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 … Read more
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 … Read more
With Valentine’s Day safely behind us, we can approach Baron Franois 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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more