Month: September 2006

VocalEssence, 120 singers strong, will join forces with the all-male singers of the boutique troupe Cantus to present an evening of folk songs, spirituals, and contemporary classical compositions, all handcrafted right here in the U.S.A. Included are works by Aaron Copland (“Ching-a-ring-chaw”) and Leonard Bernstein (“Make Our Garden Grow”) as well as relative unknowns. A section of the bill is also dedicated to Minnesota composers: Domenick Argento, Aaron Jay Kernis, Libby Larsen, and even Brent Michael Davids, whose work is a fascinating melding of traditional Native American music and classical European stylings. 612-371-5656; www.vocalessence.org”

Long the greatest cover band in the indie-rock world, Yo La Tengo’s live repertoire (and much of its recorded catalog) includes an exhaustive list of wonderful songs by other people, ranging from the Fall and the Grateful Dead to John Lennon and Captain Beefheart. Of course, Ira Kaplan has proven to be abundantly capable of writing his own agitated, intricate, and eclectic songs for the band, a tradition that continues on its latest release. Titled I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, it makes you wonder if there’s a specific person that this normally mild-mannered trio is addressing. There doesn’t seem to be any musical confrontation on the new album, however, as the band blurs pop’s boundaries by bringing in jazz, rock, country, and glorious ambient sounds. 612-332-1775; www.first-avenue.com”

Three years after his last album, Guero, Beck gives us The Information, a spacey rap fantasy, and we’re relieved to report that our favorite trapped-in-puberty rocker is still one of the most devious sound manipulators in the business. Things were uncertain for a while: After the exceedingly mopey Sea Change and a notorious tour with the Flaming Lips, Beck got married and became a dad, which downshifts many a good rocker into a mediocre folksinger. The beats on Guero were a step in the right direction, however, and now the man has hit the ground running in The Information. Apparently, it wasn’t Scientology Beck needed to pull him out of his slump; it was hip-hop.

Mina Agossi was born to rankle a particularly fusty type of jazz listener. Her music is just so maddeningly … French. Edgy, cranky, wandering, and undeniably sexy, her vocal style owes more to PJ Harvey and Diamanda Galás than anyone from the jazz world. Agossi employs punkish backup musicians, utilizes unauthorized sounds (including the kamale n’goni, a Malian string instrument), and sings with the kind of unholy spirit that used to get women burned at the stake. 1010 Nicollet Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-332-1010; www.dakotacooks.com

As of late, Wendy Knox has been giving some thought to what a person might take with her if driven from her homeland. She and her Frank Theatre troupe are rehearsing their production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, an epic set during the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648—a time when many Europeans were rendered refugees.

Brecht’s play, which premiered in Zurich in 1941, is a meandering but deeply intellectual piece of literature, one with no shortage of contemporary parallels. Indeed, it has recently become fashionable reading, especially since a prominent and well-received New York production, starring Meryl Streep, was mounted in New York. But like most Twin Citizens, Knox has never seen Mother Courage set to stage. Where Mother Courage—and the posthumous personality we’ve attached to Brecht, for that matter—represents great darkness, the effusive Ms. Knox is quite the opposite. She was warm and chatty during a recent phone conversation—especially for a director fascinated by Brecht, Suzan-Lori Parks, and other challenging playwrights. And, like any theater professional worth her salt, she handily improvised the following list of items to take with her to The Rake’s desert isle:

1) I’m taking the hammock. Most people think that because they’re going to a desert island there’s already going to be hammocks there, because they’re used to going to Mexico. I went down the Amazon ten, twelve years ago, and we actually slept on hammocks, which was pretty fun. Then I bought a hammock a couple years ago, and I’ve got to tell you, I’m a believer in the hammock therapy. They’re great for reading. They’re great for just spacing out.

2) My friend Richard’s iPod. I don’t have an iPod and I’ve never even programmed one, but when I go to Richard’s house, I hear the most eclectic programming on his—everything from Donna Summer to Louis Prima. But first I’d want to make sure he had Elvis Costello and the Staples family.

3) One or two golden retrievers. I’m a golden retriever addict; they’re such great companions! And who cares about dog hair on a desert island?

4) For my intellectual survival kit, I’d take the library of my friend Beth Cleary [a Hamline University theater professor], which includes Brecht’s collected works, his journals, his poetry—since I’ve had the obsession with Brecht for, like, the past twenty years …

5) I’d also like to have a culinary survival kit, including a copy of Cook’s Illustrated: The Best Recipes. What’s great about it is that they’ll go into their test kitchen and do these test runs—how do you make the best scones or the best fried chicken? They’ll try the recipes with milk, and then maybe some cream. And then they’ll do this sort of analysis: Well, this worked but it made it kind of soggy, and so on. The survival kit would also have a really good knife and at least a case of fine wine. And a handful of seeds, because I’m a maniac gardener, too, and if I had a handful of heirloom tomato seeds and basil, I’d be able to make my own li’l caprese salad.

Joan Jett, the tough-talking broad who once screeched “I don’t give a damn about my reputation,” has been canonized by an entire generation of she-rockers. Everyone from Courtney Love to PJ Harvey cites her as a muse. And while Jett’s career has recently detoured through acting gigs and reworking some of her standards for movie projects, she and her Blackhearts have recently been touring in support of an all-new record, Sinner, which was ten years in the making. Jett gave us a ring one recent afternoon to chat about her music, her career, and the current climate for women in rock.

So, after ten years with no album, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts are back with Sinner. What’s the deal with the name?

It’s really just a reflection of the times we’re living in. Everyone seems to be on one side or the other, and so it’s kind of interesting to realize that morality is so subjective. For example, a lot of people might judge me based on who I am, based on the way I look or whatever. But underneath, they may not know anything about me. But it’s not just with me. I’m thinking about other people, too, and my judgments of them.

We’re listening to some of the tracks on the new record and not discerning a great shift in musical style. However, with songs such as “Riddles” and “Change the World,” it seems your lyrics are tackling a new topic: politics.

Politics and war—and hope, hopefully. These are certainly my first protest songs. It’s something I’ve kind of wanted to touch on for years, but I didn’t really know how to cross that bridge without being preachy or corny; I wanted it to be really organic. So [with “Riddles,” a song that mixes in sound bites from Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush] I was able to write a song that’s not calling anyone a moron or anything; it’s just reflecting on something I see. And I want to see if other people see it, or if I’m just crazy.

What can people expect to hear at First Avenue on October 23?

There’ll be a lot from Sinner. But there’ll be a lot of our older songs, too.

So you’re not averse to playing the classics. Will you go as far back as The Runaways?

Yeah, actually, we’ll do a little Runaways, too. Why would I run from who I was or who I am? I’ll even play “I Love Rock-n-Roll”… I had to make peace with that a while ago.

Looking around at the situation today, the presence of women in rock seems to have dissipated some since the Blackhearts’ heyday in the 1980s. What’s your assessment of the state of women in rock?

It’s really frustrating! For a while, you had bands like L7, Babes in Toyland, and Bikini Kill. I think girls are still a little hesitant because I think there’s this illusion of support and equality, and it’s not really the case. People say girls are equal and girls can do what they want, but most of the time, the girl is going to take a little shit from her parents or her girlfriends for trying to get into a band. There just doesn’t seem to be a lot of support for girls playing music—either from radio, or people just not being interested. I remember what a lot of people were saying about The Runaways, and it got to be really hard. Frankly, I think I had a point where I was lucky. The timing was right. I had a great song [The Runaways’ late 70s hit “Cherry Bomb”]. And I recognize that a lot of it was luck and timing. If it’d been even a year later, things might’ve been different.

So, what are you listening to these days?

I listen to a lot of the things I grew up listening to, which would be things like British glitter music, David Bowie, T. Rex, Gary Glitter, and then a lot of the punk rock stuff—The Replacements, Social Distortion, Fugazi.

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts perform at First Avenue on October 23.

I was ten years old when I first saw Citizen Kane. My father hauled my brother and me to the enormous Temple Theatre in downtown Saginaw, Michigan, and with a crowd of maybe two dozen, we noticed that Citizen Kane was more than just a chapter of film history; it was hilarious and melancholy and eminently bizarre. Like the eponymous boy in The Little Prince (which Welles at one point adapted into an unfilmed screenplay), Charles Foster Kane is less William Randolph Hearst and so much more the young Orson, bouncing from experience to experience in his fruitless quest for true love. Here was a curious and melancholy figure, trying desperately to hold on to his childhood as he grew older. Just like the rest of us. Or so I thought.

Reading about Orson Welles in the hopes of understanding his character (or his movies) is akin to dropping into a deep and unmapped cave. For someone who made only twelve full-length features (one remains unreleased due to myriad legal problems, and there are many others he may or may not have directed), Welles has had a tremendous amount scribbled about him. On the whole, the assessments about the man and his career are notably contradictory. Pauline Kael staked part of her considerable reputation on devaluing Welles’ contributions to his masterwork in her “Raising Kane,” a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker essay that is hotly debated to this day. Another eminent writer on film, David Thomson, went bonkers in Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, analyzing much of Welles’ life and making an unfounded accusation that he raped an actress in one of his films. Director and friend Peter Bogdanovich interviewed Welles, who spun so many tales that the resulting book reads like a cineaste’s Thousand and One Nights, with most of the facts twisted to suit the moment. Followers have held up the man as a genius, while detractors slam him for failing to live up to the promise of Kane.

Now, adding to the dozens of volumes on Welles and his work, there’s Orson Welles: Hello Americans. It’s the second volume of a three-part biography by Simon Callow, probably best known as an actor (his was the funeral in Four Weddings and a Funeral). Considering that this labor of love was originally proposed as two volumes, it could very likely stretch to four should the excesses of Welles’ later years begin to overwhelm his biographer.

Hello Americans is a strange but effective book, encompassing only seven of the director’s seventy years, albeit perhaps the most thoroughly documented ones. It opens in 1941, as Welles basks in the critical afterglow of Citizen Kane, with the cinematic world his proverbial oyster. He had a sympathetic studio head in RKO’s George J. Schaefer, America had recently plunged into World War II, the press was still very much awed by the boy wonder, and Welles himself was bursting with ideas. As Callow writes, “Welles was an early sufferer from the condition … described as projectitis. His fertility in engendering ideas was astonishing.”

In the short span between December 1941 and February of the following year, Welles seemed like a kid with an extreme case of Attention Deficit Disorder. (He actually took amphetamines to keep his weight down.) He met Rita Hayworth, whom he would eventually marry; worked on a short film about bullfighting in Mexico called Bonito the Bull; and labored continuously on his radio programs and those of his contemporaries—including Norman Corwin’s We Hold These Truths, rightly considered one of the finest radio shows in history. All the while Welles was toying with the notion of making The Life of Christ, bringing Mein Kampf to the screen, and selling a germ of an idea that would eventually become Chaplin’s overpraised Monsieur Verdoux. Finally, he settled on making not one but three films to follow up his freshman triumph—the tragic Magnificent Ambersons, the relatively unseen thriller Journey into Fear, and, most ambitiously, It’s All True.

The Magnificent Ambersons is often referred to as Welles’ most butchered film, and the best example, for his supporters, of how the studio bosses quickly lost their faith in the wunderkind when his films strove for brilliance over commercial success. (By early 1942 it was evident that Kane, despite the glowing reviews, was going to lose money.) To his detractors, Ambersons provides abundant evidence of the genius-as-spoiled-brat, for with it—and many of his later films—he would prove uninterested in finishing the product or working within the system. Callow’s scene-by-scene critique brilliantly takes the reader through this relatively unseen picture, which tells the story of the wealthy and out-of-touch Amberson clan at the turn of the last century as their fortunes declined with the rise of the automobile. What remains of Ambersons boasts some of Welles’ most assured direction and shows his strong hand with his actors while also offering a foray into the sentimental mind of its creator.

Welles made Ambersons, which he narrated but did not appear in, while simultaneously starring in and clandestinely directing (with Norman Foster) the forgotten thriller Journey into Fear. Here, Callow shows Welles as a man with far too many plates spinning in the air. With insufficient time to helm both films, Welles gave Foster extensive notes—and full credit—for directing, something he was hitherto unwilling to do. Shooting on lots as opposed to location, Welles and many of the loyal Mercury actors were shuttled between the two pictures, shooting one after another and racing between sets. Joseph Cotten, who appeared in both films, was even pressed into writing Journey’s screenplay when Welles became too busy. In early February, Welles finished work on Journey, concluded principal photography on Ambersons, then fled, two days later, to Brazil.

While juggling both Journey and Ambersons, Welles had been pegged to film the famous carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Given that his flat feet and bad back had kept him from putting on fatigues, it was Welles’ attempt to do his part for the war effort. The footage he shot in Rio would become the basis for It’s All True, his fourth feature. Despite some vague directives from the federal government about strengthening “pan-American” unity during wartime, no one, least of all Welles, knew quite what this film would be about. But that doesn’t mean the director was apprehensive. To the contrary, he was thrilled at the prospect and managed to convince officials from the studio, the government, and his own stable of Mercury actors to join him in South America for a project that he himself could barely articulate. All he knew was that it would be fabulous.

This was the first of Welles’ many glaring mistakes. Having finished principal work on both Ambersons and Journey, he left the fate of the former picture in the hands of the pedantic editor, Robert Wise (despite the passionate entreaties of his allies at RKO). Preview audiences loathed it, so Wise, with RKO’s support, mangled the film, cutting it from 148 minutes to just 88. The studio stuck it on the tail end of a double bill, and in a matter of weeks the film vanished, losing the studio’s shirt in the process.

Working in Brazil, Welles was at first oblivious to all this. Stranger still, once he was clued in to the problems back in Hollywood, he ignored pleas to return to the states to try and save his film from RKO’s money-driven suits. Down south, things went from triumphant to disastrous. Initially greeted as a hero, Welles shot miles of film, often with his camera pointed at the wrong people (the Brazilian government did not want the world to see its poor, its lascivious, and especially its darker-skinned citizens). After months of often scatterbrained work (Welles still hadn’t provided RKO with an acceptable plot outline for It’s All True), the studio cut off his financing. His reputation took a beating, and in shooting the “Four Men on a Raft” sequence, one of the four original sailors drowned while recreating a scene. It’s All True ended up essentially unmade. Journey, released a year after Ambersons, failed miserably. Welles would never again taste the freedom that he’d enjoyed with Citizen Kane. The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey into Fear are unavailable on DVD in the United States; what remained of the miles of It’s All True footage was cobbled together in a virtually unseen documentary of the same name in 1993.

This episode, perhaps little more than a year in Welles’ life, takes up about a third of Hello Americans but offers the most telling clues about the character of this amazing, and amazingly aggravating, artist. After his failed cinematic hat trick, Welles temporarily abandoned filmmaking, throwing himself into politics. He worked tirelessly for Roosevelt, considered a run for president, wrote a daily newspaper column that flopped, and became embroiled in a hugely controversial moment in the Civil Rights movement, working to hunt down a Southern sheriff. Then, in 1946, he staged the ambitious musical Around the World in Eighty Days (another flop), among other pursuits too numerous to summarize. He also got back into the director’s chair that year, overseeing a mediocre thriller, The Stranger, followed by the near-classics The Lady from Shanghai and Macbeth. Callow’s biography leaves off as Welles flees to Europe, both to avoid the taxman and to find comfort in the greater appreciation for his work on that continent. Once again, he abandoned a movie (Macbeth) in postproduction and remained a wayward traveler to the end of his days.

Critics of Hello Americans have been as divided as those critics of Welles himself. Some accuse Callow of hagiography, others suggest he’s nearly libeling the man’s reputation. But I found Hello Americans to be a surprisingly evenhanded account of an often infuriating artist. In fact, it’s Callow’s mastery of acting that makes his analysis of Welles’ films required reading for anyone interested in why movies succeed or fail. He tries to come to grips with the legend, sorting through enough material to fill the great warehouses of Xanadu. What results is like a kaleidoscope pointed at a moving picture; every reader of Hello Americans will come away with a different image of the fractured Orson Welles. Which is just as it should be.

Reading the many Welles biographies and the stories he himself spun, one wonders if their subject was purposely trying to keep his legend, as opposed to his reality, alive. He always wanted us to return to his movies and forget about him. Callow’s work on the third installment—Welles in his last years, from 1948 until his death in 1985—should prove almost as quixotic as the man whose life he is writing, for it will take him from the land of strict documentation into the shadowy realm of the unknown. Whereas Callow could previously avail himself of the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana—a storehouse of Welles’ material, from letters and speeches to manuscripts, photographs, and films—he will now have to hunt down individuals and innumerable loose ends; Welles’ own record is notoriously dubious. It’s hard not to wonder if we wouldn’t be better served by heeding filmmaker Ernest R. Dickerson’s loving analysis of Citizen Kane: “One word can’t explain a man’s life. But the final two words in this film can: ‘No Trespassing.’”

I first encountered an Uta Barth photograph six years ago, wandering through a group exhibition of eleven artists at the prestigious Getty Center in Los Angeles. The works were high-concept, low-execution, clearly the product of expensive art school educations, and, like pretentious dinner guests, unjustifiably boring.

Then, turning a corner, I stopped dead in front of a massive photo of a white couch, delicately brushed by the shadows cast from a window frame. The photo next to it showed little more than the feet of the same white couch and a slice of impeccably clean gray carpet. With perfectly balanced lines and angles, these exquisite compositions seemed to serve no other purpose than to highlight the exceedingly good taste of the owner of this living room. I had never before so carefully examined the feet of a couch, and for some reason, as I wandered through the otherwise insipid show, I found myself repeatedly circling back to these images. After a half-hour of this, I realized it wasn’t just the composition that attracted me, but also a sharp sense of the deficiencies of my own living room. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get that languid, well-designed, luxurious feeling from the shadows cast by my window frames. The untitled photos, part of a landmark series named … and of time, were created by Uta Barth, a German-born artist who has spent the last two decades revolutionizing photography from her perch as a studio art professor at the University of California, Riverside. Since that first encounter with her work, I have spent countless hours fixated on Barth’s exhibition catalogs, filled with gorgeous photos of easily overlooked everyday subjects from her life: that sofa, an empty backyard, the power lines above her house. They are riveting because they are unexpectedly beautiful, particularly for the majority of us who find little in the way of unexpected beauty in and around our domiciles. This month, Barth’s newest works, forty-eight untitled images, are on view at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis (1021 E. Franklin Ave.; Minneapolis, through November 4)—their first-ever U.S. showing. Measuring roughly two feet by two feet each, the mounted images wrap around the gallery in a single line. The images are grouped into sets of two to five, each of which examines still lifes on Barth’s window ledge.

For example, one grouping features an exquisitely composed image of a water glass and vase, both holding flowers, framed against hot white sunlight coming through the window. The first image in the group has an easy elegance and beauty, and if it were framed just a bit downward and to the right, the Martha Stewart Living magazine logo would be right at home in the left windowpane. Next to this image is a polarized version of the same scene, rendered in blood-red, highly saturated ink—an art student’s mere trick of the light. Finally, on the opposite end, the still life becomes a totally unfocused wash that resembles nothing so much as blood in water. It is a stark, menacing contrast to the flowers it complements, yet in its echo there is something familiar.

Moving from left to right—from the elegant flowers to their final, bloody exposition—Barth seems to be embracing and then repudiating her attachment to the still lifes that have defined her work. According to her, however, the new images are actually about “what happens with your eyes closed.” She is literally representing the process of getting over an image. As she was quoted in db artmag:

“Those images are pretty much blood red and reenact optical after-images seen after staring into the light. At first, you’re still registering the blood through your eyelids and everything is a flash of red. After a few moments, the after-image becomes the opposite color of what you’ve looked at.”

Barth’s is a hard, domineering vision. Not content to just show you a picture, she’s determined to demonstrate how you will experience it when you blink or after you look away. Nothing is left to the imagination, to the sense that one’s personal experience can define the photo in an individual way. The images are about seeing, and the flowers are just a means of exploring that topic. Barth said she chose flowers as the subject for her new series because “they are completely invisible” to her. Over the course of several months, she photographed them at odd angles, imitating how a passerby might briefly notice them, then not notice them at all. In time, as viewers linger on the images, she hopes they will see “that something else might be happening other than describing my home.” The images are not, she insists, “a reverie about flowers.”

Of course, that’s a highly esteemed professor of art talking. As a fan of the artist (not the professor), I unabashedly admit that I find the flower photos awfully pretty, and I’ve spent enough time reveling in them to have had my own epiphany of sorts. It is this: Professor Barth keeps fresh flowers around the house, and I don’t. It may be the case that she buys so many flowers that they’ve finally become invisible to her, but I can’t remember the last time I had a vase of fresh flowers perched on my window ledge. Whether she recognizes it or not, I (the audience) have a connection to the flowers that Barth doesn’t. For me, her work is aspirational, the fine-art equivalent of the Room & Board catalog. Like Barth, I once lived with a white couch (purchased from Room & Board, no less). Sure, sunlight used to fall across it, but I swear it never looked quite as timeless as Barth’s.

In the introduction to Barth’s 2004 catalog of photos, which includes images from …and of time, one critic declares her work “the visual equivalent of silence,” and another comments that they are a “study in sameness that attempts to reduce all activity and purpose to pure observation.” In interviews, Barth says similar, deeply philosophical things. But for me, the real draw of the … and of time couch photos is the way in which they induce an almost visceral desire for a living room just like Barth’s. The artist and her admirers, however, are insistent in their denials that object lust might have anything to do with her work’s appeal (or, dare I say, its beauty). “It is hard to imagine subject matter that is less compelling than a living room floor,” is how the Albright-Knox Art Gallery explained its decision to purchase images of Barth’s living room carpet. Never mind that the average American bookstore is bursting with shelter magazines and decorating books that detail why living room floors are compelling; the lush images in most of them could have served as poor concept studies for Barth’s living room artworks.

To my eye, what makes this artist’s images so compelling, so utterly hypnotic, is how they take the conventions of object-lust publications—magazines like Metropolitan Home and Dwell—and recast them as fine, minimalist art. Instead of photographing her couch straight on, in blinding Mediterranean light (see: Architectural Digest), Barth allows us a view of just the top few inches of the cushions and a shadow of window frame across the wall. In effect she is saying—to me, at least—“here are the object and the feeling you’d have if you were lucky enough to have my time and the means to enjoy it.” Or more directly: “Enjoy my couch.”

To the best of my knowledge, Barth has never said anything of the kind, and who knows, maybe she’s never so much as flipped through an issue of Dwell. I doubt it, though. In fact, in the same way she insists that her new untitled series of flower images is not about flowers, she declares that her photos have nothing to do with her at all, and that, to the contrary, she strives for anonymity in creating them. “I don’t want to become the subject I’ve tried so hard to erase,” she says. “Shoes on the floor, clothes, letters, and objects on my desk immediately construct a narrative and identity of the person, and there you have it: I’m the subject.” But how can Barth spend months photographing her surroundings—her couch, her electrical cord, her carpet, her windows, her backyard, the telephone poles above her house, her flower arrangements, and her window ledge—and somehow believe that her audience will automatically erase any readings into the personality of the owner of these objects?

For me, these photos are far from anonymous. It is precisely Uta Barth and no other who emerges from them. Intended as patient studies of the nature of time, they also serve as patient studies of a character or personality who not only owns nice things but knows how to look at (and photograph) them in unique and exquisite ways. It is those barely revealed quirks, quirks that hint at a personality, that endear Uta Barth to me. The intentions and theories that she and her critics generate about her work are interesting and occasionally relevant, and I’m pretty sure I’ll start paying more attention to the blood-red retinal aftereffects of looking at photos in Architectural Digest. But really, in the end, it’s the lovely simplicity of her images that moves me. For whose couch, in the history of art, is more sublime than Uta Barth’s?

It was a good dog-weather day. Several hundred onlookers, kids clad in hooded sweatshirts and parents in Patagonia zip-ups, crowded around a roped-off rectangular strip; a painted finish line glowed white against the still-green grass at Wayzata West Middle School. More than one of the contestants was shivering under its cape, though it wasn’t clear if this was a result of the early fall weather or simply excitement. One auburn-colored dachshund, in what appeared to be a hunter-orange life preserver, yapped happily at its owner’s feet. “I put a coat on him today,” shrieked the middle-aged woman to her friend.

The stage was set for the 22nd Annual Dachshund Races, “Where every dog is a WEINER,” as the T-shirts declare. The Animal Humane Society mobile unit was on hand, a canine emergency-aid station of sorts, and a concert tent arched against the background, set up for the evening’s musical climax to Wayzata’s James J. Hill Days.

The event began with the Parade of Champions. “Just as in the Kentucky Derby, the racing silks are very important,” the announcer intoned from beneath a watermelon umbrella. She continued, describing the conditions of the track and the quality of this year’s competition (there was talk of a littermate of last year’s winner being the favorite), while off to the side, volunteers sold—you guessed it—hot dogs.

The big dogs had come to watch. Away from the crowd, a pair of bull terriers wrestled gently between their leashes; one man reclined in the grass against his golden retriever. But the day was for the little guys; 120 were entered in the day’s festivities, and they came in a rainbow of colors. There were black dachshunds and brown ones and blond and brindle and spotted. Short-haired, wire-haired, and long-haired with fur growing out between their little toes. The day had the feel of a family reunion. Some participants were veterans of the event, and they greeted each other, dogs and owners alike, with familial enthusiasm.

The name dachshund is German for “badger dog,” in honor of the wild game the dog was bred to hunt. In the WWII era, the literal translation was briefly adopted as the dog’s name to disassociate it from its German roots. The American Kennel Club places the dachshund in the hound group, for its hunting prowess and keen sense of smell.

There are absurd but necessary ground rules at the dachshund races—namely, no throwing your dog from the starting gate and no pulling him over the finish line. The judges are lenient about false starts, and “do-overs” are frequent. Half a dozen dachshunds race in each heat, jumping three hurdles in the process. Usually, two or three of them race competitively, two zigzag around the hurdles, and one runs in circles. It’s also common for a contestant to run just short of the finish line before turning around to do another lap. During the semifinals, the barking level was elevated a notch, getting almost loud enough to drown out the exhortations of the owners. Some used deep, commanding voices; others were high-pitched and encouraging; one simply yelled, “La la la la, la la la-ah!” All manner of attention-getters were employed: jingling keys, the waving of encouraging signs and squeaking of favorite toys, and, of course, the enticement of treats. One woman pulled what appeared to be a massive barbecued chicken leg from a plastic bag.

The contest is about beauty as well as athleticism. Owners clearly took seriously the challenge of designing their dachshunds’ outfits. One dog wore a royal purple cape with braided gold trim; another contestant arrived in full Superman garb—the blue shirt, the red cape; and still another wore a matching green-felt cloak and cap with a Robin Hood-style orange feather. Literary names were prevalent—Dante, Atticus Finch, and Gretel—as were names from pop culture: Prada, Gonzo, Siegfried, and Lucy Liu.

One could protest that it is cruel or patronizing to dress up a pooch and race it around for the entertainment of laughing and pointing onlookers. The American Kennel Club officially opposes dachshund racing, citing the exploitation that’s befallen the greyhound as well as concern for the dachshund’s propensity for back injuries. While that’s all well and good, these dogs were clearly much-loved family pets, and they surely, with dachshunds’ tendency toward extra weight in the middle, can use a little exercise. In the end, perhaps the spirit of the event was best summed up by the advertising slogan of its sponsor: “Everything your pet doesn’t need but you love.”

Barely two hours after the first round of American Idol auditions began, the sidewalk outside Target Center is abuzz with distressed-looking people on cell phones, seeking, no doubt, some form of satellite consolation. Some of them are tearful. Some are stone-faced. These folks are among the many who sang their hearts out for thirty seconds, were thanked, and told to go home. The few who made it through to the next round are trying to be quiet about their success, because they were told they had to be, though some of the good news has leaked out anyway.

One woman props a large sign up against a brick pillar, thunks her Coach bag on the ground, and flips open her cell phone. The homemade sign, decorated with glitter, reads “I can get Simon to peel me a grape.” She’s dressed in a striking red cape, skinny black pants, and a black-lace bustier à la Vanity from the 1980s. She holds an empty martini glass. When she finishes her call, I ask her if she made it to the next round. “I can’t tell you,” she says, somewhat blithely. When I tell her that a few other people already told me she had, she says, “Can’t say. You know, they’ve got their rules.” When I ask her name, she says, “I can’t tell you.” When I ask her if she can tell me what song she sang, she says she can’t do that either, but looks at the sign and offers this description: “It’s a fun one. It’s about a woman telling a man what to do to make her happy.”

Whether her apparent success is the product of her promise of carnal pleasures for the show’s nastiest judge or her raw talent is anyone’s guess. Shannon Thompson of Edina and Sheila Romero from West St. Paul met during a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the North Como Presbyterian Church in Roseville and decided to try out together. Of her audition, Shannon said, “It was horrible. I messed it up and added an ‘oh, crap,’ to the chorus.” Sheila, who’s had voice lessons since she was ten, said, “It’s hard to compete with 6,999 other people, or however many they’re saying are here.”

Which sort of begs the question, why bother? The answer to which is surprisingly universal.

“American Idol is going to go down in history as a huge part of pop culture,” said Kalii Palmer from Nashville, “and I can say I was part of it.”

“It’s kind of a rush,” commented Janel Sorenson. “And I like the attention. I can say that I did it.”

She and her friend Joshua were both still waiting on the sidewalk for their auditions, and both had tried out last year in different cities. Joshua spent a big part of his childhood on the Ivory Coast because his parents were missionaries and now works as a shift manager at an Arby’s in a Minneapolis suburb. “I’m goin’ for salary manager!” he shouted, with some apparent irony, pumping a fist in the air. At last year’s tryout in Denver, he didn’t make the first cut but was allowed to sing his entire song, and was hoping for at least the same good fortune this time.

American Idol seems, indeed, to be a sort of contemporary Woodstock. For most, there’s the feeling of having been part of a big cultural happening. But there is also the appeal of being chosen, the promise of that fleeting, Warholian fifteen minutes, though the selection criteria are as elusive as Osama bin Laden. Actually, it all seems to have less to do with singing and more to do with singing as a vehicle for celebrity.

Andrea Leap is an instructor at the MacPhail Center for Music and helped two of her students prepare to audition. “There’s personal taste, and that’s hard to account for,” Leap comments. “They’re looking for a very special aesthetic, something with broad appeal, all-American, whatever that is. You can’t be too threateningly unique.” (So we can assume that had Bjork tried out, she would’ve gotten the chop.)

“It’s certainly increased the enrollment in voice lessons,” Leap says of the show. But she’s quick to add that the students who’ve been inspired by watching American Idol “aren’t necessarily into being singers, they’re into being famous. I don’t know how to teach that.”

For his part, Tiki Cross will stick to smaller venues. After singing a few bars of Kenny Rogers’ “She Believes in Me” for the Idol judges, he was told his voice was too strong, despite the fact that a previous audition had gone really well. That one had been in his living room, before a different panel of judges: his three children. His oldest son, eight-year-old Dajeon, had played Simon. His daughter, Gloria, ten months, was Paula. And Taveon, Gloria’s twin brother, had played Randy. “Randy sang along with me,” said Cross. “Paula said, ‘Good, Daddy,’ and Simon actually clapped. I was really surprised by that. So I thought I was doing pretty good,” he laughs. “But you know, they all said, ‘You’re our American Idol, Dad,’ and that’s what counts.”

To each his or her own consolation. “We’re going to do retail therapy at the Mall of America,” said Kalii Palmer, who had brought her mother along for support. “And I need a big thing of fries.”