Author: rakemag

Backyard wrestling, eating contests, re-enactment play, Halloween hijinks—Cameron Jamie takes inspiration from some of contemporary mankind’s most primitive social pastimes. While they may not be great showcases of civility, these subjects do make for grotesque, amusing, and ultimately thought-provoking study in this artist’s first solo museum exhibition. Through film, video, performance, photography, sculpture, and drawings, Jamie presents the strange fruits of suburban boredom—focused around California’s San Fernando Valley, where he grew up—as “social theater.” His collaborations with street performers, celebrity impersonators, and musicians (including the Melvins and Japanese guitarist Keiji Haino) add dimension to these fascinating takes on socially acceptable absurdity. 612-375-7622; www.walkerart.org

The Great Gatsby is a notably contemporary choice for a company best known for its Shakespeare. But by honoring both the spirit of St. Paul’s favorite son and the opulent Jazz Age epitomized by his classic novel, the company is making quite the symbolic statement for christening its glamorous waterfront playhouse. A second Minnesota son-made-good figures into the production, as well: It’s directed by David Esbjornson, the veteran Broadway director who grew up in Wilmar, and now serves as artistic director for another regional company, Seattle Repertory Theatre. An attractive cast serves to plum things up—West Coast actor Lorenzo Pisoni has the floppy hair and Gallic good looks necessary to play Jay Gatsby, and local songstress Christina Baldwin has the role of car-crash victim Myrtle Wilson. 818 2nd St. S., Minneapolis; 612-377-2224; www.guthrietheater.org

What Momentum does for choreographers (see above), Fresh Ink does for playwrights. Among our top picks is Boldly Going Nowhere, a one-man, five-character study put on by Theatre Latté Da veteran Tod Petersen. As wear-tested at the Minnesota Fringe Festival two years back, it demonstrated Petersen’s uncanny ability to pick up the speech patterns and mannerisms of, say, a debutante dabbling in lesbianism or a television addict who exiles himself to his parent’s basement. Also on the docket is a tribute to Gene Pitney, who penned the classic “Only Love Can Break A Heart,” performed by Gary Rue, a musician who was once a roadie for Pitney; a stand-up routine by ex-Twin Citizen Amy Anderson; and more. 528 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-339-4944; www.illusiontheater.org

These days, Stockholm, Wisconsin, is a sweet daytrip for retirees looking to buy Amish quilts or decorative objets from discerning folks who’ve escaped the big-city rat race. But in 1854, this town was the promised land for two hundred Swedish settlers; their compatriot, Eric Peterson, had left Bjurtjärn for America with his two brothers, who then went back to spread the good news to their former neighbors. These brothers must have been highly persuasive—can you imagine your neighbor inspiring you to go anyplace other than perhaps the new Trader Joe’s? Anyway, a good chunk of Bjurtjärn decamped for Wisconsin. After 152 years, the descendants of those who stayed in Sweden have now crossed the Atlantic to present a musical version of a play based on the exodus. As many as fifty members—not counting the animal actors—of this eighty-person troupe appear on stage at a time, a true feat of stage direction. 2600 Park Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-871-4907; www.americanswedishinst.org

While taking tango lessons from an Argentine national, local choreographer Gerry Girouard became interested in the famous Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo—a group whose mission since 1977 has been to track down missing Argentine children, many of whom were born to political prisoners. By teaming his own dancers with Off-Leash Area Productions, a theater troupe adept in physical performance styles, Girouard’s piece evokes the ominous Junta environment that the Grandmothers braved to rescue dozens of children. Expect an imposing and virile spectacle involving wall dancing and impressive upper-body strength. 1940 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-724-7372

This year’s lineup of fresh Minnesota dance includes inspired moments like the pairing of the gorgeous music of Spaghetti Western String Co. with Live Action Set, an inventive company of clowns, dancers, and stage performers. Their piece is titled “Percussionist,” even though, yes, Spaghetti Western is a string quartet; it’s the bodies in movement that provide the thump. Other standouts in the series include a hip-hop dance piece, an amalgamation of video and live performance, and “Tiny Town,” in which New York transplant Karen Sherman offers a meditation on the Midwest’s expansive flatlands (pictured). 1420 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-340-1725; www.southerntheater.org; www.walkerart.org

Imagine paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house you’ll never set foot in—because it doesn’t exist. Every day, legions of people buy virtual merchandise online, including real estate, tools, weapons, and creatures, in a real economy surrounding MMPORGs, or Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Games. If you aren’t involved in these games yourself, you probably know someone who is; an estimated six million people play World of Warcraft, which is one of dozens of popular MMPORGs, and involvement is growing exponentially—as is the amount of cash surrounding these games. So much money is generated within the game world of EverQuest II that, calculating its gross national product, it’s estimated to be the seventy-seventh largest economy in the real world.

Author Julian Dibbell writes about this phenomenon in Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job And Struck It Rich in Virtual Loot Farming, out July 31. He challenged himself to see if he could exceed his real-life pay as a freelance writer for magazines like Wired, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice by selling virtual goods online.

So can you earn more money playing video games than writing?
Yeah. People can make six figures. Once I got going, I was making more money every month, and in the last month, I made $3,900 profit. If I’d stuck with that business, there’s no doubt that I would have made that much, or maybe even more, and averaged over a year, that would have been about forty-seven thousand dollars a year. Selling virtual goods probably would have been a better career choice for me, but I don’t think I was put on this earth to do retail.

Why would someone want to pay real money for fake things?
It’s all part of the experience. We have these magical, potentially utopian spaces online that are essentially the kind of world we’ve always wanted to live in. Fascinating people from around the world are there. But the spaces people are really drawn to, the worlds people actually pay subscription rates to use and spend a lot of time in, actually have a lot of constraints and challenges. In the end, we don’t like perfection, and the chance to overcome virtual difficulties gives people enormous satisfaction.

Aside from the cash, how much do these game worlds bleed into real life?
There’s this meme going around that World of Warcraft is the new golf, meaning that it’s become a professional meeting ground for people, with all the good and bad that that implies. Like golf, the people who don’t play are on the outside. But people do get to know other players. It’s like if you were playing poker with somebody. You’d talk about things apart from the game. These online games are the same way. It’s very enmeshed in real-life identity, not hermetically sealed off.

Do you think playing these games is training the next generation to interact differently?
To an extent, playing these games fosters a kind of thinking and level of cooperation that hasn’t been seen outside of the military. There’s been some glib talk in the business world along the lines of, “I’d rather hire a [game world] guild leader than an MBA,” because the people skills required to successfully manage a guild really are quite intense. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a generation of thinkers shaped by playing these games. It’s one thing to play a single-player game, it’s another to play a four-way game of Monopoly in which you’re going to be the top gun against five or six people. But to be achieving against the backdrop of a population of hundreds of thousands of other players adds so much weight to the achievement, because there’s such a rich social context surrounding your play.

Are that many people really into this?
When you start playing these games, you start to discover all sorts of people who are “game geeks” like yourself. I was showing our house to prospective renters, and one guy who came over was an established professor of labor history, and he saw I had Dark Age of Camelot on, and it turned out he was a serious player of this game. A lot of people you wouldn’t expect to be gamers are involved, and in deep.

So, how much time a day do you spend playing?
Umm … So who’s going to be reading this?

It only seems like the Turf Club is too small for the sound—and audience—Dave Alvin can generate. Actually, this scruffy and resilient little bar is a great place for a songwriter who has never asked for much in the way of attention, yet who also remains a dependable source of solace or entertainment (whichever you require at the time). Alvin’s natural gift for penning tuneful and expressive songs has taken him far and wide, from his rootsy early days with the Blasters, to his stint as the guitarist for X (and his ongoing role with the Knitters, X members’ country-rock side project), to a solo career that has merged his ear for blues, folk, country, and rock with the energy, anger, and hilarity of punk. Given his gig’s proximity to Independence Day, we’re crossing our fingers for the classic X number, “4th of July.” 1601 University Ave., St. Paul; 651-647-0486; www.turfclub.com

Here’s a lineup showcasing the new sound of the Twin Cities rock scene that will have legions of fans and new converts scurrying home to write on their blogs, blissfully if also slightly hearing-impaired. The Plastic Constellations have been together since their days at Hopkins High School more than a decade ago, but the rock and roll is finally coming together for the guys on their third album, Crusades, which puts a polish on their anthemic howl while bearing the imprimatur of a hip indie label, Frenchkiss Records. Their upstart pals in Tapes ’n Tapes are harder to characterize. Their songs echo a profusion of indie heroes, but with such a short attention span for any and all of them, there’s little point in accusing them of being derivative—music-obsessed is more like it. 612-332-1775; www.first-avenue.com