AP Photo/Matt Slocum It occurs to me that the best way to recap the first three games of the Spurs-Lakers series is to point out all the places I was wrong. There are plenty of examples so let’s get to it. * A high scoring series When I looked over the various matchups between San … Read more
I stopped in at Shiraz Fireroasted Cuisine for dinner the other night, to check out the new menu and the belly dancing, and at 8:30 on a Saturday night, the place was nearly empty. That’s really a shame, because it is a charming little restaurant, with good food and an ambience of Persian arts and … Read more
Welcome to a possibly special edition of Poem Worth Reading. The very title of this Cracking Spines segment — that is, Poem Worth Reading — is jeopardized with today’s entry. But because this is a blog, and should thereby not be held to any qualitative standards (self-imposed or otherwise), and because I got the go-ahead … Read more
Happy Memorial Day! Happy Memorial Day? We get so used to wishing happy holidays that we end up saying inanities like these. Is it a happy day — a holiday to commemorate loss of lives, casualties? What do you make from a holiday whose best venue is the cemetery? A celebration of life, perhaps — … Read more
"That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment." -Dorothy Parker Over ten long, occasionally checkered, years as an art critic here in Minnesota, here’s one thing I’ve learned: Making your way in the world today, as a visual artist … Read more
"Hitler believed modernists couldn’t see color as it was in nature, or humans as they were in life," remarks one of the scholars interviewed in The Rape of Europa — a documentary on the artistic pillaging perpetrated by the Nazi army during World War II. "He viewed this as a racial deficiency." And with that, … Read more
I usually take my coffee black. I prefer the same color in comedies, and particularly in that rare dark comedy that can be called a film. As you raid your video store or netflix account this weekend, finding a good dark film can be difficult–particularly when they are packaged as standard-blend comedies of the … Read more
All day a dragon in a rented crow costume was installed in the tree outside my house, shrieking imprecations and keeping me at bay. A few months back I reversed the mat on my doorstep so that each time I opened the door I would encounter the word “WELCOME.” My hope was that this would … Read more
On the well-manicured lawn that is the Democratic primary, there resides a two large groups of little old men shouting epithets at one another, screaming for "these kids" to get the fuck off their lawn. Sadly, these arthritic individuals aren’t Edina’s most senior residents, as one might expect of these wizened figures glowering at any … Read more
The menu at the new Red Pepper in Saint Paul combines Vietnamese, Thai and Hmong dishes, but since the first two cuisines are pretty widely available elsewhere, I decided to try one of the Hmong dishes. Number 27, sweet pork belly with eggs, turned out to be a savory stew with big chunks of roast … Read more