This is your last chance, actually, to catch a highly popular series at the Jungle pairing the theater’s talented players and artists with great children’s stories. Well, your last chance for now. Linden Hills’ cornerstone Wild Rumpus has established itself as the Ruminator of children’s books, so it’s appropriate that they’re co-sponsoring and curating this … Read more
From TV ads with roving cursor arrows to horror films about chat-room predators, our so-called entertainment elite is deeply fixated on the culture and symbolism of the Internet. One hundred years ago, it was the burgeoning vogue of vaudeville theater and moving pictures that blew the American zeitgeist wide open, and painters of the day … Read more
Summer augurs the arrival of the high season for movies of all varieties. Looking for art-house titles? Why not go to the biggest, baddest art house around? The Walker’s healthy film and video commitments come into full flower in June, and this year is no different. As if to both elucidate and erase the line … Read more
A few years ago, when Minnesota author Faith Sullivan’s novel The Empress of One (for which she won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize) had just been released, a friend of ours mentioned that Sullivan had recently accepted an invitation to attend her diddly little neighborhood book group as a guest author. How cool is that? … Read more
Like all great artists and authors, Jules Feiffer was not a fully formed world-class creator until he’d composed a children’s book. Remember that E.B. White, his brilliant colleague and contemporary at The New Yorker, didn’t really gild his impeccable reputation until he’d composed Charlotte’s Web. This rite of passage separating the great from the legendary … Read more
We descended on Hell’s Kitchen on a Monday, the four of us, expecting the hellfire and brimstone and everlasting chaos of a kitchen under siege. Or, at least, we envisioned the antipode to the white tablecloth, fresh-flower breakfast place. Why do we expect Hell to be so over-populated? Perhaps Salvation Sundays, with brunch from 8 … Read more
Going out for breakfast on a rainy Saturday morning, lingering over those third and fourth cups of regular old coffee, chatting with the pretty young waitress about the smell of the rain in spring and the striking beauty of her just-dyed hair—what could be nicer? Key’s Cafe on Raymond Avenue in St. Paul (at the … Read more
Tucked away in downtown St. Paul (but then again, what isn’t invariably tucked away down there?), Babani’s is rumored to be the only Kurdish restaurant in the United States. (Quick geography lesson: Kurdistan is a mountainous region occupying 74,000 square miles in southeast Turkey, northwest Iran, northeast Iraq, and northeast Syria—with a population of 25 … Read more
This morning I sat around watching it rain outside and trying to cull some signal moment from the many hours I spent with my friend Nellie Stone Johnson, the labor/civil rights legend who died April 2 at the age of 96—some little story that might sum her up for purposes of a remembrance like this. … Read more
Few people remember that beatnik legend Jack Kerouac spent part of his wayward youth perched literally in the clouds, employed by the federal government—he was a lookout for forest fires in the High Cascades. From high atop what he called Mt. Desolation, he could survey most of what is now known as Glacier National Park. … Read more