Category: Article

They were painful, those three years we spent waiting for the lights at Town Talk Diner to flicker on again. A series of delays only added to the tension for fans, who were dying to see what a quartet of hotshot refugees from some of the Cities’ (and the nation’s) finest restaurants would do with diner food. What’s the shine? Is it the frickles, a snappy snack of fried pickles? Is it the seemingly innocent cherry shakes spiked with schnapps? Could it be the Banana’s Foster French toast? All of the above, and then some. The reborn Town Talk is all things fun and familiar, concocted with a twist. Its resurrection may have come slowly, but also oh-so-surely. 2707 Lake St. E., Minneapolis.; 612-722-1312

Check this out, New York and California: This year the Twin Cities is hosting Juxtapoz magazine’s annual national exhibition of street art, hot rod art, and pop-surrealist paintings, along with tattoos and graffiti. That’s right, it’s here with us in the heartland, coastal cred be damned. (Ask us how great the two-day opening gala was–especially the Melvins gig.) With works from seventy artists distributed between Uptown’s Soo Visual Arts Center and downtown’s OX-OP Gallery, you can consider the jaunt between the two spaces as a breather. Juxtapoz, the cutting-edge journal that first gave so-called lowbrow art serious consideration, fuels this gathering of fractured genius, calling in the complementary action of rock -n- roll to make it a full-on sensory event. SooVAC: 2640 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-871-2263; www.soovac.org; OX-OP: 1111 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-259-0085; www.ox-op.com

With Valentine’s Day safely behind us, we can approach Baron Franois Gerard’s classic depiction of romantic love with less hubba-hubba and more astute appreciation. Simply put, this is a very old painting featuring beautiful naked people, and though it may conjure memories of Victorian valentines, it also illustrates one of our most enduring myths with surprising complexity. Does Psyche really want that guy with wings to smooch on her? Her face is as clouded as the azure sky behind them. This painting is on loan from the Louvre; save the plane fare to Paris and see it with select related works from the institute’s own collection. 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org

This ambitious traveling show focuses on the environmental destruction of native lands by energy interests–from dam building and coal mining to oil drilling and logging. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Michael Horse are some of the well-known names among the more than forty artists in the show, but there are a few compelling pieces by newer names, as well. For instance, Neal Ambrose-Smith’s Coyote Sees Two Worlds combines native forms and imagery with colors and composition that recall Constructivist-style propaganda posters, while America Meredith’s Pop-influenced Produced Water: Salt the Earth has the Morton Salt girl and a cowboy-hatted businessman walking arm in arm through an oilfield (toxic brine is one of the byproducts of oil drilling). While there’s plenty here to induce shame, despair, and anger, there’s also a sense of hope in the idea that Native Americans can and should take a place in developing renewable energy, like solar and wind power. 1113 Franklin Ave. E., Minneapolis; 612-870-7555; www.honorearth.org/impactednations

For years, Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek made the back pages of alternative weeklies across the country worth reading. The adventures of Marlys, a geeky girl who aspired to be a revolutionary funk dancer in the seventies; her angsty, zitty older sister; and their loony, hookah-sucking Filipino relatives unfolded with humor, pain, beauty, and a self-consciousness that could be understood by anyone who was ever a dumb little kid, which is all of us. More recently, Barry has written novels and worked on her outsider-ish art from a top-secret and remote location somewhere in Wisconsin. 1 College St. N., Northfield; 507-646-4023; www.carleton.edu

It’s a reunion of sorts, albeit a highly non-traditional one, as several former artists-in-residences return to the Walker with new and decidedly free-form projects. Answer “What is freedom?” at a digital-media station rigged up by Spencer Nakasako; your recorded reponse will join those of fellow visitors and people around the country. Or get in on the action around a two-story stage set built by Rirkrit Tiravanija (who early on hosted one of his now-legendary dinner-parties-as-performance-art in the Walker’s Gallery 7); or at the installation by Ralph Lemon, the choreographer who, like Nakasako, has had a lengthy relationship with the Walker. Also on view are works created by previous artists-in-residence, and a series of performances, actions, events, hijinks, and other surprises by local artists like Mankwe Kdosi, Gulgun Kayim, Abinadi Meza, Marcus Young, and Andrew Knighton. 612-375-7600; www.walkerart.org

A gem of a show that highlights Morrison’s vast and varied talents. Aside from one nude, the other works are all variations on abstraction and nature. One drawing is a gorgeous thicket of brown-ink hatch marks; several others depict the north shore of Lake Superior, where Morrison was raised and where he spent the last seventeen years of his life, in pen and ink and with a surrealist-tinged wit. While the works are all modest in scale, this is a fine example of how exhibitions devoted to works on paper offer a window into an artist’s sense of both experimentation and play. Morrison in particular took in all manner of styles and influences through his lengthy career, transcending but never forgetting his Native American roots. 2123 21st St. W., Minneapolis; 612-377-4669; www.bockleygallery.com

T.C. Boyle’s fiction used to be a reliable source for laughs, usually at the expense of his characters. His often gleefully malicious stories about yuppies, hippies, quacks, and people who share their lives with animals had the outlandish trajectory of those classic cartoons that reveled in comic brutality–amputations, anvil accidents, cruel twists of fate–visited on the deserving and undeserving alike. Of course, Boyle’s amusing abuse was generally tempered with sharp social criticism and a keen understanding of human foibles; in recent books he has been weaving subtle, dark treatises on environmental destruction, global warming, and species extinction into his tales. More and more often lately, however, Boyle’s short stories have been domestic dramas almost entirely devoid of humor, a trend that is as alarming as it is discouraging. He’s always been a charismatic and entertaining performer, though, and hopefully his sense of humor is still intact and will be on display for this reading. 2128 4th St. S., Minneapolis; 612-626-1892

Anchee Min has been remarkably lucky at least three times in her life. As a reward for her loyalty to China’s Maoist regime, she was selected by Madame Mao to star in a government-produced film. Her good fortune wasn’t long lasting, though; Mao’s death and the end of his regime sent Min back into the ranks of the lowly. Her friendship with actress Joan Chen allowed her to move to the United States, and when she chronicled her sometimes shocking experiences in China (she describes herself as the “product of Maoist brainwashing”) in Red Azalea, she earned critical hosannas and cracked the bestseller lists. In her native country, Min is frequently criticized for sharing too much. Here, though, she is admired for her portraits of a remarkable time and place. 10500 Hillside La. W., Minnetonka; 651-209-6799; www.hclib.org

A literary follow-your-heart poster girl, Elizabeth Berg worked as a nurse for a decade, pulling bedpan duty while inventing imaginary worlds in her mind. Such mundane jobs are a boon to writers, of course; if nothing else, they liven up a resume. Berg surely witnessed a thousand dramas and characters in her job, some of which no doubt provided fuel (not to mention fodder) for her many bestselling novels, whose subject matter tends toward the painful and domestic. We Are All Welcome Here is her latest, based on the true story of a paraplegic polio victim raising her daughter amid the social upheavals–both race- and Elvis-related–that besieged Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1964. 2020 Lake of the Isles Pkwy. W., Minneapolis; 612-374-4023; www.birchbarkbooks.com