The month of November is the prime of white truffle season. Never mind black truffles—the whites are where it’s really at. The most prized fungi in the world, they fetch up to fifteen hundred dollars a pound and look exactly like clods of dirt. Shaved thinly over a dish of hot pasta, their elusive flavor … Read more
The other day, we noticed one of those traffic-counting devices on the Cedar Lake bike path—the little black hose that crosses the trail and enters the silver lockbox. It tallies the number of vehicles that pass. We also noticed some kids jumping up and down on that hose, and we did nothing. This … Read more
Mainstream is attending the Episcopal Church. Non-mainstream is practicing Zoroastrianism. Mainstream is owning a golden retriever. Non-mainstream is breeding Rhodesian ridgebacks. In the universe of non-mainstream things, it’s hard to conceive of two things more arcane than Michael Barone’s passions: pipe organs and Citroën automobiles. The host and producer of public radio’s Pipedreams, Michael Barone … Read more
The floor of Ms. LaVie’s School of Loving Arts, inside the Golden Valley Wellness Center, is spread with cheap blankets and plush pillows. Fifteen pajama-clad students sit in this “cuddle puddle” nodding solemnly as Marcia Baczynski explains that dry humping, or “basically pretty much having sex with your clothes on” is not okay here (Rule … Read more
The Mother-Goose-does-Vegas tone of the TCF Holidazzle Parade seemed at odds with my method acting background. With more than two hundred and fifty lighted characters brought to life by a different group of volunteer actors each of the twenty-one evenings the parade marches between November 25 and December 23, a cohort of dressers, lighting technicians, … Read more
Maybe you’ve seen the new billboards on Snelling, Grand, or Highway 94: “Banana Chips Can Cause Figure Skating,” and “Fun-Size a Cow”—ads enjoining us to rediscover or reconsider the meat snack, those salty mystery sticks most of us save for camping trips or are storing for the apocalypse. Those tough, pungent treats most of us … Read more
The century-old Enstrom photo studio is located on an out-of-the-way street in the tiny Iron Range town of Bovey. An otherwise modest wooden building with a flat front and a new addition jutting out from one side, the studio’s most distinguishing feature stretches across its second story: an enormous hand-painted black and white mural of … Read more
The tradition of grand and inaccurate predictions about the future of prefab houses goes back almost a hundred years, to the first sales of Sears mail-order kit homes in the early 1900s. Now, though, prefab home designs seem actually to be getting somewhere, both in terms of the number being produced and home builders’ desire … Read more
We waited all year for a surprise like this. Provocative, global-minded, warm, and even uninhibited pieces make up this juried show of works by twenty-six artists from around the state. Compelling discoveries include the super-psychedelic Georgie Girl Hart, by Andy Messerschmidt of Ely (pictured), and Plymouth resident Chuck Avery’s Separation, a photograph of concrete blocks … Read more
Gustafson was an integral part of the Minnesota art community until his early death in 2003. Because of his sensitivity to light and nuance, he was the natural choice of many local artists when it came to having their work photographed. Over the years, the relationships he built among artists in a host of mediums … Read more