Category: Article

A night of wide-ranging new choreography and structured improv from one of our state’s most venerable dance troupes. Artistic director Heidi Hauser Jasmin loves to mix things up, and the kinetic pyrotechnics on display will be as varied in mood as the accompanying music. The movement piece “Tongues” jerks with the wild swagger of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, while modernist composer George Crumb provides a chilly aural backdrop for the solo “Framed.” Jasmin also memorializes her late friend Charlie Byrd, the great jazz guitarist, with a work set to three of his silky-smooth songs. 1940 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; (612) 871-9077

In France, Mary Beach has a place in the pantheon of major living Surrealists, and frequently collaborated with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Robert Mapplethorpe. However, she’s not so well known here, in the land of her birth; in fact, Speedboat’s putting on her first-ever Twin Cities show. Her fascinating life includes a stint in a Nazi prison camp, a glass-ceiling breakthrough in the 1950s art world, and later still, prime spots in the beatnik scenes surrounding City Lights and the Chelsea Hotel. Paris Working collects sixty-four of her latest collages—at eighty-five, she’s still producing vibrant work. 566 N. Snelling Ave., St. Paul; (651) 641-0538; www.thespeedboatgallery.com

Remember when you could snuggle up with the newspaper rather than read it online? When you could get your information from the phone book rather than from Google? Those were the days. A group of 50 photographers and one installation artist remind us of our love for the tangible as they turn their camera lenses on the printed word. Whether using the book as a medium for their art, capturing its simple beauty, or documenting the reader’s relationship with it, these photographers keep our attention cover to cover. 2400 3rd Ave. S., Minneapolis; (612) 870-3131; www.artsmia.org

Photographer Justin Newhall takes on the myths of the American West, tracing their subtle but inescapable residue in contemporary junkscapes of parking lots, stores, parks, monuments, and suburban tracts. He picks out the sculptural abstractions in a lakeside picnic area in South Dakota, and documents a shaggy heap of invasive Russian olive trees sprawling dumbly along an Oregon highway. The results are poignant, pungent, and absurd, sometimes all at once. An image of a display window in Idaho, where family shoes commingle with plastic eggs, could be an oblique allusion to countless westward marches by folks who followed Lewis and Clark in search of something better. Fans of Robert Adams, Joel Sternfeld, and William Eggleston will recognize a keen affinity here. 711 W. Lake St., Minneapolis; (612) 824-5500; www.mncp.org

A simple but powerfully chilling idea ripe with dramatic possibility: What would you do if you were sentenced to die for a crime you didn’t commit? Husband-and-wife writing team Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen (a 1988 Apple Valley High School grad) interviewed forty wrongfully convicted death-row prisoners and boiled their stories down to six. Exonerated’s pared-down approach—a script, a music stand, an actor wearing reading glasses—has netted enthusiastic praise in New York theater circles. This touring production, directed by Gosford Park actor Bob Balaban, includes Lynn Redgrave and Brian Dennehy, the latter of whom, perhaps ironically, is pro-death penalty. But then the point of the play isn’t to convince you of a point so much as simply to make you think. 805 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; (612) 339-7007; www.hennepintheatredistrict.com

You’ve seen him hobnobbing with Bill Clinton, partying (and attending IMF meetings) with Bono, and doing other cool and prestigious things that world-class playwrights-cum-presidents do. But have you actually seen a play by Vaclav Havel? (We won’t ask about the political essays.) Now’s your chance. Known as Havel’s most “successful” (read: accessible) work, the three autobiographical one-acts comprising The Vanek Trilogy were written in the late ’60s after the Soviet clampdown in Czechoslovakia. Don’t let the idea of Eastern European absurdism put you off: The Ministry of Cultural Warfare likes serious drama, but that doesn’t mean they take it—or themselves—too seriously.
810 W. Lake St., Minneapolis; (612) 825-3737; blb.ciceron.com

Will Durst, to paraphrase the old country radio music billboard, was doing political satire before it was hip, and he’s still going strong. Part of the San Francisco contingent of comics who didn’t sell out to Hollywood for sitcoms and potato chip commercials, Durst displays the thoughtfulness of Mort Sahl without Sahl’s patina of Ward Cleaver weeniedom; he also summons the righteous anger of Lenny Bruce before he was driven cuckoo. If you don’t attribute when you rip off his insights, quoting Durst will make you sound very smart around the water cooler the next day.
708 N. 1st St., Minneapolis; (612) 338-6393; www.acmecomedycompany.com

Here’s a bistro that’s just what it should be, though we would have liked bigger crab cakes for eleven bucks. The spanking new Amsterdam, with its brick-and-wood interior, tin ceiling and little corner-shaped bar looking out onto the Third Street terminus, seems destined to become a favorite jumping-off spot for a night on the town. One could finish up here, too, given the good sized wine selection and great entrees like maple-bourbon glazed salmon, not to mention the best French onion soup around. The homemade gelato merits a separate blessing.

We have a television in the office, a twelve-inch black and white job with rabbit-ears. This TV, recovered more than once from the garbage, is switched on precisely once a year: in March, during the state boys high school hockey tournament. We just can’t help it. If you were born and raised anywhere in this good state, from Luverne on up to Pigeon Falls, it’s in your genes. And even though management here is, in part, Iowan in both origin and practice, we rustics are indulged in a thousand different ways.

But we are worried. One of our origin myths is taking a beating in the corners. We’re less concerned with Republicans throwing their elbows at our proud Scandinavian progressivism, and more concerned that Darby Hendrickson—the sole Minnesotan on the Wild’s roster, and the first goal-scorer at the Xcel Energy Center—has been exiled to the minor-league locker-room in Houston. Is the decline of real Minnesotans in the NHL evidence of globalism, a resurgent Canadian dynasty, or just the degrading local effect of Olive Garden?

There have been other causes for concern. When the high school league agreed in 1991 to split the state into two divisions, we were gratified that twice as many kids would realize their dream of playing hockey live on Channel 9. On the other hand, we have to be honest and say it felt like a dissipation. How much longer would we get to see Warroad, pop. 1,722, come to town to thrash Edina, pop. 47,425? How much longer would we sustain the dream that all Minnesotans owned hockey on a spiritual level—that the talent pool of the suburbs would never dominate the frozen pond of the tundra town?

Hollywood may come to our rescue with that most questionable proposition—the hockey movie (Slap Shot; Youngblood; Mighty Ducks; Mystery, Alaska…). There is no greater mythmaker today than the movies. Miracle has opened to widespread mirth, at least around these parts, and it’s no wonder. It is a throat-catching tribute to Herb Brooks and his 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. That “Miracle On Ice” team won the gold medal with twelve certified Minnesotans on the roster, and a quorum on the bench, too. And while we tend to view provincialism and nationalism with suspicion, we figured, what the hell? This is our time, this is our place. If tiny Eveleth can take on the evil empire of Hill-Murray, why shouldn’t a bunch of amateurs from the Range stand up to a red army of Soviet pros? Our private war against the cold was writ large as a definitive moment in the Cold War.

Have basketball, baseball, or football ever done that for us? Root all you like for the Wolves, the Twins, even the godforsaken Vikings. But give us hockey—the Wild, the Gophers, the International Falls Broncos. These teams are among the most admired in the country, in any sport, in any season. If a place can own something as ephemeral as a sport, Minnesota’s claim on hockey is surely stronger than Indiana’s on basketball, or Texas’s on football. We are the state of hockey, indeed.

If you were lucky enough to find a job during this jobless recovery, your orientation probably consisted of a short tour of the copy room and a long trip through the employee handbook. But if you’re Jessi Peine, your new boss sent you on a six-week trek across Europe, where you toured several cheese-producing farms, devoured pounds of cheese, learned about the aging process of cheese, drank loads of wine, and ate more cheese.

Peine is a cheese specialist at Lund’s. Since her education abroad, and her installment at the Penn Avenue store, she has come to know her cheese-loving customers on a first-name basis. They bombard her with questions and cheese stories the instant she slips behind the counter and puts on the tall, white hat that designates her as a food expert. When I approached her the other day, she was huddled with a customer. “I just got back from Norway,” the customer bragged. “I shoved a cheese wheel in my jacket, and they never found it!” She’d successfully smuggled some gjetøst past the eagle-eyed customs officials.

“As a kid who loved food, I always thought you could only be a cook or a housewife,” Peine told me. “I never knew you could do this. And I studied microbiology for a while, which is all about bugs. And bugs make cheese…”

Yes, bacteria make cheese, and cheese is more popular than ever, especially artisan cheese. Like the secret societies of wine, chocolate, sushi, and even cigars, the world of fancy cheese is a complicated one. Peine’s job is to steer you in the right direction, which sometimes means not following your nose.

First of all, “American cheese” shouldn’t be confused with American cheese. Cheeses made here are not necessarily inferior to, say, French cheeses. In fact, in recent years the most expensive and sought-after specimens have been produced in the U.S. “There’s a cheese called Pleasant Ridge Reserve from Wisconsin that is beautifully made, and their cows have acres and acres to graze on, which is very important, because the cows need a steady diet of fresh grasses,” Peine said.

There’s only one problem with American cheeses: Due to FDA regulations, the milk has to be pasteurized (which means heating it to 161 degrees Fahrenheit). This adds a cooked taste to the cheese, and destroys many of the natural enzymes that cheese tasters celebrate. The alternative is to age a cheese for at least sixty days, which also kills most harmful bacteria. But because of what Peine calls an epidemic of food paranoia, most American farms will pasteurize instead of risking the aging process. “We’ll never taste a really fresh, unpasteurized cheese unless we’re in France,” Peine said.

That said, we still can serve plenty of super-stinky cheeses that are dripping with bacteria. Peine doesn’t carry Limburger, the infamously stinky German cheese, because it fouls up her entire cheese case, and because, she says, there are better stinky cheeses out there. “There’s Taleggio from Italy, which is lovely. It just stinks to high heaven, but has a really nice and clean pure cheese flavor.” An ancient Italian cheese carried around the globe on the winds of World War I, Taleggio is creamy, rich, and buttery, and will make a fickle guest either love you or hate you, depending on his or her nose.

Even if you’re serving a wheel whose mere odor will insure plenty of elbow room at the cheeseboard, it’s important not to overwhelm your guests with too many alternatives. Three to five cheeses are all you need, in a nice array of colors, textures, and milks. “Do a nice goat, sheep, and cow,” Peine counseled. “Sheep and goat have that lovely tang, totally different from cow’s milk.” Peine suggested serving Humboldt Fog, a funky-looking goat cheese from California that has a layer of vegetable ash between two layers of white cheese. “That’s the thing: Most of the ugliest cheeses taste the best. They’re not supposed to look perfect,” she said.

There are other simple truths to be aware of: It’s best to pair cheeses and wines by region (reds and whites are both fine) and relative strength on the palate. Always make sure your cheeses are served at room temperature. (Enough with the food paranoia; Peine says cheese can sit out for hours, even days.) Also, never cut the cheese. “Let the guests cut what they want,” Peine said, cautioning against airing the cheese too much too soon. “Don’t let the hard work of those little animals go to waste!” Serve your cheeses with a fresh baguette or bland crackers. You do not want to overpower the cheese. Or you can just scarf it down on its own. “You don’t really need bread,” Peine said. “You don’t need crackers. You can eat it with a spoon if you want.” Face it: If you were worried about offending your more sensitive guests, you probably would have stuck with the cheddar cubes.—Molly Priesmeyer