The Wake

Fave Value has moved and changed name! Check out Sunshine Assassins.

There comes a time in every person’s life when they must appeal to a power greater than themselves.

In this particular case it was Susan Tillman.

The woman was on fire, she was pissed and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say she was this close to gouging Marnie’s eye out with a cuticle clipper. In all her melodramatic glory, Susie did not take disappointment well. Her short attention span, among that of her short temper, and …

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“Nothing can take away what happened to us, but we are survivors.”

These words begin to describe only a minute part of an even larger saga of war, fear, regret and wounds that time may never heal. Doan Hoang relives painful events in her family’s past with her new documentary film Oh, Saigon. The lens cap is removed as her family reveals shocking truths and opinions about their last minute escape from Vietnam. Under …

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When it comes to grassroots movements in the Minneapolis/St. Paul art community, nothing beats out a few summer art fairs and festivals. The warm temperatures and sunny days make the perfect setting for a stroll through an outdoor art gallery. Of course an art fair is not exclusive to the Twin Cities. Nevertheless, most everything about the Twin Cities’ fairs scream “local,” and they certainly scream “hip” and …

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Out with the old, in with the new, or so is the idea. The new millennium saw the beginning of a new age for the arts and entertainment scene in the Twin Cities. In the spirit of looking toward the unprecedented future, entertainment outlets across the city desired space for repair and expansion. Fights over land have resulted in a number of institutions being stuffed in different locations …

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It was a trend that kept popping up in conversation; podcasts that had the power to make you do things. It was more than persuasion, it was hypnotism. At first she brushed it off as another fad that preyed on the simpletons, like dieting pills and shamWOW. She resisted it when people told her of the merits. One person claimed his looserness was cured; he was getting booty left and right, any time of …

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“What are you going to do with the $500?” Susie asked as she held Ciggie’s drawing up in front of her face. She turned it this way and that as if she didn’t know which end it was supposed to sit on.

Marnie gripped the back of a chair and enunciated her words with her hands. “Did you not just hear my tale of Ciggie?” she said.

Susie nodded, frowning as she looked up at Marnie.

“Yes, but…You …

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This was it, the final day of the smoker study. A plain jane waiting room, in one of the university medical facilities, Marnie sat. A wide array of people were there, fatties, skinny bitches, and people well on their way to either. It was a comfort to see that other than being present, there was no way to tell they were smokers. Well, most of them did twitch, or fiddle, or squeam, but there was …

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Where do you come from? This is one of the first questions we always ask each other when introducing ourselves. But really, where do you come from? Your ancestors may have sailed over from Asia or Europe, but what about their ancestors who lived tens of thousands of years ago? From where did they travel and how did their actions result in your existence? Despite your views …

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Apparently, the appearance of a wordsmith was like the second coming of Christ. Susie didn’t rave about it on the bus ride over, yet Marnie could see anticipation in the way she sat upright and clinged to the handrail. All this for some guy who told tall tales while scamming people for food and money? He was probably homeless and his words were nothing more than the result of being beaten down for a lifetime. …

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Life has always been easy for Marnie Williams. Her mother was never a crack whore and her father never hit anyone nor anything in his life. Both her parents were relatively no-fuss kinda people. Their home was in a quiet suburb and had a good sized lawn and patio adorned with an oversized chrome “hungry man” grill out back. The refrigerator was always stocked with healthy and meaty options, and the kitchen was neither too …

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Here at the University of Minnesota, we always see those bins with designated openings for newspapers, trash, bottles and cans, and the like. It makes us feel good when we put our diet Coke bottle into the “bottles and cans” hole, and we feel like we patted Mother Nature on the back today. We pride ourselves in being sustainable and recycling our …

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Marnie took her time walking through the campus, being careful of where the sun hit the pavement, doing her best to keep close to the trees. She couldn’t help the humidity, but she could stay underneath the canopy provided by rows and rows of green. It was the one thing she appreciated, among other things, during the languid summer months. Shade, air-conditioning. If she had those two things, then she was that much closer to …

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Her sunglasses, perched atop her cranium, pushed back the matted mass of hair that collected round her forehead. A thick layer of moist film on her face plastered stray clumps of curls here and there, which she wiped away with oil secreting fingers.

It was hot. The thin cotton of her shirt stuck to her skin like cling wrap, so wet with sweat, her decorative bra was visible. The embroidered pink and periwinkle blue …

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As I walked down Washington Avenue, congealed globs of blood streaked the pavement. Any other day
I would have run screaming for the police. But as a man with a terrible gash on his neck approached, he moaned “brains” and I knew everything was all right.

Zombie Pub Crawl IV was by far the highlight of this month. Forget the Halloween celebrations — this was it. Who would have thought so many people would enjoy having “blood” …

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