Life is real! Life is earnest!

WINE & DINE
Join Us for Dinner

While movies like Ratatoiulle might have us questioning how good a dinner partner a food critic might make, we have to remember it’s merely fiction (the animation helps). The truth of the matter is, a good food critic is simply someone who knows and appreciates good food (and can express the reasons why, of course). What better dinner partner than that? I would gladly have dinner with any food critic in town — and we have so many good ones. But frankly, dinner with Jeremy Iggers and Ann Bauer — together! — has to take the cake. Join them this evening for an equally wonderful meal at T’s Place. According to Iggers, "T’s Place offers a unique menu — a combination of traditional Ethiopian dishes, served on a tray
covered with injera (a pancake-like flat bread), and some
Malaysian-Ethiopian dishes that chef T Belachew invented when he was a
chef-partner with Kin Lee at Singapore!" And if that’s not enough to entice you, then be sure to read the Twin Cities Daily Planet‘s review of tonight’s featured musician, Yohannes Tona — "the baddest bass guitar player in the Twin Cities."

8 p.m., T’s Place, 2713 E. Lake St., Minneapolis, pay your own way.

BOOKS & AUTHORS
Chip Kidd

This is apparently what we’ve come to: In an age when we’re reminded
on an almost daily basis that nobody reads books anymore, one of the
biggest celebrities in publishing is a guy who designs book jackets.
That, of course, would be Chip Kidd, the graphic designer with a
classic quarterback’s name. You’d think maybe the guy would be content
with having designed fifteen-hundred covers and counting—his work is
ubiquitous and, to his credit, almost always ridiculously stylish and
unmistakable—but you’d be wrong. Turns out Kidd also writes novels, and
on the heels of his debut The Cheese Monkeys
(an art school yarn) comes The Learners (a novel with a lot of
ruminations on graphic design). You certainly can’t accuse the
ambitious Kidd of not writing about what he knows. The publisher says
the new book also involves “advertising, electroshock torture, suicide,
a giant dog, potato chips, and the Holocaust.” —Brad Zellar

7-8 p.m., Minneapolis Central Library, 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis; 612-630-6174.

MUSIC
Foo Fighters

If
you want to piss people off, claim that Dave Grohl has written and performed more
great music than Kurt Cobain. It’s true: While his stuff may never be as
transcendent as Cobain’s, the Foo frontman and ex-Nirvana drummer has soldiered
on in superior fashion since Cobain’s ’94 suicide, delivering a remarkably
consistent string of quality discs. (One by One is the lone clunker among the
seven Foo records.) The latest, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, ranks
with the first disc on In Your Honor as the band’s finest work, containing the
Foo hallmarks of dynamic crescendos (a whisper-to-a-scream capability to rival
Aerosmith); gritty, punk-pop hooks; underrated, passionate vocals; and the
occasional affecting ballad. Plus, in whatever incarnation Grohl slaps
together, the Foos have always been able to deliver the goods in an arena-sized
venue. —Britt Robson

7:30 p.m., Target Center,
600 First Avenue North, Minneapolis; 612-673-1600.

Also tonight — and tomorrow night — the Terell Stafford Quintet will be performing at the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant.

And on the birthday of one of my favorite American poets (1807-1882), I’ll leave you with his words:

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,–act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;–

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow