Category: So Little Time

The
co-founder of Los Hombres Calientes, young Irvin Mayfield has over the years
abetted the impeccable precision of his trumpet lines with increasingly
emotional long-form compositions. How Passion Falls in 2001 was his personal
response to the first time his heart was broken, and Strange Fruit, recorded
four years later, is an incendiary tale of a lynching arising out of an
interracial romance. For the latter, Mayfield assembled a seventeen-piece orchestra
of New Orleans-based musicians. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they have
become an ongoing nonprofit organization and are currently on tour playing
Mayfield’s latest opus, the as-yet unrecorded Rising Tide, about that epic
storm that flooded New Orleans and took the life of Mayfield’s father and
dozens of others.

8:00 p.m., Orchestra Hall,
1111 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis; 612-371-5656.

Last
time Charlyn Marshall played Minneapolis, her set was half songs and half
nervous chatter, owing to the notorious self- consciousness that occasionally
overshadows the subtle beauty in her music. But her 2006 triumph, The Greatest,
has given the shy and sad kid a renewed sense of confidence that will only be
further buttressed by her pro backing band, The Dirty Delta Blues. Expect
plenty of The Greatest, along with a generous assortment of masterfully
evocative tunes from her new Jukebox, which, like The Covers Record from 2000,
consists of stark interpretations of an array
of old classics. If nothing else, count on the beguiling Marshall to
deliver more bangs for your buck.

First Avenue, 701 First Avenue North, Minneapolis; 612-338-8388.

Minnesota in early February is the perfect place and time for some intelligent and effervescent pop to quicken our winter-slogged minds and brighten our outlooks across the snow-covered prairie. The chance to hear ex-Split Enz frontman (and Crowded House cohort) Tim Finn spin flax into gold while reprising the magical realism of his latest solo disc, Imaginary Kingdom, fills that prescription better than anything else out there this month. At his best—and much of Imaginary Kingdom qualifies—Finn blends Paul McCartney’s delightful sense of naïveté with Ray Davies’s trenchant eye for social detail. Folk-pop thrush Alice Peacock (a White Bear Lake native, donchaknow) has enough insight and honesty in her mainstream-safe approach to set the stage as a strong opening act.

Cedar Cultural Center, 416 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-338-2674.

Regarding Fidel Castro: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography (available January 8)— we’re curious about what the old man has to say, and we’re hoping for wardrobe and grooming tips, along with colorful yarns about outlasting ten American presidents. Plus, how can you resist a two-colon title? … As long as we’re pimping atheists and communists, we might as well throw this one out there, too: Eric Wilson’s Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (available January 22) is pretty much exactly what it says; it argues that depression is a vital force and the wellspring of creativity. We’re happy to hear that … In Life Class (available January 29), Booker Prize-winning novelist Pat Barker (The Regeneration Trilogy) continues her exploration of the First World War’s devastating effects on British society … A.L. Kennedy is one of those prolific, much praised, purported virtuosos that nobody seems to have read. We can all climb on the bandwagon with her latest, Day (available January 8) … Finally, want to read something unlike most of the stuff you read? Try sampling some of the reissues from the virtuous New York Review of Books Classics series. For starters, we’d recommend Elaine Dundy’s delightful The Dud Avocado, a novel of an adventurous American girl in Paris. Or Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Tenants of Moonbloom, about a bill collector for a slumlord. Or Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes. Seriously, their catalog is full of marvels.

Having adopted an alias, Michael Frame, the character at the center of My Revolutions is living a carefully constructed life of suburban mediocrity, hiding his radical history from a capitalist career wife and a stepchild who dreams of nothing more romantic than a gig as a corporate lawyer. As always seems to happen in such stories—whether in real life or fiction—ghosts come calling and Frame is dragged back into the past. That’s admittedly a tired premise, but Kunzru—one of Granta’s “Twenty Best Fiction Writers Under Forty”—has a pretty good track record at making something stylish and memorable out of unpromising material. His previous novels, The Impressionist and Transmission, seemed like cool, logical outgrowths from his work at Mute Magazine, a nifty British rag that focuses on the exploration of globalization and “network societies.” From the sound of things, My Revolutions is a sort of ambitious departure, and a meditation on the fluidity of time, identity, ideology, and necessity.

The history of literature—up to and including the stuff piled on the new arrivals tables at your local bookstore—is crammed with oddballs and anachronisms. That said, it’s still a rare novel that can take such raw materials and make something truly funny, compelling, and moving out of them. Based on the early reports, Tod Wodicka’s debut novel—which features a tunic-wearing medieval re-enactor as a protagonist—consistently hits all the right grace notes. British reviews have consistently remarked on both the book’s comedy and its compassion, and All Shall Be Well has drawn comparisons to both Don Quixote and the novels of Charles Portis. It doesn’t get much more promising than that.

Hot on the heels of the birth of Christ comes yet another assault on religious belief. God knows, the godless have been on the pop culture offensive of late (see: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Philip Pullman et al.), and if the other side of the barricades didn’t have such an overwhelming historical foothold, you could almost accuse the atheists of piling on. The irony of so many of the recent irreligious screeds is that they tend to be marked by the same brand of repellent intolerance that has been the appalling hallmark of God’s zealots through the ages. It seems sad that even the unbelievers are reduced to preaching to their choirs. As to whether John Allen Paulos has any truly fresh light to shed on the subject—hint: It says right there in the title that the man’s a mathematician, and his book undertakes all manner of logical refutations of God’s existence (yawn)—I’m afraid he’s ultimately just another dog barking at cars.

File this one under “can’t miss.” Zadie Smith asked a bunch of literary cohorts to contribute to her latest project. Her only rule: Each story must bear the name of a person, and be about that person. The result is a broad-ranging collection of characters (a giant, a judge, and a monster, to name a few) presented in formats ranging from comic strip to monologue. Indeed, the only common thread in this schizophrenic anthology is the fact that each author is hotter than the next; George Saunders, Miranda July, Dave Eggers, and Chris Ware are among the contributors. Given the spectrum of genres and styles, there’s guaranteed to be something for everyone, all of it quality. Plus, all proceeds will go to Eggers’s 826NYC organization, a nonprofit that teaches children to write.

Lynn Geesaman’s photographs always draw one in. And after that, you stand around in the image, thinking, Now what am I doing here? I came here to get something; what was it? The fuzzy, melting landscapes have the memory-dissolving qualities of a late spring day—and, quite honestly, who knows whether that’s good or bad? But these days, which seem to be an era of doldrums in the art world (however well masked by stratospheric speculation and its attendant glamour), art that affects its spectator with this kind of subtlety is worth a second look.

Thomas Barry Art Gallery, 530 N. Third St., Minneapolis; 612-338-3656.

Scrap yards and paper recycling form Michael Kareken’s usual subjects (though he has other, more conventional ones as well—figures, usually); many of the works in this show depict the Rock-Tenn recycling yard near his studio. Tough-love limnings of crushed heaps evoke the huge stone Aphrodite that stood at the old Getty Museum on the Malibu cliffs, her voluminous draperies blown by a hurricane and torn and broken by two thousand years. The formal visual qualities of these raw heaps is exciting in itself, but Kareken also manages to infuse the drawings and paintings with the pathos of drapery—material that takes on the shape of that which it clothes, be it divine flesh, the force of tearing winds, or the mindless crush of waste. These scraps record the currents of our desires.

Groveland Gallery, 25 Groveland Terrace, Minneapolis; 612-377-7800.