Here’s an update on Jessica Mitford’s still-relevant 1963 classic of muckraking, The American Way of Death, which shed all sorts of unwelcome light on this country’s funeral industry and its often horrific practices. While Mitford’s book had its (occasionally unintentional) hilarious moments, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen focuses on some of the bizarre modern rituals that have … Read more
Through five previous Cork O’Connor novels, Krueger has put his beleaguered hero through the wringer and then some. As Copper River, the sixth installment in the popular series, gets under way, O’Connor is on the run from hired killers who have already deposited a slug in his leg. This after the poor bastard spent much … Read more
Another collaboration from Kevin Kling and Michael Sommers, Old Four Eyes is partly a treatise on the engineering (or “taming”) of the Mississippi River, and partly an appreciation of John Banvard, the nineteenth-century panoramist who famously painted the river valley on huge canvases. Kling’s goofy script and a colorful spectacle of puppets, projections, and flamboyant … Read more
Further proof of the vitality of the local dance scene, Carl Flink, the director of the University of Minnesota’s dance program, debuts a new company whose name refers to the no-nonsense ethic conveyed by 70s-era generic food packaging. As such, one of the company’s goals is to take down walls between dancers and non-dancers—and between … Read more
Much more informative than browsing at antique stores or Design Within Reach, this show is a must for design aficionados—even though, alas, you’re not allowed to park your tush on any of these models. The show includes works from the nineteenth century, but focuses on the twentieth century’s greatest names: There’s Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair, … Read more
I used to sit around late at night, mulling and wondering, and watching dark things scuttling through the long shadows on the floor. I would try, try, try to get the story straight, my story, but the thing was no longer capable of running anything but crooked, and it ran through some thick patches of … Read more
The current Minneapolis epicenter of prostitution, at least if you ask the neighbors, centers on the residential streets around Hiawatha Avenue and Lake Street East. The area is so active that an all-volunteer, amateur “John Patrol” has sprung up in order to keep an eye on things. The foot patrollers have been known to rat … Read more
One must be awful careful these days when bringing up H. L. Mencken. The “Bard of Baltimore” was an inspiration to a generation of plain-talking columnists long before Molly Ivins or Maureen Dowd were even born—or before anyone in journalism worried about hurting people’s feelings. Mencken’s specialty was puncturing the pomposity and pointing out the … Read more
Rake columnist Clinton Collins states that I failed to answer a young law student that queried me about legacy admissions at elite universities [Free the Jackson Five, July]. In all fairness to Collins, there was quite a bit of cross talking during the discussion he recounted, so it is possible that he did not hear … Read more
Having lived through and worked through the era, I appreciated Cathy Madison’s “We went crazy for a decade” and would have liked to have seen specific reference made to Butler Square. As a designer I officed there during the late 1970s into the early 1980s and the place uniquely reflected an aesthetic hybrid bridging the … Read more