Even Jon, who sees everything, wasn’t expecting to see the drowned man rolling in the waves. We were sweetly exhausted from sun and saltwater on the first day of our vacation when Jon took me by the elbow. “Look there,” he said. “Is that a person?” Jon’s uncanny tendency to see everything used to stun … Read more
At Como and Carter, next to the St. Anthony Park neighborhood’s library, the remains of an old tree trunk have been carved into a statue of a boy reading a book, an owl perched on his back. A few blocks northwest, sightings of a real owl—a great gray with a five-foot wingspan—have delighted the Park’s … Read more
The other day, my pal Steve finally loaned me a book he’d been telling me about for years. It was John Krakauer’s Into the Wild, which has sort of been eclipsed by his later blockbuster, Into Thin Air. It recounts the story of a young man who decided to move to Alaska and try to … Read more
Depending on how much snow we get in March, the year’s snowiest month, April can be one of the ugliest seasons. The yard is too soft to clean up, so the grimy leavings of winter are everywhere to be seen. On the upside, this is one of our favorite times of the year, because the … Read more
On a recent international flight aboard Northwest Airlines, a reporter was pleased to learn that the movie would be Sideways, the popular Alexander Payne film that has uncorked a million bottles of pinot noir. Of course, in-flight entertainment is notoriously prudish about dirty words. Sideways is a film that has a full nose and thick … Read more
If you didn’t see ABC’s Wife Swap! on March 2, here’s what you missed: Powderhorn Park peacenik Mina Leierwood gingerly examines the contents of “Fort Patrick,” the Louisville, Kentucky, home she’s to live in for two weeks with a family of strangers. Cheri Patrick, the usual lady of the house, is a retired Air Force … Read more
Protestants are prone to being artistically challenged because they grow up in an environment that sees the arts as a luxury. I can hear my uncle Knute wandering around the Sistine Chapel, muttering things like, “Oh, the Pope loves luxury, you know.” But those with Jewish and Catholic upbringings tend to see art as a … Read more
Nobody calls up the Internal Revenue Service for fun. But the other day, a reporter telephoned Eric Erickson, a “media relations specialist” for the IRS, to ask a few nosy questions. Erickson said that about 640,000 Minnesotans filed their taxes in the last two weeks before April 15, 2004. That’s almost the combined populations of … Read more
A brief squall of horns opens “Focus on Sanity,” the song that kicked off Ornette Coleman’s seminal Atlantic Records phase. Part fanfare, part detonation, that sound made it plenty clear that the Texas saxophonist was plunging into almost entirely uncharted territory. Twenty-nine years old when he recorded the song in a Hollywood studio in May … Read more
Charlie Callahan and Brian Spanier, creative directors at a Minneapolis agency called Periscope, spent the winter preparing an advertising and marketing juggernaut designed to pitch Twins baseball to the sticks. After several seasons of success on the field and futility at the turnstiles, this year the team scrapped its vaguely self-deprecating “Get to Know ’Em” … Read more