Category: Blog Post

Jon Ferguson‘s new show, Ligustrum Vulgare, is playing tonight at the Bryant Lake Bowl. (And I’m dragging Peter Schilling to go see it.) If you don’t already know, Ferguson is the Brit-born director who, in 2005, created the anti-war “clown show” Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban, which starred many members of the Live Action Set. Even now, it stands out as one of my all-time favorite theatergoing experiences…

Now Ferguson is turning his attention to the smaller battles we wage with, say, those oddball neighbors of ours. Ligustrum Vulgare was inspired by a newspaper article he once read about a guy who killed his neighbor in a dispute over the appropriate height for a privet hedge (thus the name Ligustrum Vulgare, Latin for privet hedge). I interviewed Ferguson earlier to week about this show (we’ll be running a short preview in our December issue–just in time to alert folks to the last two performances) and, not knowing much about it, the thing that struck me most was the method he used in casting the show’s actors. He purposefully sought out performers with “qualities of stillness and melancholy,” he said. And I knew this to be the case, at lease in one instance. One of the cast members is a mutual acquaintance of Ferguson’s and mine. This person embodies the very definition of a malcontent. I thought it pretty remarkable though, that Ferguson was able to view this characteristic as a strength. Lesser artists would’ve cast all their friends, since they’re so easy to get along with.

The Star Tribune finally managed to get a story in about Minneapolis School Board member-elect Chris Stewart’s “Tammy Lee and Everyone Who Supports Her Hate Black People” web site.

They couldn’t get the story in before the election for some reason, probably because, as they said, Stewart didn’t return their call until after the election.

I spoke to Stewart on Monday, though, which I guess means the Strib should hire me to replace Steve Brandt, their school board man.

Brandt didn’t go into much detail on the story of course, because, after all, the Strib had to leave plenty of room for Katherine Kersten to tell us again how wonderful Michele Bachmann is. But I so admire his apparently pungent questioning of Stewart–which elicited this response: “It breaks down to some frat-blog type humor that never was meant to get out to the public and it’s completely inconsistent with my politics.”

Some questions I might have asked: “Stewart, what you really mean is it wasn’t supposed to be revealed that you wrote it. Right?” and, “Since you did write it, how can you say it’s inconsistent with your politics?” and, “If we accept your explanation that it was frat boy humor, how do you think the citizens of Minneapolis ought to feel about having just elected someone of such awesome intellect?” and “Would you have returned my phone call if I had left the message that we were going to run a front page story on Election Day that exposes you as the author of patently racist diatribe and we wanted to give you a chance to explain yourself?”

A question Brandt might ask his own editorial board is, “What sort of research did you do on this guy before we endorsed him?”

And he might ask his own editor “Why do you tolerate an excuse at the level of ‘He didn’t return my phone call?’ for not getting this story to the voters?”

Whether you be toasting liberally or crying in your beers about the election results (I have a feeling that, like me, my readers are doing a little of both), it’ll probably be a good night to go way, way back (before you were too young or unborn to care about this shit): there’s B.B. King at Orchestra Hall and, if you’re really hating life, some sort of Johnny Cash backup band playing over at Lee’s (with opener “Johnny Trash”).

The founders planned for it to work out this way: one party controls the executive; the other party controls the legislature. Except for the fact that the chief executive is George Bush, things could be a lot worse. God knows they have been for the past 6 years.

If there is one thing that’s been clear, it’s that old saw about absolute power corrupts absolutely. With few exceptions, the power party was clearly governing for the benefit of the party, not of the country.

But what I’m most encouraged about is that the American people may be slow, but they’re not completely stupid. It took them longer than it should, but to be fair, the Democrats certainly put up some dreadful candidates. (John Kerry, Coleen Rowley and Patty Wetterling come immediately to mind.)

But they also came up with some good ones, like Tim Walz.

Now the Democrats have to actually prove that they have some ideas. We know that Bush’s strategy in Irag is wrong. However, we don’t know what is right. The Democrats better figure it out soon, because the people seem to be demanding it.

Congress, you’re on. Don’t screw it up.

And those of you who depend on the newspapers or the TV for your news did, Minneapolis School Board Candidate Chris Stewart wrote and posted this “spoof” of Tammy Lee’s website front page on his blog, americanhotsausage.com.

It’s since been removed and the blog has been passworded so you can’t see any of his previous scurrilous screeds unless you have the secret password, which I’m guessing is probably “honky” or “ofay” or whatever is slang for “white motherfucker” these days.

Stewart goes by Rev. Rahelio Soleil on his blog and as a letter writer (to The Rake, among others) and frequent commenter on local blogs. If you want to google him, you can, and you can read some of his stuff if you click the “cached” link on the google listing.

He commented here the other day as RS2, and stopped just short of calling me a racist. On the Tammy Lee page, he didn’t hesitate to put racist words in my mouth.

I spoke to Stewart yesterday and asked him point blank if he’d written the site. He refused to answer a simple yes or no question.

Chances are Chris Stewart will be elected to the Minneapolis School Board today, and by God, we’ll be proud to have a thoughtless cowardly racist like him representing us. Especially one who says such things behind a pseudonym.

(Pardon us while we laugh our ass off when we quote what Stewart says he stands for on his website: “A intense focus on core knowledge, character education, and civic accountability.”)

At least Keith Ellison put his name on stuff he wrote. Too bad Stewart can’t muster the same courage.

And too bad none of the main stream media couldn’t do so either. Maybe the Strib just didn’t want to make themselves look any stupider than they already do by ignoring this story about their endorsed candidate.

It is well known that certain types of cars are blue, green and red.

The bluest of the blue is the Volvo station wagon. The sedans, however, are quite popular in Georgetown, where you find the ocassional conservative. Locally, however, Bush supporters and Volvos are rarer than Amy Klobuchar apologists at, say, Grace Church.

The poster child of green cars is the Subaru station wagon. It also serves as a moving billboard for civil union amendments. I could easily see myself in such a car provided it was the English STI 306 HP version of the Forrester wagon — a car worthy of Martina Navritilova and Billie Jean combined.

The reddest vehicle on the planet is not the Hummer (Neil Young drives a bio-diesel variant) but the Suburban XL, the “national car of Texas.” Before you Prius prissies diss this behemoth realize that a flex fuel version currently exists that can run on 85 percent ethanol. That makes the Suburban more politically correct in the corn growing states like Minnesota but still red meat for liberals in Texas.

Do they have corn in Texas?

Happy election day. Two related happenings, where the worlds of art and politics collide: there’s an election night cocktail party at Gallery 13. And Bedlam Theatre will set about spoofing the television news in a one-night show at Bryant Lake Bowl.