Author: rakemag

Given Chris Mars’ greater fame as the former drummer for the Replacements, you might well think that his career as a fine artist is mere rock-star dilettantism. It’s not. He’s the real thing, a skillful visual artist whose work echoes the semi-apocalyptic grotesque tradition of Hieronymous Bosch and World War I artist George Grosz. To make a more modern-day comparison, Mars comes across as a far less whimsical Tim Burton, especially in his repeated use of Halloween imagery. Disturbing, distorted Frankensteinian monsters populate his landscapes, bloated beings of bizarre and demonic ugliness. It is perhaps not surprising, then, to learn that Mars’ art is a conscious attempt to deal with a traumatic family history of schizophrenia. Often these figures are not demons, but lonely, suffering outcasts. Mars’ aim is to draw out their inner beauty and dignity without whitewashing their external horror. If anything, he’s too successful at the latter; empathy for these ghastly souls does not come easily. But maybe that’s the point. (Mars is still active in music as well, planning to release a new record soon.) Showing through Oct. 19 at Theiss is the very different but equally worthy painter James Disney, a Lutheran minister, whose often pensive watercolors draw on Biblical stories and late-medieval religious iconography to echo his own spiritual struggles. Kellie Rae Theiss Gallery, (612) 339-1094, theissgallery.com, chrismarspublishing.com

Okay, so they sound just like Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. But at some point, we all grow old enough to realize that pop music is one big lazy susan that keeps spinning in place. (In any case, all roads lead back to the Rolling Stones, right?) And why should we begrudge the kids their own updated version of art-school rock ’n’ roll? In our ongoing effort to help you avoid becoming just like your parents, take a moment to look in a mirror and say: “Yes, I’m 40 years old. I will never be a rock star. That doesn’t mean I can’t stay hip to the scene.” Anyone who’s spent five minutes on Cities 97 or Drive 105 in the past six months can tell you that it doesn’t get any hipper than the Strokes, and we’re eager to find out whether this youthful quintet can live up to the hype. We predict the average age for ticketholders at this show will be about twice the age of the band—you’ll feel right at home with all the emeritus hipsters. Orpheum Theatre, (612) 339-7007.

Bob Mould is no stranger to shocking his audience with a radical new direction—after his years in Hüsker Dü, the loudest punk band in all creation, the quiet and folkie Workbook seemed dumbfounding, though now seen as a career high point. But that’s nothing compared to his recent jump into dancefloor techno and electronica, on first blush as bizarre and wrong as if Olivia Newton-John tried gangsta rap. But it’s no joke. Indeed, he’s approaching this with the same intense seriousness he brings to everything, even his stint as a pro-wrestling scriptwriter. “Modulate” and the more recent “Long Playing Grooves” move farther from Mould’s traditional melodic-guitar assault into computer-generated soundscapes, in a conscious effort to revitalize a songwriting approach he’s been pursuing for two decades. The response from critics and fans has been mixed, though certainly not hostile. There might be something worthwhile, even luminous, down this new path, but Mould clearly hasn’t yet found it. (Mould’s third 2002 release, Body of Song , will be more in the Workbook vein, but he’s also got a live disc recorded in 1998.) Live, he’s now casting his guitar over preprogrammed beats and loops, though antediluvian stuff like “Chartered Trips” and “I Apologize” still appear with comforting regularity on the set list. Woman’s Club, 870-8001, www.bobmould.com

You could be forgiven for falling asleep during the last few years of Elvis Costello’s career. Don’t get us wrong, his collaborations with the classical Brodsky Quartet and pop-standards king Burt Bacharach were tasteful and sophisticated proof of his facility in more musical modes than mere rock. But for many of us who discovered him through the snarly vituperation of his early New Wave records, they had all the eat-it-it’s-good-for-you appeal of broccoli and dry toast. So it was with a guilty sense of pleasure that we heard him taking a big step back to the spirit of his younger days on his latest disc, When I Was Cruel , combining that familiar one-two punch of melodic guitar pop and acidly sharp lyrics. Not surprisingly, it’s also his biggest seller in years, putting him on top of the college charts for the first time since Punch the Clock in 1983. His touring band, the Imposters, features two-thirds of the Attractions, drummer Pete Thomas and keyboardist Steve Nieve. Orpheum Theatre, (612) 339-7007

We were skeptical of Coldplay’s massively huge debut album Parachutes. It seemed like a blatant ripoff of a much better thing—to wit, fellow Scottish navelgazers Travis—and a kind of superbuffed commercial repackaging of Britain’s wave of earnest young acoustic groups. But as the saying goes, you have your whole life to record your first album and one year to record the second. As such, a band really ought to be judged by its sophomore effort, and we have to admit that we’re entirely impressed with Coldplay’s followup. Ringing melodies, smart lyrics, big rock a la cart. Where Parachutes was a bit thin and tentative at times, Rush has polish, soul, and real depth—the mark of a band that’ll be making fine music for a long time to come, even if they’re on the road most of the calendar year. If we must suffer yet another British invasion, may it be as gentle, tuneful, and bloodless as “In My Place,” that crystalline single you’re hearing all over the radio just now.

For a musician who’s changed directions as many times as Beck has, Sea Change is an apt album title. If our Mr. Hansen has a single style, it’s eclecticism, tossing blues, hip-hop, rock, folk, and whatever else happens to be in the room at the time, into the mix. The irony here is that the master of self-aware postmodernism is going for the heart this time, coming up with a record dominated by world-weary, mournful ballads and lush production. Sea Change was reportedly inspired by a bad breakup, and indeed the lyrics are dominated by a sense of foundering grief. “These days I barely get by/ I don’t even try.” Think of it as his Nick Drake album. His tour with the Flaming Lips (about whom we’ve been raving all year) is potentially one of the coolest shows of the season. We’re honored to have it kicking off here in Minneapolis on October 17 at the Orpheum.

For all its imposing reputation as the play where nothing happens for two hours, Waiting For Godot is Samuel Beckett’s most accessible play, as you might have seen if you caught the recent PBS production of his collected stage works. There’s a famous story about its enthusiastic reception from an audience of hardened lifers at San Quentin, but you don’t have to be a prisoner in lockdown to identify with the desperate plight of Vladimir and Estragon, who wait forlornly for someone to come and give their lives purpose. Yes, it’s bleak stuff, and there’s probably no playwright with a more hopeless outlook than Beckett, even among existential absurdists. But even if Godot stares directly into the abyssal question of whether life has any meaning, and suggests that it doesn’t, Beckett’s canon has a strong streak of mordant humor that is especially prevalent here—not only abstruse philosophical wit, but slapstick reminiscent of Buster Keaton. Corcoran Park Neighborhood Center, 3332 20th Ave. S., (612) 724-4539

Last year’s production of Hamlet worked out so well for Jeune Lune that they’re taking it on the road. But before the company heads out for an East Coast and Midwest tour, they’re restaging the play at their home base for a couple of weeks, where they’ll also return in late November. As in the 2001-02 production, the creative vision comes from a pair of guest artists, director Paddy Hayter and set designer Fredericka Hayter from Footsbarn Traveling Theater in France. The Hayters’ interpretation is one of radical simplicity. Basing the set around the four elements, the visual effect is stark and monolithic. And the text itself is stripped down to its basic core, cutting out some minor characters entirely—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. At the same time, they take care not to lose the dark humor that, if done right, makes Hamlet the funniest of the Bard’s four major tragedies. It’s also in some ways his most intractable, and so while we’re sure we’ll disagree with some of the artistic license this production takes, any fresh look at Elsinore Castle is certainly worthwhile. Theatre de la Jeune Lune, (612) 333-6200, www.jeunelune.org

Ironically enough, while guests from France take over the Jeune Lune stage for their production of Hamlet , longtime Jeune Lune director Dominique Serrand is in residence at the Guthrie for another Shakespearean offering, one that’s never been performed at the Guthrie before. Comedy of Errors is one of the Bard’s zany coincidence-ridden farces, and for this one you’ll have to swallow perhaps one of the most improbable central conceits in the Canon—that a pair of identical twins separated at birth would both be named Antipholus, and would each have a servant named Dromio, who together form yet another pair of identical twins separated at birth. Get past that, and you’re golden. The rest falls into place from there; when the second Antipholus shows up unannounced and unaware in the first Antipholus’ town, each shows up in the wrong places at the wrong times until everyone’s hopelessly confused. It’s wacky, we tell you. Guthrie Theater, 377-2224, guthrietheater.org

In anticipation of December’s arrival of the Bolshoi Ballet, also at the Northrop, this much-decorated Swedish troupe presents Mats Eks’ modern reworking of Swan Lake . It makes a certain amount of sense to put the cart before the horse like this; as much as we might like to, we cannot escape the constraints of our own time and the paradigm in which we view a classic like Swan Lake , so we may as well be up front about our 21st century assumptions, right? Classical ballet itself is bound by archaic forms and timebound fashions—one might argue it’s an anachronism in itself. But then one wouldn’t be arguing from an informed point of view. Don’t do that. Catch Cullberg’s much-anticipated return to Minneapolis after a 20-year hiatus. You’ll be firing on all cylinders by the time that Russian crew comes to town.