Along with The Passenger here’s another seventies-vintage Italian film being feted with an anniversary re-release. Why spend eight bucks to see this one on the big screen? Well, when it’s a lush noir masterpiece that influenced everything from The Godfather triology to Reservoir Dogs, and was written by Marxists against fascism yet resonates with fresh … Read more
At a preview for Brokeback Mountain, women throughout the audience gasped with pleasure when cowboys played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger started a fond embrace. Was this going to be a Mulholland Drive for ladies? Or simply a gay Western? Neither label will suffice, but this tale of a love affair between a ranch … Read more
Hero or rascal? Liberal threat or viable candidate? Could Al Franken be our next senator, really? Well, he can certainly charm his way across a room full of snakes, but when it comes right down to it, the guy can’t even pretend to be moderate about anything. Then again, neither can the folks in charge … Read more
Windy but precise, laden with words that have no life outside the dictionary, and generously slathered with footnotes, David Foster Wallace has achieved acclaim for a kind of writing style seldom seen outside of graduate English programs. Of course, it also helps that his essays for Harper’s, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and other … Read more
Dropping out of school at age thirteen would seem not to set a young woman up for a life in letters, but more than sixty books later, Doris Lessing has the last laugh at the vicious nuns and finishing-school marms who made her formal education such a drag. A self-made and wickedly sharp intellect with … Read more
These annual exhibitions showcase new work from the recipients of one of the state’s most coveted grants–and keep us up to date on the doings of some of the best local photographers. Last year’s celebrated quartet was made up of Beth Dow, who made rich platinum prints of various types of manicured landscapes (pictured), and … Read more
Don’t let the title fool you: This show based around animal imagery is, if anything, more cryptic than cute. Among its nine artists are the eccentrically folky Juliette Oken, a local; New York-based Larissa Bates, whose mythological landscapes are, according to one art magazine, selling as fast as she can make them; Robert Marbury of … Read more
Gustafson was an integral part of the Minnesota art community until his early death in 2003. Because of his sensitivity to light and nuance, he was the natural choice of many local artists when it came to having their work photographed. Over the years, the relationships he built among artists in a host of mediums … Read more
We waited all year for a surprise like this. Provocative, global-minded, warm, and even uninhibited pieces make up this juried show of works by twenty-six artists from around the state. Compelling discoveries include the super-psychedelic Georgie Girl Hart, by Andy Messerschmidt of Ely (pictured), and Plymouth resident Chuck Avery’s Separation, a photograph of concrete blocks … Read more
The tradition of grand and inaccurate predictions about the future of prefab houses goes back almost a hundred years, to the first sales of Sears mail-order kit homes in the early 1900s. Now, though, prefab home designs seem actually to be getting somewhere, both in terms of the number being produced and home builders’ desire … Read more