Yes, Brazilians really do eat this way. Fogo de Chão, the new Brazilian steak house at City Center in Minneapolis, is much more elegant—and more expensive—than the truck stop in northeast Brazil where I first experienced churrascaria (Brazilian spit-roasted barbecue), but the basic principle is the same: Waiters in black pleated gaucho pantaloons (at Fogo … Read more
72 Degrees You’re wide awake at six a.m. when the sun tips its hand. You barely slept at all last night in the hot box that is your cramped third-floor apartment. There’s no air-conditioning, the windows are all propped open. You spent most the night on top of the sheets, waiting for a breeze that … Read more
Tim Alevizos is a man who lives his art. Show up at his posh Uptown condo on a Saturday morning around 10. He will open the front door and take your coat. Then, if you’re someone he likes (and believe me, if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here) he’ll usher you into the “owner’s suite” … Read more
There’s something about talking over a meal that makes people loosen up. It’s the proximity of your knees under the table, the intimacy of sharing food, the lubrication of a little wine. This is not a set-up for drunken confessions. It is a method for coaxing the truth out of public figures used to communicating … Read more
When Father Louis Hennepin first saw the great falls of the Mississippi in 1680, he was on furlough from a prolonged captivity at Mille Lacs Lake. The Flemish cleric and his Dakota escorts portaged downstream along the east bank on what is now Main Street in Minneapolis, then beheld the cataract he would later document … Read more
Minneapolis’s music scene in the ’80s is a persistent source of nostalgia, pride, and perhaps even fairy tales. Laurie Lindeen was there; her role as guitarist and vocalist in Zuzu’s Petals, an all-girl Minneapolis rock band, put her front and center for plenty of storied music moments. She even went on to marry the crown … Read more
Ian McEwan is at a stage in his writing life where he could be coasting on his laurels or organizing his papers for the inevitable memoir(s). McEwan, though, is not that kind of writer—at least not yet. More than a dozen books into his career, he seems to be getting only better and more ambitious. … Read more
“For years now I have published my poems in funny magazines / So that nobody would notice / How sad they were,” Andrei Codrescu wrote in his 1980 “Paper on Humor.” Despite his acutely ironic sense of humor and his archetypal Jewish wit, Codrescu nonetheless seems an odd proposition for the Minnesota Public Radio’s American … Read more
It’s been twenty-five years since a new collection of Woody Allen’s short humor appeared in print. You’re welcome to argue this point until you’re blue in the face, but he hasn’t made a truly great—or at least consistently funny—film in almost as long. It’s easy, then, to forget how truly fresh and funny Allen once … Read more
This irreverent modern dance production is inspired by Jean-Claude Forest’s cheeky ’60s comic strip Barbarella. But it’s more closely related to the 1968 sci-fi movie Forest’s book inspired. Just as Jane Fonda did in that movie version, Dolls dancer Heather Cadigan gets things started with a zero-gravity striptease. In this instance, however, the achievement owes … Read more