There’s an arbor in my neighborhood that I drive past every day. Sturdy pre-fab construction, what looks to be bare, untreated wood. It catches my eye not because it’s beautiful, but because it is goofy. It’s the placement of the thing that gets me. It’s plopped a third of the way into the front yard … Read more
It won’t be long now. September’s weight presses in on my teacher bones, and there’s only one way to stave it off and prepare for the shock of going back to school: Take a road trip of several thousand miles with five kids. So here we are in Mackinaw City, Michigan, where sturdy-looking Midwestern families … Read more
“Zookeeper” is surely one of the top twenty coolest jobs in the world, and for Ross Taylor, a South Minneapolis native and University of Minnesota graduate, the path to this career started, oddly enough, in clown college. Studying to be a circus clown led to a job as big-top animal caretaker and then, for the … Read more
Just about everyone can name someone they know who hates meatloaf. Or yogurt, I bet you can find someone in your circle who categorically hates yogurt. But I dare you to locate someone who hates pizza. Sure, you can find a friend with tomato issues or one of those poor, lactose-intolerant freaks who cries if … Read more
Mary’s watching: “Live Forever: The Rise And Fall Of British Pop” I settled into my comfy chair and with every good bed-wetting liberal intention tried to watch the Democratic National Convention on TV. I felt like a big dumb demographic cliché. With one eye on John Edwards’ shiny hopeful face, my hopelessly Gen-X other eye … Read more
Phoenix Rising, a sculpture fashioned from roughly five thousand melted guns, now lies in two pieces in a storage facility. Hennepin County officials are reluctant to say exactly where, because its current condition “is not the presentation the artist had in mind.” The mawkish symbolism of the mythic bird reborn from ashes certainly makes it … Read more
In film after film, John Sayles is one of the only directors out there unafraid to take a hard look at the negative influence of money and power on American society. At times that leads to heavy-handed didacticism, as with the disappointing Sunshine State, but we’ve got a good feeling about Silver City, which reunites … Read more
If moviespeak shorthand abbreviates “romantic comedy” as “romcom,” then this is a “romzom”—a romantic comedy set amid the zombie plague of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Director Edgar Wright and star Simon Pegg, who also wrote the movie, first worked together on a British sitcom called Spaced, and it’s obvious they have great creative … Read more
Director Takashi Miike’s reputation rests on his bizarre visual imagery and his mindbogglingly prolific career—though Gozu only came out in Japan last year, the Japanese gonzo has already finished seven other films. So it might be too much to ask that everything that happens in this movie makes logical sense. Nominally a cross between an … Read more