It remains to be seen whether Brazilian singer Seu Jorge will perform his own sexy, samba-driven songs, or the set of the David Bowie covers that he played in the film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. We’ll hope for more of the former, since the Bowie songs, sung in Portuguese to spare and jangly … Read more
If the current U.S. government funded art that reflected its ideals, we might see Thomas Kinkade’s cottage scenes take over museums as well as shopping malls. (Then again, Kinkade’s apparently acquired a rep for groping women and urinating in elevators, so perhaps he’s more bad-boy art star than the Bush administration might wish to sanction.) … Read more
In a way, Alexander Calder is a movement of one—his mobiles, those feats of balance and grace, pretty much own the category. But Calder owes his inspiration to the surrealist movement, and this exhibit places him firmly within that larger context, demonstrating how his work grew out of influences from contemporaries such as Marcel Duchamp, … Read more
In a valiant effort to create public art for St. Paul that doesn’t involve globe-headed cartoon characters, a group of stone carvers from Minnesota and around the world have gathered to unleash shapes and figures from blocks of our state’s finest quarried stone. A geologist’s bouquet of granite, limestone, sandstone, and gneiss will fall away … Read more
Fans of Nick Cave and his band, the Bad Seeds, recognize that Cave has something of an obsession with murder and the torment that so often leads to it. So it’s not so surprising that, with his first screenwriting effort, the Aussie rock icon should focus on some other bad seeds—the gunslingers and thugs who … Read more
Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance was a relatively early, mostly ignored, and extremely prescient look at global warming and the fate of our planet. Thirteen years after its publication, we’re still waiting to see the kind of widespread social and political awareness that could bring about change and slow the planet’s demise. So … Read more
Spawned by the success of Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books, the tiny New York City publishing house, launched a series of noir anthologies, each pegged to individual cities and their neighborhoods, and featuring all-new stories by local writers. With seventeen titles either in print or in the works, stories from the series are racking up a … Read more
The sins of the father are visited upon just about everyone when a disturbed young man, recently discharged from the military, tracks down his birth father. However, Dad (played by William Hurt) wants nothing to do with his half-Mexican love child (Gael García Bernal, best known to Americans for his roles in The Motorcycle Diaries … Read more
Humanitarian architecture: On the glamour meter, the term is right up there with “FEMA trailer.” But during a recent discussion on the topic at a noisy Dinkytown bar, my ears perked up when an “elephant migration specialist” was listed along with soil engineers, architects, and government officials as a crucial collaborator on a relief project … Read more
The upside of a miserable school experience: It might help you become a great artist. Take French director Jean Vigo. His traumatic years in a substandard boarding school helped turn him to a life in art; in his 1933 film Zero for Conduct, he draws upon those years for inspiration. In the film, the students … Read more