The Lightness of Being In Space

Tonight, the Bell Museum’s Science on Screen series features State of Weightlessness, a 1994 documentary that pairs archival footage of early Soviet space travel with the reflections of various cosmonauts on being in Space. Our friend Colin Covert likes it very much.

Verbosity with Plum Sauce

Haven’t had enough of three hour menu presentations by effete servers describing specialties that become more and more intricate as chefs plumb the dark recesses of their creativity? Visit Chez Louise and refresh the page to get more more more. Or if you seem to be the only one lacking a good comment at your … Read more

Go Pack Go

A trip to Lambeau field to watch the Vikings play the Packers would be a highlight of the year for any real football fan. I don’t quite fit that level, but with a father that grew up in the U.P. (thus making him a Green Bay fan) I didn’t even realize until I got to … Read more

Band of Brothers

From the moment I met him, which was a couple years ago now, I knew there was something familiar about my Rakish coworker Brad Zellar. He looked an awful lot like the musician Martin Zellar, the guy my high school friends used to follow around to beer bashes and the Taste of Minnesota concerts. It … Read more

Soda Pop And A Piss In The Woods

There were four of them in the car. Three of them were crammed in beside each other in the front seat, drowsy and cursing intermittently and squinting into the harsh sunrise that was splattering off a windshield already made bleary with insect grease. At some point in the night they had run themselves through a … Read more

Notes on soul

A moment of silence in honor of the Godfather of Soul … … … By chance, I was listening to this fine James Brown-inspired band at about the moment lightning struck. Also, go see Dream Girls. I got very excited about it after reading David Denby’s hyperbolic review in the Dec. 25/Jan. 1 issue of … Read more

Paying for Crime

The Minneapolis City Council proved itself to be more politically adept than the Minneapolis Library Board in early December when it warded off the pleas for permanent funding of the Minneapolis Library system. Instead of the hoped-for permanent budget increases that had been dangled before the Library Board, the Council instead gave them one year’s … Read more

A Rope Trick

In August 1924, one year after a honeymoon tour of India, Alain Coulbec pushed my grandmother down the servants’ stairs at their country home outside Paris. Bruised but uninjured, she promptly pushed the noted aviator from family history, fleeing to Tahoe with her trust fund and newborn son. It didn’t matter that Coulbec had crossed … Read more

The Interruption

I heard a story at my great-aunt’s place that I told to my sister long-distance on the phone. Well, first I said, “Did you know her real name?,” because I knew or suspected that my sister did not. I will not repeat it here. But one of the cousins, a man whom I had never … Read more