Month: March 2005

We had a laugh a few months ago, when there was that little dust-up between the gay fellows over at Powerline and the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman. They’d all been in a running firefight—liberal this, neo-con that—and while we’ve come to appreciate the deceptively euphonious rhetoric of the full-time bloggers and Rather-slayers, they were far…

Neal Viemeister, a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota, can’t pinpoint exactly what prompted him to hire the Greek undergrad as a research assistant back in the 1970s. He searched his memory—“Well, John knocked at my door looking for research experience, which impressed me, that an undergraduate would be that motivated and courageous. He…

It’s doubtful that people will camp out in order to be the first inside the newly expanded Walker Art Center, but who knows? They did at Ikea in Bloomington last year; surely some flapdoodle ought to accompany the unveiling of a shimmering contemporary art center designed by avant-garde Swiss architects. However, to members of the…

At a recent screening of The Assassination of Richard Nixon, the director, Niels Mueller, showed up for a question and answer session. It quickly became apparent that his questioners didn’t care so much about the film’s story as what it was like to work with Sean Penn and how Mueller got his movie made. How…

Charlie Callahan and Brian Spanier, creative directors at a Minneapolis agency called Periscope, spent the winter preparing an advertising and marketing juggernaut designed to pitch Twins baseball to the sticks. After several seasons of success on the field and futility at the turnstiles, this year the team scrapped its vaguely self-deprecating “Get to Know ’Em”…

A brief squall of horns opens “Focus on Sanity,” the song that kicked off Ornette Coleman’s seminal Atlantic Records phase. Part fanfare, part detonation, that sound made it plenty clear that the Texas saxophonist was plunging into almost entirely uncharted territory. Twenty-nine years old when he recorded the song in a Hollywood studio in May…