David Fhima’s slick space in Galtier Plaza is near perfect, the kind of place geared toward you and your hunger rather than what the chef thinks you should be eating. Here, your dinner date can dig into a big seafood linguine while you gleefully ponder the beauty of a honkin’ slice of cappuccino buttercream cake, … Read more
The tradition of growing grapes is almost as old as the hills on which they’re planted. But when we picture those vine-covered hills, most of us would sooner conjure Tuscany, Bordeaux, or the windswept Carneros Valley of California than Hastings, Minnesota. Yet increasingly, places like Hastings, Putney, Vermont, and Long Island, New York, are being … Read more
Every time I take the boat down Stranraer Sound, I think of Saint Brendan. A Celtic monk, Brendan set sail toward the setting sun with fourteen of his confreres in a whimsical endeavor to find the Island of the Promise of the Saints. Spoilsports (i.e., my academic colleagues) tell you his charming tale is an … Read more
This season, as you know, black is the new black. That puts local artist and object d’art Scott Seekins in a bit of bind. A sartorial and tonsorial marriage of Tom Wolfe and Marsden Hartley’s Adelard the Drowned, Seekins has long stood out here in the land of the bland, with his trademark seasonal shift … Read more
If you were seeking God, you probably wouldn’t think to look in Inver Grove Heights. The fast-growing St. Paul suburb is a good place to buy a fleet of used Cessnas, or a truckload of corn chips, potash, or mechanical heart valves. At the town’s center stands a massive petroleum refinery—a strange, stippled city of … Read more
Did Chris Mars live through (or die from?) the Black Plague in a former life? His paintings of ghoulish, skeletal crowds and beseeching wraiths, set in gloomy environments that hark back to medieval villages, seem too vivid to have come purely from the imagination. Cruel and creepy, yet with a visceral beauty, Mars’ storytelling on … Read more
Our lady who art in Kenwood seems to have an endless supply of spooky and captivating tales that read like campfire legends. Her Native American characters often have one foot in the modern world and the other in a misty, spirit-populated Indian landscape that is quickly disappearing. The heroines in her latest book are a … Read more
We thinks the Ivey Awards made a peculiar choice in having Justin Kirk co-host its first annual awards party later this month. Although Kirk just wrapped up a summer run of Entertaining Mr. Sloane at the Jungle Theater, he appears more frequently on the large and small screens these days. (You can catch him on … Read more
Minneapolis gets high marks for its “quality of life,” but the home addresses of its cops tell a different story. According to police insiders, less than ten percent of Minneapolis’ police force lives within city limits. Mayor R.T. Rybak and would-be mayor Hennepin County Commish Peter McLaughlin both claim they want more cops living in … Read more
The moment flickered past while I realized that the last of them was gone, the last of the sixties counterculture iconoclasts, those world shakers and rainbow revolutionaries: Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman, Edward Abbey, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson—all gone, the last by his own hand. I … Read more