Month: October 2006

Minnesota’s northwoods overshadow its southwestern prairies, but Jim Brandenburg—the acclaimed nature photographer and Ely resident who’s best known for his images of woodlands and lakes—is doing his part to change that. His foundation is working with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service to bring back the tall grass prairie on hundreds of acres near his hometown of Luverne. And now there’s this exhibit of forty-three lush photos, featuring the kind of work that has brought the photographer acclaim from the National Geographic Society. Our only quibble is that these images, however gorgeous, are printed on canvas, which diminishes their clarity and even makes a few of them look like paintings by a talented amateur. On the other hand, Brandenburg’s work is nicely complemented by a series of eloquent, sometimes downright poetic quotes from nineteenth-century settlers and explorers. 10 Church St. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-627-4430; www.bellmuseum.org

Call it the forerunner of the demolition derby. One hundred and ten years ago, tens of thousands of people gathered to witness the collision between two late-model steam-powered locomotives in Crush, an east Texas town specially established for the event. While it was conceived by one William George Crush as a promotional stunt for his employer, the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway Company, people interpreted it as a clash between any number of dualities: progress and destruction, past and future, technology and money, even North and South. It’s those kinds of opposing forces, as well as the “Crash at Crush” itself (a heartland legend), that serve as inspiration for the latest installation by Minnesota artist Chris Larson, whose last local exhibit involved a space rocket smashed into a structure described as Ted Kaczynski’s cabin. 612-870-3200; www.artsmia.org

The University of Minnesota’s McNeal Hall is home to something of a dream closet: an archive of more than twenty thousand articles of vintage couture. Most of these pieces were bought long ago, and mostly by Minnesota women with the wherewithal to shop the Oval Room or the old Young-Quinlan and Frank Murphy department stores in downtown Minneapolis. For this show, the Goldstein Museum has ventured into its McNeal Hall stash to unpack treasures from four designers who were integral in changing what women wore in postwar America: Norman Norell, Bill Blass, Geoffrey Beene, and Pauline Trigère, a Frenchwoman who set up her own fashion house in New York in 1942. Highlights include Beene’s 1968 “M&M dress,” a flirty silk number with layers upon layers of fabric-covered buttons, and a psychedelic slip dress, lavished with both feathers and frayed chiffon, from the Blass collection of the same year. 1985 Buford Ave., St. Paul; 612-624-7434; Goldstein.cdes.umn.edu

Unlike the writer with whom she shares a surname, Eva Hesse is one of those artists who really never goes out of favor. Sure, there’s nothing like a tragic, early death to provoke and sustain interest (she succumbed to a brain tumor in 1970, at the age of thirty-four), but the fact remains that work from this German-born artist, who fled the Nazis with her parents as a toddler, seems as fresh and exciting today as it did four decades ago. This exhibit in particular has been praised for largely setting aside the drama and promise of Hesse’s life story in favor of focusing on the evolving relationship between her drawings (including collages and gouaches) and her sculptures, tracing Hesse’s innovations in both media. Supplementing some 150 drawings are several “relief drawings” incorporating papier-mâché, cord, and paint, as well as “test pieces” conceived as a form of three-dimensional drawing using materials (including latex) that were very nontraditional at the time. 612-375-7622; www.walkerart.org

What happens when one really smart, hip young writer marries another really smart, hip young writer? In the case of Ben Marcus, who heads up the MFA program in creative writing at Columbia University, and Heidi Julavits, founding editor of the Believer, the ultracool, ultrasincere arts and culture review, they do a tour together. Both are known for creating, through inventive language and dark humor, weird worlds only a few degrees different from our own—as in Marcus’ experimental novel Notable American Women and Julavits’ The Effect of Living Backwards, the story of two sisters on a hijacked plane. In addition to longer works, both writers have published short fiction and essays in such wide-ranging publications as Glamour, Esquire, the Paris Review, and Harper’s.

William Gay’s strain of Southern fiction is a nearly perfect blend of the dark and the comic. A ferocious stylist with a flair for the sinister and the forsaken, he deserves both a cult and a wider audience. While it isn’t hard to pin down his influences, Gay is less baroque than Faulkner, looser than Cormac McCarthy, and funnier and more steeped in the blues than either. Gay’s new novel—his third—is (like most of his work) set in his native Tennessee and features a suspect undertaker, grave robbers, bootleggers, blackmail, and necrophilia. In other words, Twilight is hard-boiled gothic literature that makes most contemporary Southern fiction look like Bailey White’s lost screenplay for Smokey and the Bandit IV.

Meissner’s literary debut, in 1994, was Hitting into the Wind, an acclaimed collection of thirty baseball stories. He’s since gone on to write poetry (American Compass was published in 2004) and now another story collection, The Road to Cosmos. These portraits of “regular” individuals include, as a recurring figure, a man named Skip, who is obsessed with deciphering the mysteries of his own youth, and his father. At their best they capture quiet, potent moments that resonate with universality, and on occasion they shine with the kind of aesthetic Meissner has cultivated in his poetry. “The Rescue,” in particular, reads like a prose poem focused on the image of ice on a river in a series of Skip’s musings. 1011 Washington Ave. S., Suite 200, Minneapolis; 612-215-2575; www.loft.org

The Cities have plenty of venues for teaching writing or hosting visiting authors, but the Minnesota Center for Book Arts is unique in that it treats the book as an artistic expression in and of itself. Book art is an inclusive term, covering everything from decorative spine-stitching to historical printing techniques to a limited-edition, calfskin-bound book of wood engravings—all of which will be on display in abundance at this event featuring more than forty artists and their handmade books, journals, paper, prints, and other gifts. This is also your chance to see nineteenth-century editions of Leonardo da Vinci sketchbooks and work by the Children’s Book Illustrators Guild of Minnesota. 1011 Washington Ave. S., Suite 100, Minneapolis; 612-215-2520; www.mnbookarts.org

There’s never been anything flashy about Alice Munro’s fiction, but she is unrivaled when it comes to sifting through seemingly quiet, parochial lives and uncovering, through small, precise details and close character study, the universal undertow.ne standing the title of greatest living short-story w In fact, her greatness has been proclaimed so often that saying anything more runs the risk of seeming like mere dust-jacket hyperbole. We will suggest this, though: Arrange a cage match between Munro and William Trevor, then award the last oriter in the English language. Pretty much everybody else you might mention in the same breath belongs on the undercard. On the other hand, the field might open up, since word is that Munro’s contemplating retirement—which would make the New Yorker’s fiction section even more of a crapshoot than it already is.

Famously reclusive, elusive, and allusive, Thomas Pynchon is the closest thing the American literary scene has to a mythical being (not counting such literally mythical characters as JT LeRoy and maybe Danielle Steel). It remains a marvel that in the age of the Smoking Gun, the guy has so successfully guarded his privacy, but it’s even more of a marvel that he keeps producing fat, dense, head-thumping novels that deliver challenges and gratification in almost direct proportion. Pynchon’s latest—coming almost ten years after the stupendous, 784-page Mason & Dixon—checks in at 1,120 pages, and according to the author’s own description, “the sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.” In other words, Against the Day is a typical Pynchon novel.