Christy DeSmith “I’m not materialistic or anything,” said Dave King, sprawled on his living room shag carpet with his infant daughter. “I’m just interested in being around things people have really labored over.” King, of course, knows well what it means to labor over one’s work. As a songwriter and drummer for Happy Apple, the Bad Plus, … Read more
If you were a Minneapolis bohemian ten years ago, you might have found yourself packed into a downtown nightclub for what was then one of the city’s most popular bands, the Beatifics. Back then, the band was promoting its first album, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, a collection of gloomy love’s-lost lyrics and power-pop … Read more
According to hundreds of billboards, bus sides, and direct mailings: Do. Of course, you are already doing something. You are reading a billboard. As you do, you learn this is not enough in the doing department. You should “groove your body for ten minutes three times a day.” Grooving includes such agreeable activities as dog … Read more
It’s hard to tell for sure, but the trend may have started with bright tangerine five years ago. That’s the color that the then-newly arrived owners of Two 12 Pottery, a potters’ studio-cum-gift-shop, painted their building on Northeast’s Thirteenth Avenue. Since then, art and color have swept into Minneapolis’s old Polish quarter: storefronts along this … Read more
“Can I pick those up tomorrow?” Frank Stone stands at the bottom of a thirty-foot mountain of stainless steel scrap metal and points to its peak—a bouquet of four-foot-long, auger-like spirals, salvaged from crop sprayers, flailing in the chilly wind. Employees at the American Iron scrapyard in North Minneapolis are well acquainted with Stone, who … Read more
With its cast of starving poets and musicians and creative squatters, Puccini’s La Bohème has not only inspired generations of bohemians; some would say it’s the best known and most accessible opera in the canon. When someone goes to the opera for the first time, frequently it’s to see La Bohème. It has also been … Read more
One reason so many lapsed Christians find themselves back in church on Christmas Eve is to hear the music. This year, you might be surprised to discover that those wonderful old carols have changed in your long absence. While you were away sinning, there has been a bit of an internecine scuffle between fans of … Read more
In 1996 I was a junior at the University of Minnesota when a friend invited me along on her family’s annual outing to see A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie Theater. At the time, I was taking Gender and Geopolitics, a class that had me deeply engrossed in the study of socioeconomic strata. Naturally, I … Read more
After Richard Avedon, the famous portraitist and New Yorker staff photographer, died on October 1, the owners of the Black Forest Inn in South Minneapolis draped their notorious Avedon print in black chiffon. The colossal photograph—a black and white portrait of eleven members of the Daughters of the American Revolution—covers a wall in their backroom … Read more
Somewhere between West River Road and Summit Avenue, blood will begin to seep through the shirts of a good many Twin Cities Marathon runners. It will seep from a particular part of the anatomy—their nipples—which makes this a delicate subject. It doesn’t happen spontaneously, as many non-runners might think. “This is caused by the abrasion … Read more