If you think of the University of Minnesota’s Nash Gallery as a teaching space, then this ambitious exhibit is designed to show students—and the rest of us—the range of forms that political art can assume. An intriguing mix of locally-based and national artists are represented: There are paintings from Shana Kaplow and selections from photographer … Read more
Hardcover Theater’s versions of “penny dreadfuls,” or Victorian-era soap operas, have been so popular in years past that this time around it’s offering five installments, each time imagining a more fantastical mash-up. Making an appearance are historical figures such as Queen Victoria, Scotland Yard founder Sir Robert Peel, and the grave robbers William Burke and … Read more
Stuart Pimsler was inspired by literature when constructing this feverish meditation on love; he read everything from Plato’s Symposium to contemporary fare like Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love and Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He then cast a nine-year-old dancer to act as the show’s sage narrator, much like in … Read more
In the biblical story of Susannah and the Elders, a beautiful young woman gets falsely accused of being a hussy. Thinking this an apt metaphor for all the finger-pointing and paranoia he saw during the McCarthy era, American composer Carlisle Floyd transposed the fable to 1950s Tennessee. Just like in the Bible, the fetching Susannah … Read more
Edna Stevens Talton was but a wee Liberian seven-year-old when her family transplanted itself to the States in 1981. Once here, she quickly picked up on echoes of traditional African dance in the new African-American styles she was discovering. A couple of decades later, long after she’d forged a successful career as an MTV backup … Read more
Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip has been a strangely enduring cult phenomenon. First published in 1973, Lesy’s indescribable marriage of photographs and text, alternately chilling and hilarious, chronicled a late-nineteenth-century epidemic of madness and mayhem in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. A photographic historian, Lesy has kept busy since then, producing a batch of books that, … Read more
As Minnesota Public Radio’s alterna-juggernaut, The Current has delivered a reliable slate of programming and special events, but it’s really stumbled on an inspired idea with the Fakebook series. The basic idea is to pair an author—usually somebody copasetic with the station’s mission—with a band, and put the two on stage with host and Current … Read more
Other Electricities, Ander Monson’s 2005 debut collection, introduced one of the freshest and most interesting new voices in years. The interrelated stories, set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the bleakest midwinter, represent a sort of inventory of loss, complete with obituaries, obsessive weather minutiae, electrical charts, and an elegiac style that drifts again and again … Read more
Mix the rich color cinematography of Douglas Sirk with the gushing violence of Sam Peckinpah, fold in the kind of Thai melodrama that has all but vanished from the international movie landscape, and you’ve got Tears of the Black Tiger, a film that moves with the force of a hurricane blasting apart a great marzipan … Read more
Jan Svankmajer could be the weirdest filmmaker in the world, an artist whose troubled subconscious seems to dictate his every move. His latest, Lunacy, is loosely based on two Edgar Allan Poe short stories and “inspired” by the Marquis de Sade. It’s the story of a poor fellow who, upon returning from his mother’s funeral, … Read more