Author: rakemag

Besides being pals with Tori Amos, Neil Gaiman has worked with Douglas Adams on his companion to A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, created the enormously successful Sandman comic book series, and written for children (Coraline), the silver screen (Beowulf, in production by Robert Zemeckis), and fantasy-horror fans (American Gods). And he dwells among us, right here in St. Louis Park. Gaiman’s elegant, slightly highbrow writing is made addictive by his wicked sense of humor, and his ease in goosing the flat world we live in with characters who hail from entirely different universes. In Anansi Boys, a boring office worker saddled with a cruel name by his father discovers that dead old dad was actually an African trickster god, one with the power to do much more than embarrass his son.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel made him the darling and the whipping boy of the literary world. Brilliant and pretentious, and at times completely impenetrable, the book chronicled the adventures of a geekish young collector of family ephemera named Jonathan Safran Foer (pure coincidence, of course) who travels through the Ukraine in search of the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis during World War II. Guided only with a photograph and a companionable if bizarre translator, the miserable Foer blunders along doggedly, bothering everyone in his path and picking up new doodads for his collection–items valuable only to him, which are displayed in plastic bags covering a monumental wall. Elijah Wood borrows Harry Potter’s glasses to play Foer, making him look like more of an artifact than anything he encounters in the Old World.

One day, when Mike Watt was thirteen, he was standing under a tree when D. Boon fell out of it and landed on him. Thus began one of rock’s great friendships and collaborations. With George Hurley, they formed the Minutemen, a pioneering punk band that lifted motifs from all over the musical spectrum, took its fire from the politics of the eighties, and blasted its tunes out at a Ramones-like pace of sixty or so an hour. For five years, the Southern California trio made some of punkÕs most memorable music (“Corona” is featured in the intro for MTV’s Jackass), and then Boon was killed in a car accident. This documentary gathers television appearances, concert footage, and dozens of interviews with friends and punk rock heroes, including some painful reminiscing by Watt, who’s never gotten over losing his best friend.

Dead people? Check. Black humor? Check. Johnny Depp? Check. Yep, it’s another Tim Burton film, and this one’s a love story. A young man on his way to his wedding stops to practice his wedding vows. He puts a wedding ring on a stick poking out of the ground, and waxes eloquent upon it. Turns out the stick is the desiccated finger of a murdered girl, who rises from the grave demanding to start her new life as a wife, to the horror of her poor groom. Set in nineteenth century Europe and rendered in the same stylized, sensual live animation Burton used for Nightmare Before Christmas, this warm, funny, and macabre film is visually stunning. Kudos to Burton; no one else can get the dead to get up and dance quite like this guy can.

The Heights is one of the things we love about these cities: It regularly screens silent black and white classics accompanied by a live Wurlitzer organ, just the way your great-granny saw them. Even the folks at the Heights have to agree that sound was a pretty great invention, though, and to celebrate seventy-five years of talkies, they are screening a dozen vintage Vitaphone short films from the twenties. After a break for boxed lunches and movie games, they’ll wrap up the evening with a showing of Follow Through, a Technicolor musical that originally showed at the Heights in 1930. By the way, Vitaphone, a recorded disc played at 33 rpms in sync with the film, was the first cinematic sound process. 3951 Central Ave N.E., Columbia Heights; 763-788-9079; www.heightstheater.com

Short and googly-eyed, cackling and sniveling, Bela Lugosi played the perfect piteous wretch in some of the greatest horror films ever made. He became a distinctively dank and unseemly type, one with no modern equivalent, not even Tom Cruise. Although he is best remembered for acting as sidekick to more commanding actors like Boris Karloff and Gene Wilder, early in his career Lugosi played dashing leading men with good posture, including Dracula. This set collects five films from the thirties and forties that showcase the work of this early and elegant Lugosi: Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Black Cat, The Raven, The Invisible Ray, and Black Friday. Boasting quality writing and noirish cinematography, these Universal films are hallmarks of the horror genre.

As a musician, you ought not name yourself after one of the wonders of the ancient world unless a) you’re damn sure of yourself and b) you’re going to be playing for a long time and assume iconic status. Taj easily meets both criteria: His ego’s as big as the stogies he smokes, and his tunes have taken him about as far as a folk-blues musician not named Dylan can go. His polyglot, border-crossing music takes from the American South, Africa, the Carribbean, Hawaii, Cuba, and beyond, and his proficiency on twenty-plus instruments, starting with his trademark Dobro, can be stunning. Throw in a rich, gruff but honeyed voice and an occasional whistling solo, and there’s no doubt he’s still got what it takes to cast a spell in concert. 651-290-1221, www.fitzgeraldtheater.org

You’d think we’d stay on top of these things: Sigur Ros, the superhip ambient slow-core band from Iceland, has a new record coming out this week, and we never got our secret-handshake-nudge-nudge-wink-wink advance copy, the better to let you know whether you should buy it when it becomes available to the masses. But when it comes to Sigur Ros, well, we figure we have time. Lots and lots of time. We still listen to the beautiful and fragile ( ), and that came out three years ago. Agaetis Byrjun, which sounds a bit like Cowboy Junkies spouting a made-up language on helium in an empty swimming pool with Erik Satie–yes, it’s that beautiful–is six years old, and it’s still in top rotation on our iTunes. Detect a pattern? It may be three years before they pass through town again–hint hint. 612-339-7007; www.hennepintheatredistrict.com

It can be hard to find the blues in these parts, unless you’re also looking for joints with a bunch of crazy crap nailed to the walls frequented by tipsy grandmothers. But this event promises to give the blues lover a real feast for the ears, and in a fancy-pants setting to boot. In addition to performances by a live ensemble–including singer Jearlyn Steele, Spider John Koerner, harmonica player Howard Levy, accordionist Dan “Daddy Squeeze” Newton, and bassist Gary Raynor, the event will include host (and guitarist) Pat Donohue recounting legendary episodes from the blues experience and screenings of rare film footage showing the people whose music came up the Mississippi and got into the souls of a lot of northern folks. 651-290-1221, www.fitzgeraldtheater.org

The strange phenomenon of classical cheesecake is not limited to nubile females posing naked behind their cellos. Violinist and conductor Joshua Bell only has to toss sweat off the ends of his long hair and the band geeks all swoon. Bell debuted at age thirteen with the Philadelphia Orchestra and has since played with many of the world’s renowned orchestras. He’s also the current owner of the Gibson Stradivarius, a storied violin that was made in 1713 and recently resurfaced fifty years after it disappeared backstage at Carnegie Hall. Bell is conducting Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Verdi’s Quartet in E Minor, and Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat for Strings. We’re pretty sure he’ll leave the Strad safely at home. September 23 at Ordway Center for the Performing Arts (651-224-4222; www.ordway.org) and September 24 at Ted Mann Concert Hall (612-624-2345; www.music.umn.edu/facilities/tedMann.php); www.thespco.org