rakemag I used to sit around late at night, mulling and wondering, and watching dark things scuttling through the long shadows on the floor. I would try, try, try to get the story straight, my story, but the thing was no longer capable of running anything but crooked, and it ran through some thick patches of … Read more
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, … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more