Month: July 2007

My brothers and my mother were all dancers, outside of whatever else they did, like acrobatics, high wire, trapeze,” Donald O’Connor once said. The Hollywood dance icon knew inherently why a dancer is like a circus performer: because both create physical illusions by subverting gravity and harnessing momentum. During his classic and clownish “Make ’Em…

A race car with a dorsal spoiler careened over a jump and passed through a flaming hoop. Then it followed the racetrack in a loop-d-loop and drove through another flaming hoop. Rolando, a video-game tester for Activision Publishing, guided the car via a Playstation 2 controller over a series of flashing, fluorescent arrows that somehow…

People who work in fine dining tend to be night owls who eat their first meal of the day around two p.m. They carry a wine service wherever they go but often lose their car keys. They’re rock ’n’ roll junkies who, more often than not, have been married multiple times. They put up with…

I first met Dennis Banks two years ago, at a gallery opening featuring the work of Dick Bancroft, a local photographer who specializes in chronicling the American Indian Movement (AIM) and father of the famous polar explorer, Ann Bancroft. We were at Ancient Traders Gallery, on Franklin, and Banks was dressed that night in feathers…

An earthquake rattled Twin Cities radio this past month. It cracked open the notoriously unstable Clear Channel fault line and took down a legendary monolith, Mick Anselmo, previously thought to be impervious to corporate shock waves. Until his firing, Anselmo ran the seven stations Clear Channel owns here in the Twin Cities—Cities 97, KFAN, K102,…