Top photo: Fifi Chachnil; bottom photo: Cristina. It was one thing for Alec Soth, at a relatively early point in his career, to be admitted to the Magnum Photos cooperative. Then the legendary agency followed with another invitation, asking the St. Paul-based photographer to produce its third annual fashion magazine. Soth, whose energy seems as … Read more
“By drawing freely from the subconscious, the painter can bestow upon the canvas images most people could only access under the influence of hypnosis or in the depths of sleep. In my métier, I find myself time and again exploring the lure of the forbidden.” “My practice is concerned with the dichotomy between the term … Read more
Walker Art Center director Kathy Halbreich might be the most admired museum director in America,” wrote Tyler Green last year on his influential Modern Art Notes blog. He quoted some of Halbreich’s museum-director colleagues, one of whom said “I watch her from afar, kind of like a guru,” and another who said “Kathy is the … Read more
Red House Records is a tiny label headquartered in a modest office in the St. Paul Midway, yet one that is internationally celebrated among roots-music devotees. Founder Bob Feldman spent more than twenty years signing a roster of folk musicians like Greg Brown, Peter Ostroushko, and Ann Reed. But when Feldman died unexpectedly last year, … Read more
This weekend’s program is emblematic of conductor Osmo Vänskä’s five-year tenure to date with the orchestra. It begins with “Rakastava,” the romantic, melancholic choral work from Vänskä’s famous fellow Finn, Sibelius. It ends with Beethoven’s “Second Symphony,” a secondary but not second-rate composition among the nine Beethoven symphonies that Vänskä is recording with the Minnesota … Read more
Vega is deservedly getting the best reviews of her career for Beauty & Crime, her tip of the beret to New York City, her home since childhood and also the site of September 11th, her dead brother’s apartment, and sidewalks full of poets and fashion models. Vega gathers it all up—Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, and … Read more
He looks like a waiter out of a New Yorker cartoon. Crisp shirt, ramrod straight back, tray held aloft on his fingertips. He wears reading glasses on a chain around his neck, makes the best wine recommendations, calls all the ladies “dear” no matter what their age, and sports a wild, white mane of hair. … Read more
Bridgewater won a Tony for her role in The Wiz, won a Grammy for an Ella Fitzgerald tribute, had early-career dabbles in fusion jazz and R & B; more recently, she recorded a disk dedicated to Kurt Weill, and another of Parisian café music sung completely in French. But her latest, Red Earth, ranks with … Read more
In the early 1980s, when I was 16, my friend, Martha, picked me up at 11 p.m. in her father’s enormous Buick, and we drove from our neighborhood in Minnetonka to the Uptown Theater for the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I was brought up on an entertainment diet of The Carpenters, … Read more
There is nothing wrong with talented chefs like J.P. Samuelson at jP American Bistro turning out dishes like roast chicken breast with fermented black bean sauce and mango salad and calling it American cuisine. And Doug Flicker has every right to offer duck breast with prune ravioli, asparagus, and portobello mushrooms at Mission American Kitchen. … Read more