If your cardboard and paper-lace valentines box wasn’t exactly overflowing on the big day, don’t despair. There are plenty of potential sweethearts posting regularly to the Minneapolis Craigslist “Missed Connections” page. Functioning as an online “I Saw You,” this forum gives shy-types a chance to yearn in public, or sort of in public, whether mentioning … Read more
Last December I was in Minnesota, chatting with workers at Peace Coffee, a Minneapolis-based one-hundred-percent Fair Trade coffee company. To these guys, who make local deliveries on bicycle, Starbucks is the enemy. It’s a huge, non-transparent corporation; only a small percentage of its coffee is Fair Trade; and it doesn’t re-invest in the communities where … Read more
On a blustery Saturday night in January, one of the year’s most anticipated gallery shows opened in New York City. As winds off the Hudson River barreled eastward down the charmless streets of Chelsea, the haute monde of Manhattan and the wider world streamed in from the west, down to Gagosian, at the very end … Read more
For years, photographer Greta Pratt considered herself a New Yorker. As a Pulitzer-nominated documentary photographer whose works hang in museums including the Smithsonian and the National Museum of American Art, she was thoroughly enmeshed in the East Coast art world. And then she went to a hog-showing competition in Nebraska. “I looked around me and … Read more
Enough already with the fat, bearded, balding guys playing Hamlet! The Prince of Denmark is twenty or so years old. While we certainly understand that anyone cast in the role–perhaps the most storied in all of English-language theater–should have something of a track record, Hamlet just doesn’t work when its titular character is middle-aged and … Read more
The King was widely regarded as a complete jackass: a foolish man who traded his Kingdom and his wondrous gifts for a chain of muffler shops. The Queen had left him immediately, and was followed in short order by his retinue (for he had, in fact, once had a retinue). A few desperate and greasy … Read more
The spring collections usually lend levity to our wardrobe, but this year, that’s not necessarily the case. Many of the season’s prettiest party dresses and tissue tops are coming fully loaded with all manner of heavy metal hardware. Surely you noticed such chains, charms, pendants, and toggles stitched onto last season’s winter things. Now the … Read more
“I never had a business dream,” admitted Dave Kapell, founder of Minneapolis-based Magnetic Poetry Inc. “I aspired to be a starving artist.” In 1993, he was a thirty-year-old musician struggling to write song lyrics in his living room. He picked up a newspaper. He picked up a pair of scissors. He picked up adhesive, magnetic … Read more
The ingenious inventions and dazzling artifacts left to us by the fallen superpowers of millennia past cannot help but raise the question, “What went wrong?” Ancient Rome, China, Britain, and other countries have enjoyed a few shining centuries in the sun, only to sink into the shadows of subservience and mediocrity when another region took … Read more
There was a time, not that long ago really, when a lonely and obsessive-compulsive man, unable to sleep, might have spent hours on his hands and knees, raking and grooming the floors of his apartment with his fingers, venturing into corners and hard-to-reach places to gather handfuls of hair, dust, random miniature tumbleweeds, and wispy … Read more