Month: September 2007

There was a lot of, ahem, visual stimulation at last night’s Collage Fashion Show. But I must admit that after doing the MNfashion Weekend circuit last weekend (not to mention staying tuned to the various global fashion weeks), I find I’m a bit tired of looking at clothes. Sure, the threads looked awfully pretty last night but so too did the fellows (both on and off the runway), and I found myself admiring their beauty.

Here we have two of the male models (smiling and being all-around friendly after the show). Meee-ow.

Below: I often see this guy strutting about the warehouse district. He’s a realtor, from what I understand. He also happened to be the date of one of the editors from Mpls./St. Paul Magazine last night. (jealous much?)

Below: The one on the right is Chris Schauf, frontman for the local band Catchpenny. And his bandmates dress just as well, if you must know. They even have an exclusive deal with the very fabulous Trovata, an Orange County, California-based clothing label.

If you (or a loved one) want to look as polished as those above, then you might consider swinging into Ivy Men’s + Design this Saturday between three and seven p.m. for a DJ-ed shopping event with free beer. Ladies, if you heretofore have been unsuccessful at convincing your bedraggled boyfriend to upgrade his wardrobe, then you might be able to lure him in with free beer.

A couple months ago, I posted a piece about the health benefits of wine — including the information that red wine had been found to have both cancer-enhancing and cancer-preventive effects on breast tumors in women. My hope — quixotic, perhaps — was that it was a wash: the antioxidants in wine would cancel out any damage done by the alcohol.

Well, a cautionary story published this week in the Scotsman and by the Associated Press says that’s just not true. According to a study conducted by the European Institute of Oncology, wine drinkers are just as likely as drinkers of beer and other spirits to be diagnosed with breast cancer. Of more than 70,000 women surveyed during health examinations over a period of 7 years , those who reported drinking wine developed the disease at roughly the same rate as those who said they drank beer or hard liquor. But “light” drinkers (defined as less than one glass per day) and non-drinkers in the study suffered from breast cancer at a much lower rate.

I think this is worth knowing. But note a couple things: first, the study appears to have relied on self-reporting — a notoriously inaccurate way to collect data. (It sounds a lot better to say to one’s doctor, “I have a couple glasses of wine with dinner” than “I knock back three or four rum and Cokes every night.”) Also, I can find no evidence that the wine drinkers in the study were exclusive about what they consumed; did a few of them, maybe, follow those couple of glasses with the rum? Finally, there are other factors to consider, such as the fact that drinkers tend to eat rich food and this was Italy, after all, where smoking is still de rigeur.

But enough rationalizing. It appears to be sadly, horribly true that alcohol promotes estrogen production and estrogen feeds breast tumors. Which is a problem for women prone to cancer — or, for that matter, anyone with a set of breasts. So ladies, if you’re going to drink wine, be careful. Follow a low-fat diet, exercise, try not to eat hormone-laden meat, avoid taking the birth control pill, and DON’T SMOKE. And if you have risk factors beyond your control — such as a genetic predisposition — you might want to limit yourself to one glass a day.

If you must do this, however, please, make it a good one.

BOOKS
Amdromeda Romano-Lax Takes Casals through the Looking Glass

I grew up surrounded with images, sounds, and stories of Pablo Casals. Though you’ll hear that he’s a Spaniard, his mother was in fact from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. An amazing cellist and a beautiful conductor, Casals spent much of his early years playing for queens and presidents. He lived a most interesting life among the elite, which writer and journalist Amdromeda Romano-Lax set out narrate. As she became engrossed in the story, however, her imagination went wild, resulting in a most interesting novel rather than a nonfiction work. This afternoon, you can hear Romano-Lax talk about her novel, The Spanish Bow, and the man that inspired it. What a man! His Bach’s Cello Suites makes me weep each time I hear them — which is often; and there’s a 1983 Casals Festival lithograph still hanging in my bedroom.

Friday at 2 p.m., University of Minnesota Bookstore, Coffman Memorial Union, 300 Washington Ave. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-626-0559; free.

Tim Brady Explores the Gophers’ Rich History

What’s the obsession with gold in sports? Let’s face it: gold is a horrid color. No matter what color you pair it with — black, blue, green, even maroon — it’s still horrid. Is it the medal reference? Go for the Gold? The enthusiasm behind sports in this country is astounding, as is the amount of money made from it, put into it, and circulating within it. Money is power, my friends. And sports are mighty powerful in, oh, so many ways. Saturday, local author Tim Brady (of The Great Dan Patch and the Remarkable Mr. Savage) invites you to experience over 150 years of rich University of Minnesota sports history. “Gopher Gold delves into the little-known corners of the university’s past to showcase the wealth of talent and ability that this landmark institution has attracted, nurtured, and given back to the world.” Brady will sign copies of his book following the discussion.

Saturday at 2 p.m., University of Minnesota Bookstore, Coffman Memorial Union, 300 Washington Ave. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-626-0559; free.

Top off the Weekend with an Extraordinary Orgasm

Thanks to Girl Friday, we learned of Sunday’s book event: a book chat with Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller, authors of I Heart Female Orgasm: An Extraordinary Orgasm Guide. As Girl Friday points out, the book has yet to receive less than a 5-star rating from any of its reviewers on Amazon. But really, how could it? I mean… an extraordinary orgasm guide? Of course it’s great!

Sunday at 6 p.m., Smitten Kitten, 3010 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis; R.S.V.P. to 612-721-6088.

FILM
Quiet City

Director Aaron Katz’s Quiet City is part of the ever-growing “mumblecore” movement in indie film, a genre that favors disaffected youth who struggle to pay the bills. These films defy summary and star nonprofessional actors who improvise most of their dialog, or, well, mumbles. In Quiet City, a girl gets lost in Brooklyn and meets a young man and together they wander through the sleeping borough, saying almost nothing. Quiet City places demands on the viewers’ attention — a sideways glance, a puff on a cigarette have as much gravity as ten minutes of dialog in a conventional film. Tonight and Sunday, Katz and lead actress Erin Fisher appear to discuss the film, and on Saturday (2 p.m.) you can join them for a director’s roundtable discussion at IFP. –Peter Schilling Jr.

Friday and Sunday at 7:15 and 9:15 p.m., Oak Street Cinema, 309 Oak St., Minneapolis; 612-331-3134, $8 (seniors $6, members/students $5).

THEATER & PERFORMANCE
Jesus Hates Me

Just under a year ago, Wayne Lemon’s latest play, Jesus Hates Me made its world premiere at the Colorado New Play Summit. This weekend Emigrant Theater brings Lemon’s hip play to Minneapolis — directed by founding member Jessica Finney. Expect typical and quirky Texan fare, small-town rural America, a Bible-themed miniature golf course, Jack Daniels bottles, gay ski resorts, and plenty of gut-wrenching laughter.

Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 and 8 p.m., Ritz Theater, 345 13th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-436-1129; $10.

ART BENEFIT
Art Perchance

If you’ve got a bit of extra cash on hand and you’d like to show your support for the arts, head over to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts tonight for their fourth annual Art Perchance benefit — another great opportunity to eat, drink, and play in the name of art. Enjoy an evening of games, food, and drawings for jury-selected artwork; and feel good about bringing art and culture to children throughout Minnesota — or rather, for bringing them to art and culture. Proceeds from this evening’s event benefit the Friends Transportation Fund, which provides free bus transportation for schoolchildren to visit the MIA for educational tours. Arrive an hour early (6 p.m.) for a pre-party reception.

Friday at 7 p.m., Minneapolis Institute of Art, Target Wing, 2400 Third Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-870-3045; $75 and up.

MUSIC
Rock It to the Bang Bang Boogie

“I said I can’t wait ’til the end of the week / when I’m rappin’ to the rhythm of a groovy beat / and attempt to raise your body heat.” In 1979 I knew every darn word of “Rappers’ Delight.” It’s a mighty long song, but everybody knew it word-for-word. This was the onset of rap, and it was a pretty big deal. Granted, I was living in New York then. You can imagine my surprise at hearing it “passed off” as something new in Minnesota almost a decade later. But hell, better late than never. And now, close to another couple of decades gone by, we can all look back and bask in the greatness of the pioneer rappers, the SugarHill Gang.

Sunday at 9 p.m., Foundation Nightclub, 10 S. Fifth St., Minneapolis; 612-332-3931; $25, VIP $40.

I stopped at Zeno one afternoon last week to meet a friend for a glass of wine. A lot has changed since the new owners took over last year.

When Zeno first opened in late 2003, it had an aggressive “we’re the coolest” culture: thrumming techno music, servers with multiple piercings, and two New York founders who were constantly circulating among the guests and slapping backs but — rumor had it — never paid their bills. But what irked me the most was the inconsistency: wine pours were sometimes five ounces, sometimes nine; the bottles would be freshly opened one time I visited, nearly vinegar the next. There seemed to be no standard.

I’m happy to say that the new and improved Zeno IS. The music has been turned down just a notch; the servers (at least the ones I’ve encountered) are friendly and knowledgeable; the wine menu is a little more refined and pours are a standard 7 ounces. But there is this oddity: Zeno now runs a “bottomless wine glass” special in the afternoons, from 3-7 p.m., serving customers as much wine as they can drink during that four-hour period. The cost is $10 for their bottom-of-the-barrel wines (Glass Mountain and Bella Sera) and $20 for the “premium” wines on their list.

A great deal? Well, yeah, it can be. . . .but that’s exactly the problem, as I see it. In order to make the $20 glass pay, you have to drink the equivalent of three glasses of wine (priced, per glass, at 7-10 dollars) before the dinner hour. Not to mention, you can buy an entire bottle of Glass Mountain Chardonnay retail for about 7 bucks. My friend loved the special because it allowed her to taste (and discard) several different options. And maybe I’m just more fretful than most, but the whole thing made me nervous. A bottomless wine glass at 4 p.m. seems like an invitation to be blotto by 6. Much like those bottomless cups of cheap coffee restaurants used to serve: I can still remember leaving Perkins at 15 with a sour stomach and a nearly deafening caffeine buzz.

Movie musicals–I love ’em. This magical celluloid hybrid of dancing, singing, acting, and (very importantly) cinematography simply amazes me. If Broadway’s your bag, that’s wonderful, but I’ll take cinema’s version any day: on stage, it would impossible to track Gene Kelly as he splashes through the Hollywood streets in that iconic scene in Singin’ in the Rain. To make that scene perfect, you need the camera swooping around the hoofer as his umbrella swings around and around, and then you join him as he ascends the streetlight, the camera rising to meet him in the sky… simply awe-inspiring. Furthermore, if you want to experience the full force of these treasures, well, get thee to the big screen, my friend. This week, our pals at the Parkway Theater are presenting, for our viewing pleasure, two sassy little Gene Kelly/Frank Sinatra MGM numbers, On the Town and Anchors Aweigh.

On the Town is a personal favorite, the first MGM musical to be filmed on location in New York City. The story, as usual in a movie musical, is nothing more than cotton candy: three sailors, Gabey, Chip and Ozzie, (Kelly, the Frank, and horse-faced Jules Munshin, respectively), have a one-day leave. So they decide to hit the town, visit all the sights, drink milkshakes and dance… you know, like sailors do on leave. Along the way, our heroes meet three girls–the saucy cabdriver Brunhilde Esterhazy (Betty Garrett–what a cutie) who lusts after Chip with singular determination; the anthropologist Claire Huddesen (Ann Miller, whose last role in this world would be the creepy landlady in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr.), who sees in Ozzie the remnants of a sexy prehistoric man; and Ivy Smith (Vera-Ellen), Miss Turnstiles, a dancer whom Gabey falls in love with.

By some insane coincidence, Miss Turnstiles is from the same milkshake-and-clover small town that Gabey also calls home, there’s a mean old Russian piano teacher who has Ivy in her clutches, and a horrible running gag about Lucy Shmeeler (Alice Pearce) being just about the ugliest woman in the world (it’s actually quite disturbing how they make fun of this poor lady). But the musical numbers are dynamite, with its book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who gave us the masterpiece Singin’ in the Rain). Despite the fact that it was filmed on the Brooklyn Bridge, in Rockefeller Center, and the Empire State Building, directors Stanley Donen and Kelly (again, the minds behind Singin’) gave On the Town the needed intimacy that one would usually associate with a movie shot in a studio soundstage. And being a Gene Kelly musical it has one of those crazy dance sequences toward the very end.

Anchors Aweigh is also highly regarded–it’s famous for the scene with Gene dancing with the cartoon mouse Jerry. Frank Sinatra’s also in tow, and the pair also play sailors on leave.

These are a pair of great movies for young and old–I imagine children especially taking to dancing like cavemen in the “Prehistoric Man” number from On the Town, or singing, as I did when I was a pup, that movie’s opening tune “I Feel Like I’m Not Out of Bed Yet”, and trying to hit those low, low notes. I still sing that song today–it just gets the morning started right.

EXPLORATION
A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City

Imagine your country is at war. No, not the way you know war. Not overseas. In your own country. Right here. On your own land. Perhaps you take up arms. Perhaps you don’t. It doesn’t matter. You’re losing. It’s stay and fight (and die), or flee. Imagine you have a family. Imagine you are now “among the 33 million people around the world who have been forced to flee their homes and seek refuge.” Do you have any idea what that’s like? Any idea at all? Hopefully not from personal experience. But look next door. It might do to understand the plight of others. Today, Doctors Without Borders opens its Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City exhibit in Loring Park. Get a guided tour of the camp exhibit and learn about the challenges of building shelter, finding food and clean water, handling waste disposal, controlling epidemics, and … surviving what may come. Educate yourself, and at the end of the day thank whatever god(s) you have for your well-being. Then have yourself a drink, and toast to the the well-being of those around you. But don’t stop at that…

9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Loring Park, 1382 Willow St., Minneapolis; 612-370-4929.

BOOKS
Per Petterson

It’s been a huge year for Norwegian writer Per Petterson. The acclaim for his latest novel ranged from Thomas McGuane’s front-page rave in the Times Book Review (“A gripping account of such originality as to expand the reader’s own experience of life”) to the $135,000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Award-winning author Richard Ford even chimed in with a ringing endorsement, and if you threw in a hosanna from Cormac McCarthy you’d have a pretty good idea of the sort of literary territory Petterson is exploring in Out Stealing Horses. It’s a quiet, spare, ruminative novel, in which the stoic protagonist wrestles with memory’s powerful undertow while enduring a sort of solitary confinement in a remote cabin. Petterson will spend a busy couple of days on the Minnesota leg of his tour, appearing as part of the Minneapolis Public Library’s Talk of the Stacks series tonight, and at the St. Olaf College Bookstore (4 p.m.) tomorrow. –Brad Zellar

7:30 p.m., Minneapolis Central Library, 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis; 612-630-6000; free.

STYLE
Collage Fashion Show

Two of my favorite local boutiques are participating in this three-way of a runway event: the refined, and yet funky, Ivy and super-girly Stephanie’s. The third boutique, Bluebird, isn’t a fave, but I have found fabulous vintage jewelry there in the past. However, I’m quite excited about Bluebird’s contribution to this year’s (the third annual) Collage Fashion Show. They’re planning to show clothes by Loeffler Randall, the shoe designer – a favorite of the shop’s owners – who only recently introduced a line of apparel. –Christy DeSmith

7 p.m., Nicollet Island Pavilion, 40 Power St., Minneapolis; 612-253-3099; $25.

DANCE
Explorations in Flamenco

Time for a little Spanish flair tonight, with the opening of Zorongo Flamenco Dance Theatre’s Explorations in Flamenco: An Evening of New Choreography by Sachiko and Deborah Elias. And in keeping with the current trends, we’re not just talking dance here; we’re talking dance, live music, and multimedia work. Explorations in Flamenco features two works. Inspired by the stories of Japan’s Hibakusyas (atomic bomb victims), novels by Masuji Ibuse, and poems by Toge Sankichi, Hiroshima tells intimate stories of WWII destruction through flamenco, Japanese traditional dance, martial arts, and Butoh-inspired movements. Tía, on the other hand, celebrates the power and beauty of imagination — to transform, to empathize, and to envision a different future.

8 p.m., Intermedia Arts, 2822 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis,; 612-871-4444; $15 (students and seniors $13, members $10).

THEATER & PERFORMANCE
City Ceased

In this case, the play itself isn’t the thing, although they are certainly some clever, and even touching, vignettes about the afterlife–the best of which concerns pet foster care for dogs gone to heaven. The best reason to see City Ceased is to catch a glimpse of the beautiful Lakewood Cemetery at night, to stroll its winding roads and circle its tiny lake. By the end of the show, sadly, the material of this site-specific play will have devolved into sap, but not before the audience is treated to some lovely, flashlight-lit images of, for instance, a dramatic weeping willow, a tiny s&eacure;ance, and actors dancing in the moonlight. –Christy DeSmith

8 p.m., Lakewood Cemetery , 3600 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis; $12.

Pillowman Review

Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman focuses on Katurian (Lichtseidl), a writer of grisly tales in which children are tortured and killed. When a number of child murders resembling his stories take place, Katurian is detained for questioning by the totalitarian state in which he lives. He is interrogated by detectives Ariel (Chris Carlson) and Tupolski (Seifert), who have also detained Katurian’s mentally disabled brother, Michal (Grant Richey), as a way of baiting Katurian into confessing. Lichtseidl gives Katurian what depth he can, and his big-brother relationship with Michal is sweet and sincere. But the plot itself gives Lichtseidl little to work with, and as a result he is underused. Seifert and Carlson are wonderful as the good-cop/bad-cop team of Ariel and Tupolski. Carlson’s Ariel is high-strung and constantly enraged; Seifert’s Tupolski is docile but menacing — together they are mean and unfair and completely engrossing. Seifert is so deliciously nasty that you can’t help but laugh. Grant Richey also succeeds in the role of Michal, uttering even the most disturbing of lines with innocence and vulnerability. Pillowman is heavy — it discusses child torture and highlight’s the importance of Art with a capital A. Sometimes it sounds more like a debate in a college literature course than a play. –excerpts from review by Danielle Kurtzleben

7:30 p.m., Dowling Studio, Guthrie Theater, 818 S. 2nd St., Minneapolis; 612-377-2224; $18-$34.