The gloriously ramshackle Soap Factory once again throws open its doors to Minnesota’s fairer seasons with a show about the L-word – or, to be more precise, “the emotionally disarming process of falling in love.” So you’ve been duly warned about the potential risks of some of the art. For instance, to examine Rama Hoffpauir’s … Read more
Grab a brochure, map out a route, and get ready to art power-walk instead of crawl. One of the things we like best about Northeast’s annual open-gallery weekend is an expansiveness that encourages you to explore—fifteen thousand visitors are expected to descend on this neighborhood, but unlike, say, the Uptown Art Fair, they won’t all … Read more
Mikhail Baryshnikov was just in town a few months ago performing solo, but if he wants to come back so soon he certainly doesn’t have to twist our arm. He graces our cities again as the lead dancer in the world premiere of this dreamlike dance piece set in a remote Russian town during the … Read more
Kristin Hersh has long been one of our favorite songwriters from the post-punk flowering of the eighties, and we’re excited to see this new trio of hers, which promises to take full advantage of her ability to create full-on and ferocious rock (her solo and Throwing Muses work often strove for a more fragile beauty). … Read more
It’s 1979, and President Jimmy Carter is trying his damnedest. So are some of the finest new bands to emerge since the British invasion. Elvis Costello has just released Armed Forces, Talking Heads have offered up Fear of Music, and Neil Young has turned out Rust Never Sleeps. Yet Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks beats … Read more
Close your eyes during a Leon Redbone concert and you might imagine yourself on a rickety old back porch off the Louisiana bayou, sometime early last century, with banjoes strumming and an eccentric crooning to the harvest moon. Redbone has been crafting his unique blend of back-porch ragtime jazz and blues since the early seventies, … Read more
Either childrens’ books have been getting progress-ively smarter recently, or our reading level has … Er. Let’s start again. Children’s books have been getting progressively smarter recently, what with the literary sophistication to be found in writers like Philip Pullman, Lemony Snicket, and, many would argue, J.K. Rowling. Hard Times is aimed at younger readers, … Read more
Hard-bop innovator Eric Alexander is always refining and reworking his vivacious sax styling, but remains true to his biggest influences—Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, and many of the original bebop pioneers. In 1991, at the tender age of 22, his rep blossomed after he placed second to Joshua Redman at the prestigious Thelonious Monk Inter- national … Read more
As documented by Legs McNeil in Please Kill Me, the definitive chronicle of the early punk era, Deborah Harry and Joey Ramone were good people—two of the few CBGB’s scenesters at the time who refrained from pretending not to care about success, while stabbing each other in the back to achieve it. Even at the … Read more
A twelve-year, twenty-five-volume project to reprint every Charlie Brown cartoon ever made? Good grief. Well, even if you’re sick to death of the civic-boosting Schulz statues dotting (or blighting) St. Paul, this first volume provides a good opportunity to reassess Sparky Schulz’s work without the commercializing excesses that have gotten in the way. Despite repeated … Read more