Author: rakemag

We’ve been reading occasional snipes against the White Stripes that suggest a backlash against their meteoric rise. If so, that’s ridiculous. Never mind their media oversaturation, the opening dates for the Rolling Stones, Jack White’s new career as a Hollywood actor. Look past the red/white color scheme that just happens to be an effective branding method to make their product stand out in the marketplace, and the weird revelation that Jack and Meg White are divorced spouses and not brother and sister like they claimed, which always struck our suspicious minds as clever biographical manipulation with press coverage and mythmaking in mind. The only important thing is the music, and Elephant is as heavy as its name. Recorded in two weeks entirely on vintage pre-1963 equipment, their fourth disc mines more gold from the blues-punk vein the Whites work so successfully. Their approach, combining deep affinity for old blues with an all-out rawk attack of Pixies sneer and Stonesy swagger, isn’t as original as their proponents like to claim—Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s been living in this house for years. But with a record this potent we’re not going to quibble, we’re just going to turn up the stereo.

Whatever she does, it matters—right? Easy to forget that the ersatz Material Girl skillfully retooled her whole M.O. back in 1998, suddenly creating “serious music” in connection with William Orbit, right about the time she discovered yoga and Pilates. Ray of Light was actually a critical success, and 2000’s Music also had its fans among the mostly unreadable and spineless cognoscenti. We always thought the offerings were as thin on disk as they were on the runway, but hey, she’s an American Icon (uh, living presently with her British husband in the British Isles), and everything truly American always must have a hollow ring to it. We may sit this one out. We haven’t decided.

On her three previous, criminally underheard records, Amy Rigby won our hearts with her tuneful, world-weary wit, mapping out the emotional landscape of the mid-30s woman who feels wiser with age just as the world’s become more confusing with time. There’s nothing here as transcendent as “Sleeping With the Moon” or funny as “Cynically Yours,” the two best songs from 2000’s The Sugar Tree. But “Are We Ever Gonna Have Sex Again?” has Rigby’s best blend of bawdiness and disappointed realism. And she approaches a perfect merging of sentimentality and cynicism—one of her strongest songwriting skills—on the fragile 9/11 lament “Don’t Ever Change,” with its desperate yet optimistic line “I’m holding on to everything that’s good in this world; there’s a lot that’s good in this world.” Rigby plays the 400 Bar May 16. 400 Bar, 400 Cedar Ave., (612) 332-2903, 400bar.com

We will never forgive them for that maudlin “Under the Bridge” song—one of the most heinous pieces of unfiltered pap to hit saturation rotation in the past 20 years. But we know you love them. After all, you made Californication one of the bestselling records in their whole storied career. For now they’ll stay on provisional status, if for no other reason than the perennial homage to George Clinton and Funkadelic that is their road show. Bring out the adult-sized diapers, and let’s rock. Xcel, (651) 265-4800, xcelenergycenter.com

That decision to drop out of divinity school looks like the right one. As far as record sales go, Kurt Elling has yet to crack the Billboard Jazz Top 10. Nevertheless, he’s widely considered one of the hottest things going in male jazz vocalists, and with five Grammy nominations on five CDs, he must be doing something right. The Gustavus alum has a pleasing baritone and a fine sense of tonal control, and his instincts are spot-on. He’s accomplished at the slow burn of a romantic ballad, and can switch gears in an instant to pop into one of his self-described improvisational “rants.” His savvy sense of experimentation helped make his reputation, yet his love for the classics is self-evident—as is his appreciation for Frank Sinatra, whose voice and phrasings he mimics with proficiency. Dakota, Bandana Square, St. Paul, (651) 642-1442, www.dakotacooks.com

Lyrically and vocally reminiscent of an acerbic but less rough-edged Lou Reed, Suzanne Vega first made her mark in the mid-80s among the Edie Brickell/Natalie Merchant crowd of earnest female folk-rockers. Even in her mawkish breakout hit, the anti-child abuse ode “Luka,” she had an almost hidden steely edge that set her apart from her peers. An unlikely techno adaptation of her “Tom’s Diner” became a surprise hit, leading to edgier production on her 1990s albums—a couple of interesting singles resulted, including the buzzily paranoid “Blood Makes Noise,” but often her writing style was too intimate for the clanky signature sound of producer (and husband) Mitchell Froom. Their bitter divorce led to the deceptively still, emotionally turbulent Songs of Red and Gray, her strongest album in years. Last year she executive-produced Vigil, a compilation of Greenwich Village songwriters dealing with 9/11. Her current tour’s in support of the new best-of set Retrospective.

Sometimes great artists move from New York to Minneapolis—no kidding! Stuart Pimsler relocated his company here in 1999, and now he opens his 25th season with this exciting trio of pieces; Rooms of Disquiet, Islands, and Total Surrender. If this performance stacks up to SPDT’s platinum reputation, it will be as moving as it is funny, as personal as it is political. Southern, 1420 Washington Ave. S., (612) 340-1725, southerntheater.org, www.innerart.com/SPDT

Man, we’re getting old. It seems like just yesterday that Art-a-Whirl was the fresh-faced l’il whippersnapper of a neighborhood arts festival, a new hip event in a rather stodgy part of town that nobody was really sure would see a second year. Now, in year eight, it’s well past the point of becoming an expected (and most welcome) annual tradition, especially for those of us who live in the area. Lotsa open studios, lotsa gawkin’ at art, lotsa kids’ events and bands. Several artists will give live demonstrations of their disciplines all weekend long, the coolest of which is a tie between Tyler St. Studios’ aluminum pour (noon-4 pm Saturday only) and the Island Glass folks’ glass-blowing demos—they’ll even let the kids try it. There are more than 300 artists in this year’s show, which fans out for miles across Northeast. You can pick up brochures listing individual studios at kiosks all over the neighborhood or at the fest’s website. Our recommendation is to start over at the Northrup King building, 1500 Jackson St.—the three-story warehouse space has by far the highest concentration of studios at a single location. (612) 788-1679, art-a-whirl.org

There are very, very few cultures left even partly free from the homogenizing touch of the modern world. The Asmat people are one of them. A tribal culture of about 65,000 from the rainforests of New Guinea, they only recently stopped practicing headhunting and ritual cannibalism. The St. Paul museum’s current “Embodied Spirits” exhibition of carvings takes its title literally—the Asmat believe that invisible spirits with great power are all around them, and that human artists can actually force the spirits into a tangible shape and thus make them less dangerous. The museum’s overall collection of 2,500 pieces is one of the largest around, and it plays a crucial role in preserving Asmat artwork, often made of soft wood and perishable matter that doesn’t last long in a tropical climate. The AMAA is hosted at the province headquarters of the Crosier Fathers and Brothers, an order of Catholic missionaries who have been working on New Guinea to help preserve Asmat culture for nearly 50 years.
AMAA, 3510 Vivian Ave., St. Paul, (651) 287-1132, www.asmat.org

also: Margaret Atwood on MPR’s Talking Volumes
Fitzgerald Theater, May 8

You most likely know Margaret Atwood from her chilling 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the book that made her modern literature’s prophetess of feminist and ecological doom. It was made into a rather dull film in 1990, but the story’s lately found new life in a surprising new medium—opera. Adapted by Danish composer Poul Ruders and librettist Paul Bentley, the all-singing Handmaid’s Tale gets its North American premiere here this month in a staging by the Minnesota Opera. This is a major new work with a chorus of international acclaim and sellout crowds behind it, and we’re privileged to have it debut in our town. (If that’s not enough reason to see it, know that there’s a scene where the heroine and villain play a game of Scrabble. Sheer drama!) May 6 will also see the publication of Atwood’s 11th novel, Oryx and Crake. It’s a highly readable, often disturbing vision of humanity engineering its own destruction; it follows a pathetic figure named Snowman, maybe the last human on Earth, who fights to survive among gene-spliced mutants in the post-apocalyptic wastelands and broods over his role in the disasters that befell mankind. Atwood talks with MPR’s Katherine Lanpher about the opera and her own work in a live radio broadcast at the Fitzgerald May 8. Ordway, 345 Washington St., St. Paul, (651) 224-4222, ordway.org

Theater: Perfect Crime
Jungle Theater, through June 15
At 6,000 performances and counting, the New York production of Warren Manzi’s Hitchcockian thriller is the longest-running nonmusical in Broadway history. Such longevity is doubly amazing in view of Manzi’s criminally sloppy handle on the mystery story; his script is so overstuffed with red herrings, dropped subplots, implausible twists and flat-out plot holes it could be retitled Dial I For Incomprehensible. But as the man said, 50,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong. Perfect Crime’s perfect attendance happens for a reason—namely, its terrifically watchable and funny villain, the casually domineering femme fatale Margaret Thorne Brent. It’s a juicy role, and the Jungle’s Jodee Theleen sinks her teeth into it, playing Margaret as a self-absorbed empress for whom contempt is so second-nature that she can’t stop launching her brutally dry barbs of sarcasm even when she’s seducing their target. If you want a good reason to commit to Crime, her performance is it. Jungle, 2951 Lyndale Ave. S., (612) 822-7063, www.jungletheater.com

Theater: The Sound of Music
Chanhassen Dinner Theater, opens May 30
This is, of course, the show that asked the musical question “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” What a lot of people don’t realize is that in a very early draft of the play, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s song actually asked “How do you solve a problem like multivariate normal distribution in orthagonal matrices of probability density functions?” And instead of cute kids singing about does and deers and stuff, a dozen pale grouchy mathematicians hunched silently at their desks, scribbling furiously to solve the problem before the others and thus gain tenure at M.I.T. There was no singing, and the only line of dialogue was “quit hogging the pencil sharpener.” And would you believe they were forced to rewrite this to make it more commercial? At any rate, Chanhassen will be staging the much better-known “real” version, with the singing and the Von Trapps and the Edelweiss and everything. CDT, 501 W. 78th St., Chanhassen, (952) 934-1525, www.chanhassentheatres.com

Restaurants: Red Fish Blue
1681 Grand Ave., St. Paul
(651) 699-6595
Forget about those suburban seafood chains where the waiters break into the macarena every half-hour. This self-described “ocean diner” (hey, a pun!) over Macalester-way has a pleasantly casual atmosphere with prices that won’t bite like a shark. The walls are dominated by solid reds and blues, getting a subtly undersea theme over without needing to nail up kitschy lobster traps and plastic octopi everywhere. The presentation is also very impressive—your meal will look beautiful, though the food itself may not be anything particularly revelatory. Our recent lunch visit consisted of the generously meaty and flavorful crab cakes and the zingy open-faced rib sandwich topped with sesame-orange slaw. Neither was a world-changing culinary event, but we’d definitely return and order them again with pleasure.