Author: rakemag

Something you could do tonight or put-off ’til the weekend: Shawn McConneloug and her Orchestra are presenting SHE Captains, a multi-media dance piece that roughly recreates the life of a sixteen-century she-pirate named Grace O’Malley. The real secret here is that Shawn McConneloug and company don’t perform very often, and when they do, the result has if inventive, often transcendental. Cool tidbit about the show: This film-music-dance hodgepodge is set to the music of Gracie’s homeland of Ireland, everything from traditional Celtic fare to The Pogues. The show takes place up in nordeast, at the Thorp Building. Tonight through Monday.

In that same vein: The experimental thespians comprising Flaneur Productions are pairing up with Franklin Art Works to present the Heliotrope Festival of Underground, Underexposed, and Unusual Music. Tonight through Saturday.

Tonight only: The Rake’s very own Gallery Grooves event crashes at Jean Stephen Galleries tonight. Have fun!

The Schubert Club is embroiled in its Saint Paul Summer Song Festival, in case you hadn’t noticed. And as part of that festival, they’re showing Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 behind-the-scenes film The Magic Flute–popularly regarded as the finest operatic film ever made, probably because Bergman made nice with the artifice of live opera by lugging his camera equipment into a real-life Swedish opera house and even, on occasion, panning to the audience, indeed using them as characters. Swedish baritone Hakan Hagegard, immortalized by this film as Papageno as well as for being an all-around nice fella, is attending tonight’s showing. Our friend Stephanie Curtis The Movie Maven, from Minnesota Public Radio, hosts. Five smacks gets you in. www.schubert.org/Concerts-SongFest.html

If you hadn’t already noticed, The Rake’s Raking Through Books happy hour book event topped out CJ this past weekend. That big, juicy affair happens tonight.

So, I’ve decided to divulge a few “secrets” about the Body Worlds exhibit, for the benefit of those who haven’t seen it. I saw the exhibit on Saturday evening, and it was still unsettling my supper come Sunday afternoon.

OK, it wasn’t that gross. But there were a few seconds when I became dizzingly aware of what was surrounding me–dead people. I had to sit down. But most of the time, I was able to block the notion that these had once been living, breathing folks, probably because they had been pulled apart and posed in such ridiculous fashions–“the gymnast,” “the runner,” “the basketball player” and so on, with brains and spinal cords spilling out their backsides. But then I came upon “Lady of Muscles and Nerves,” or something like that, and I could very much see the structure of her face. (NOTE: the female plastinates have considerably more poetic names–the most ridiculous being “Phoenix with two birds,” and yes, this kneeling plastinate is indeed freeing two plastinated birds from her clutch.) Then there was the guy whose tattoos you can see–a sailor, I surmised, based upon the tattooed ships and big-breasted lady, now cut to pieces, like bread.

There’s also the much-touted “fetus” room–separate because we’re apparently so much more sensitive about plastinating itty-bitty humans than we are the big ones. Once inside, however, I understood why the museum had portioned this room apart, for the benefit of the weak and weary (like me): An eight-month pregnant woman who had died suddenly is plastinated along with her baby, the stomach sliced apart to reveal the tot.

I thought the “audio tour,” in which Gunther von Hagen grapples with whether or not plastinates are science or art (Uh, it’s science, d’Uh), was a complete waste of dough–a waste of time even more so.

But I’m glad I toughed out the exhibit.

What I’m really doing this weekend: Doe at the Playwrights’ Center tonight, a new play by Trista Baldwin, who’s also a member of this Workhaus Collective of local playwrights. Will report back on results.

And I am supposedly, finally, making it to Body Worlds–which I’m not entirely jazzed about after one of my girlfriends said she was “unprepared for all the penises” at the exhibition. This worries me. I’ve been known to pass out at the sight of gore, goo, and–yes–even penises; and I pass out easily. I just hope it’s not a total gross out. Will report back on these results, too.

Hopefully, buying a new, full-sized bed–not anything kinky. My current one, bought dirt-cheap at Slumberland during my penniless first year out of college, when my kid-brother worked there as a delivery-truck driver and helped hook me up a discount, has started to sag in the middle, rather suddenly. And rather drastically too, trench-warfare style.

The Twin Cities Noir launch party is tonight. Once there, I plan to ogle over all the self-actualized crime writers, including my cubicle-neighbor Brad Zellar. Also in the TC Noir ranks: City Pages theater critic Quinton Skinner, although I haven’t been sure what to make of that guy ever since he liked Caryl Churchill’s “A Number”–which was probably the biggest disappointment of the past theater season, as far as I’m concerned. It wasn’t that the Illusion’s production lacked luster; it was that the script sucked! Churchill, who I’ve long regarded as one of my favorite living playwrights (and I was therefore quite excited to see this new play), seemed to have judged one of the main characters, a dad who had put his dead son’s DNA out to pasture, before she ever got started with him. Why go on a moral journey (about cloning) with a guy whose guts you black-and-white abhore, even from the get-go? When it was all said and done with this play, which was thankfully very short, my best friend Andrea, mocking one of the worst lines, turned to me and said: “Well, I figure I’ve got to share at least fifteen percent of my genetic makeup with vodka. So let’s go have a drink!”

In any case, other well-knowns expected at tonight’s Twin Cities Noir reading: David Housewright, Judith Guest, Mary Logue, Bruce Rubenstein, William Kent Krueger, Pete Hautman, and even more. This is a pretty exciting book they’ve put out. I would link to a website where you can buy the thing if I didn’t so want ya’all to patronize the indies at Once Upon A Crime, who’re so kind as to be hosting tonight’s affair.

An open letter to anyone not wanting to leave their houses today, and to those inextricably linked to their laptops–especially the music-heads: Have you tried Pandora.com? I know I already mentioned this website yesterday, but I was as of then just a dabbler. Twenty-four hours later and I’m a full-fledged pro. Pandora lets you enter a song or an artist you like and then, magically, “the music genome project” cranks out similar-sounding songs and artists, T.I.Y.L.-style. I entered “Tired of Being Alone” by Al Green, which conjured up some jazzy yet soulful tunes by The Rhondels, The Mad Lads, Percy Sledge, and, sadly, Billy Joel. (But I was able to click “I don’t like it” the second I caught wind of what was coming–“Easy Money.” Pandora then moved it along to the next song.)

I also made “stations” a la Joni Mitchell (Ani Difranco, Beth Orton, even one gawd-awful cover of “Big Yellow Taxi” by Amy Grant); Guided By Voices (Sonic Youth and countless same-sounding indie guitar-rock songs–this has not been my favorite station); and Buck Ownes (Jim Ed Brown, Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, Yeehaw!). So taken by the Buck Owens jag, I even tried to make a station inspired by The Mavericks’ hit, “All You Ever Do is Bring Me Down,” but that just turned-up a disastrous Garth Brooks/Toby Keith mix, which I abandoned immediately. Eclecticism has its risks.

Plus, Pandora’s totally legal since the entire sight was designed to inspire knee-jerk spending at amazon.com. Genius!

Today’s Secret: Cinema Revolution hosts its monthly Cinema des Artistes film event tonight, when they’ll be showing L’Intrus, a 2004 film-of-few-words by French filmmaker Claire Denis. This should be a pretty hip-n-happening scene at the Varsity Theatre. But I guess I, in particular, will never know ’cause I won’t be there. Can we lean on Schilling for this one?

It can be pretty tiring to come up with all these “secrets” when you don’t particularly feel like going out. This isn’t my usual state-of-affairs… What’s wrong with me lately? My idea of fun these days: biking the thirty miles to my kid-cousin’s grad party, which I’m toying with for the weekend, or shopping the designer racks at Fashion Avenue, in Edina. Last I was there I spotted a super-sexy, size six Marc Jacobs priced under two hundred–which would’ve made for a really good secret, come to think of it, especially since it didn’t fit and I had to leave it behind.

What to do when you don’t want to do anything? Surf endlessly for new music on Pandora? Gorge in the quiet corners of some Restaurant Week eateries? Continue to list every gallery event in the greater metro, which can be perused at-will over the lunch hours, leaving the evenings free for watching the news? Dump the boy-who’s-a-friend, who’s pretty open-minded as red-blooded American males go, but still, at his core, prefers spending his Sunday nights on the sofa with a six-pack of three-two over, say, a production of Riverdance? Or is this just cyclical “down time” that is to be embraced? Suggestions are greatly appreciated.

I don’t go out nearly as often as these posts might have you believe. And as I grow older, I find myself becoming more and more of a “coach potato,” sprawled out leg-long, eating chili-cheese chips, and watching second-rate DVDs some nights, when I’m not out trolling for stories or reviewing theater productions. So, while the Goldstein Museum’s just-opened 125 Years of Sitting exhibition isn’t exactly exciting to the movers and shakers of the world, pursuers of the art of sitting, such as myself, should find it interesting–situated as it is in the city that houses famous chair-designer Bill Stumpf.

Yaaaawn.

Man do I want tickets to Saturday night’s Symphony Ball! Mostly because it’s the closest thing Minneapolis has to the Costume Institute Gala, and the Strib folks always end-up doing some sort of fashion run-down after the fact. I wonder which over-embellished, designer dresses have been plucked off the Oval Room eighty percent-off rack in anticipation? But alas, I am not young-n-pretty or old-n-rich enough to afford tickets. I’m stuck at that strange, in-between phase–no longer an ingenue, not yet a dame. Sigh.

I’ll make do with these other goings-on: Petrified Forest at Gremlin Theatre (another freelance stint) (also, sorry not to link, but the Gremlin website appears to be down), Pine Eyes at the Walker, and, hopefully, drinking copious quantities of grand margarita in my friend’s backyard.

The wish list: West Bank Story at Bedlam Theatre–I’ll see it some other weekend, and Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys at the Cedar.