Author: rakemag

Much more informative than browsing at antique stores or Design Within Reach, this show is a must for design aficionados—even though, alas, you’re not allowed to park your tush on any of these models. The show includes works from the nineteenth century, but focuses on the twentieth century’s greatest names: There’s Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair, iconic designs by the Eameses and Eero Saarinen, along with pieces by Russell Wright, Harry Bertoia, Jens Risom, and others. 240 McNeal Hall, 1985 Buford Ave., St Paul; 612-624-7434; goldstein.che.umn.edu

Further proof of the vitality of the local dance scene, Carl Flink, the director of the University of Minnesota’s dance program, debuts a new company whose name refers to the no-nonsense ethic conveyed by 70s-era generic food packaging. As such, one of the company’s goals is to take down walls between dancers and non-dancers—and between the University community and the rest of us rubes, for that matter. The BLM style is built on gut instinct and the old-fashioned, bootstraps-and-shirtsleeves American can-do spirit; the music, much like the choreography, is based around an aesthetic of de- and re-construction—listen for pieces by Phillip Glass, Sigur Ros, and the like. Images draw from witches’ covens, sinking ships, and, more poignantly, the fractured emotions Flink felt after his sister’s recent death. 612-340-1725; www.southerntheater.org

Another collaboration from Kevin Kling and Michael Sommers, Old Four Eyes is partly a treatise on the engineering (or “taming”) of the Mississippi River, and partly an appreciation of John Banvard, the nineteenth-century panoramist who famously painted the river valley on huge canvases. Kling’s goofy script and a colorful spectacle of puppets, projections, and flamboyant costumes by Sommers’ Open Eye Figure Theatre make this old-timey production, as performed by University of Minnesota students, perfect fare for the kiddies. But with the strong impression it makes about the beauty and vitality of the old river, it can be enjoyed by grown-ups, too—so long as they’re game for a little silliness. Harriet Island Regional Park, St. Paul; 651-227-1100; www.showboat.umn.edu

Through five previous Cork O’Connor novels, Krueger has put his beleaguered hero through the wringer and then some. As Copper River, the sixth installment in the popular series, gets under way, O’Connor is on the run from hired killers who have already deposited a slug in his leg. This after the poor bastard spent much of the previous book, Mercy Falls, being stalked by a mysterious assailant and trying to solve the brutal murder of a well-connected businessman. Krueger’s novels always have a terrific sense of place and a solid feel for local color and regional characters, yet who knew the north woods were so crowded with dead bodies, secrets, sinister suspects, and interlopers? All right, maybe we all knew, but it’s a bit creepy all the same. This time out, O’Connor seeks refuge in a remote area of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he hopes to lick his wounds and shake his pursuers, yet murder and mystery dog him even there.

Here’s an update on Jessica Mitford’s still-relevant 1963 classic of muckraking, The American Way of Death, which shed all sorts of unwelcome light on this country’s funeral industry and its often horrific practices. While Mitford’s book had its (occasionally unintentional) hilarious moments, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen focuses on some of the bizarre modern rituals that have personalized death to the point of absurdity. God knows, in this day and age, when dead folks can buy customized “Precious Moments” caskets or have their ashes converted to keepsake “human diamonds,” Cullen has plenty of offbeat material. Even so, some of her yarns—a graveside dove release gone horribly wrong, or an account of a Colorado town’s Frozen Dead Guy Days festival—are almost too good to be true.

When queried about the meaning of his generally surrealistic stories, Haruki Murakami replied, “I’m very realistic. But when I write, I write weird.” That’s true enough, as the writer’s rabid cult of fans could attest. His new collection of twenty-five stories features, among other things, a shrinking elephant, an identity-stealing puddle of quicksand, and a variety of physically disabled characters. Murakami’s tales, with their diverse influences ranging from popular culture, Buddhism, western philosophy, and Jungian theory, are told with such shape-shifting fluidity that a reader often runs the risk of confusing their hallucinatory plots with the storylines of his own dreams.

Like his contemporaries Aharon Appelfeld and Amos Oz, Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua explores universal dilemmas that have been at the forefront of debate in his native country for decades. His often controversial views on Israeli identity and culpability have earned him fierce criticism at home and abroad, though he is widely regarded as one of Israel’s greatest living writers. His latest, A Woman in Jerusalem, displays many of his signature humanitarian concerns, and also shows off his Kafka influence to good effect. It centers on an anonymous victim of a suicide bombing who turns out to be a Slavic immigrant who had been working as a cleaning woman. An unnamed bureaucrat is dispatched to unravel the mystery and return the woman’s body to her family—a strange journey is marked by moral uncertainties, anguish, and genuine tenderness for a woman who had no real stake in Israel’s politics.

Offering an artistic take on the corporate practice of outsourcing, the collective of curators/artists behind this exhibition (including Douglas Padilla, Xavier Tavera, and Alexa Horochowski) commissioned help from south of the border in making the works on view. As part of Padilla’s installation on a faux business called “Ameri-Art Industries,” there’s a photographic “org-chart” made up of portraits of workers in Minneapolis, San Diego, and Tijuana (again, the task of snapping these shots was outsourced). Also on view is a cart laden with hand-crafted souvenir tchotckes made from seashells, horsetail hairs, naturally dyed wool, and, perhaps most impressive, El Zorzal Criollo (pictured here), a piece made of steel, auto body-paint, air-bag hydraulics, plus a kick-ass stereo and subwoofer. In short, it’s a bed-like platform that wants to be a low-rider, one that gives those lounging on it quite a ride. 520 2nd St. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-623-9176; www.soapfactory.org

Could the Rochester Art Center be aiming to become the Walker Art Center of southern Minnesota? This exhibition of eleven recent works by Manglano-Ovalle, many of them made in the last year, is certainly some kind of coup. The Madrid-born artist uses scientific data and cutting-edge technologies to create minimalist pieces that, conceptually, are quite complex. In the main gallery are three works dealing with natural forces: scale models of an iceberg and a cumulo-nimbus thundercloud, as well as Random Sky, a projection generated in real time from data gathered by a mini-weather station set up right in the room. Playing off those large-scale works is a trio of smaller pieces centered on the human individual; one involves the DNA of an anonymous volunteer, another the artist’s own fist, and the third, his child dozing in a crib. Taken all together, these pieces generate a host of ideas about man and nature (and human nature), borders and boundaries, time and transition, systems and the scientific method. 40 Civic Center Dr. S.E., Rochester; 507-282-8629; www.rochesterartcenter.org