Month: December 2002

Here’s a kid-friendly (not too late into the night) way to celebrate the New Year on the actual holiday, on the west side of the Mississippi. Well, actually right in the Mississippi. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board is pitching their tent on Nicollet Island. Skating, skiing, sledding, hayrides, and more are the order of…

If you want a wild bash with the lampshade-wearing and the drinking-champagne-out-of-a-shoe, look elsewhere. (Above, maybe.) For one thing, this civic cavalcade, formerly Capital New Year, is being held three days early. (The official auld lang syneing falls inconveniently on a Tuesday, and gosh, that’s a weeknight—though if you have to work Wednesday, you should…

New Year’s is one of those holidays where you can find yourself in a roomful of friendly strangers. In recent years, though, we’ve come to view it more like Thanksgiving—it’s so much more fun to be with people you know and love. Well, Debbie Duncan certainly qualifies. She’s one of the Twin Cities’ most beloved…

Launched in 1997 by Barry Levinson (Diner, Rain Man), Oz showed other theater and film vanguards that the path to creative freedom on the small screen led to HBO. The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire soon followed. Oz follows the lives (and untimely and/or gruesome deaths) of the prisoners in Oswald Penitentiary’s experimental…

Even amid the ferment of punk and indie rock in the early 1980s, Camper Van Beethoven didn’t quite sound like anyone else, crossing R.E.M.-style jangle-pop with ska and surf rhythms and traditional European string melodies. Not that they made a big deal out of it. Laid-back, laconic, and tongue-in-cheek was their way, and especially on…

We’re not in the camp of those who idolize the Replacements’ earliest work—they’re like tomato soup, and had to cool down before we could stomach them. But it’s remarkable to listen to the increasing sophistication of Paul Westerberg’s writing, culminating in the whisky melancholy of “Within Your Reach” and “Unsatisfied.” The Twin/Tone albums chart the…