and exposing this journal requires a thirst for hard work and satisfaction. This year’s staff …

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The iron, first invented in the late 1800s and most famously marketed in the 1950s, was and still is used tocombat wrinkles that so peevishly cramp our everyday style.

But ironing has a new meaning in the world of sports, leading us to question what a sport even is anymore and if the term should assume a new place in the English language.

Football, baseball and basketball are indeed the backbone of our country’s interest in sports, but they lackthe spontaneity and the peculiar thrill that sports such as “extreme ironing” generate.

Here are the three most bizarre sports that I found, which …

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As protesters filled the lawn at Capitol Hill to the seams, cameras landed in swarms, delegates
and party bigwigs paraded their candidates’ causes, and blank-faced onlookers with a delicate
half-interest lined the streets, the eyes of the nation and—daresay I—the world shifted to rest
upon our Twin Cities. And while the mass media, the lens that brought our cities into focus, have
the attention span of a young child, city leaders have salivated over the events of the Republican
National Convention for years. They placed much faith in the convention’s ability to launch this
unique area into the upper echelon of citydom. Whether their hopeful visions …

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