rakemag

Now that the reanimated Pixies have proved to be an arena-sized success, Black is back to focusing on his solo career, and this double album shows he hasn’t been just counting his cash. He called back several Nashville session players from his last album, Honeycomb, and brought in other guests as disparate as The Band’s … Read more

The Jayhawks seem to split up and get back together about as frequently as Eminem and his wife/ex-wife/wife/ex-wife Kim Mathers. Meanwhile, the individual members of the band have been working on some very cool side projects. There’s a new Golden Smog album, Gary Louris plays on both the new Rhett Miller and the Dixie Chicks’ … Read more

KBEM continues to surprise us—and not just by staying on the air. Amid continued funding threats, this tiny, low-budget, low-profile radio station keeps its programming fresh and relevant. Thursday nights, for instance, there’s “Riverwalk Jazz,” a Texas-produced show that explores the history of jazz through archival recordings, interviews, and performances of classics by the Jim … Read more

It remains to be seen whether Brazilian singer Seu Jorge will perform his own sexy, samba-driven songs, or the set of the David Bowie covers that he played in the film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. We’ll hope for more of the former, since the Bowie songs, sung in Portuguese to spare and jangly … Read more

If the current U.S. government funded art that reflected its ideals, we might see Thomas Kinkade’s cottage scenes take over museums as well as shopping malls. (Then again, Kinkade’s apparently acquired a rep for groping women and urinating in elevators, so perhaps he’s more bad-boy art star than the Bush administration might wish to sanction.) … Read more

In a way, Alexander Calder is a movement of one—his mobiles, those feats of balance and grace, pretty much own the category. But Calder owes his inspiration to the surrealist movement, and this exhibit places him firmly within that larger context, demonstrating how his work grew out of influences from contemporaries such as Marcel Duchamp, … Read more

In a valiant effort to create public art for St. Paul that doesn’t involve globe-headed cartoon characters, a group of stone carvers from Minnesota and around the world have gathered to unleash shapes and figures from blocks of our state’s finest quarried stone. A geologist’s bouquet of granite, limestone, sandstone, and gneiss will fall away … Read more