Shanghai’s Taikang Lu is a crowded market street, its length disordered by listless bicycle rickshaws, old ladies with shopping bags, and angry taxis. Narrow Lane 201 opens into the middle of it, defined on one side by an old factory and, on the other, a modest rose-red building that houses Hands in Clay pottery shop. … Read more
Jay Bakker, the son of former televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, is not the same innocent little pudgy kid whom viewers knew as Jamie Charles. Now twenty-eight, he has piercings in his lip and eyebrow, his arms are sleeved in tattoos, and he plays in a Social Distortion cover band called the Creeps. Bakker … Read more
Growing up in Minnesota, I was always taught that Scandinavian society was some sort of utopian system that helps everyone. The taxes were high, but the payoff was the world’s highest standard of living. Living in an age of increasingly regressive tax cuts and anti-welfare rhetoric, I thought it was time to look to Norway … Read more
The largest public execution in U.S. history took place in 1862, down in Mankato. Since the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota Indians, public sentiment against the death penalty had been building in Minnesota. Nineteenth-century politicians tried to pacify the public outrage not by banning the death penalty, but by carrying it out in relative secrecy. An … Read more
A couple of months after President Theodore Roosevelt had given the inaugural address for his second term of office, an itinerant named William Williams was convicted of first-degree murder. In one of Minnesota’s most infamous crimes, Williams had killed a teenage boy, Johnny Keller, and his mother. An English laborer, Williams had worked as a … Read more
As our Chooka boots slog into winter’s home stretch, it’s good to be reminded that this too—the bottomless mud puddles, the salt stains, the never-ending blur of flurries—will pass. Pangea World Theater and The Playwrights’ Center help lift our spirits as they resurrect Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld who was often associated … Read more
As would be expected from a theater that shares a building with the Powderhorn neighborhood community center, the Pillsbury House Theatre can always be counted on for politically engaged and socially responsible performances. The area premiere of the great English surrealist Caryl Churchill’s Far Away is no exception. Timely and powerful, it is the story … Read more
Located 1,200 miles off the coast of west Africa, St. Helena is mostly known for exporting dead French Emperors, i.e. Napoleon Bonaparte, whose remains went back to France in 1840 after his death nineteen years earlier. The island’s second-most-famous export is its coffee, which the diminutive warmonger reportedly adored—and if you’re willing to shell out … Read more
Not content merely to be an ambitious new downtown art gallery, One on One doubles as a bicycle shop, and once a little remodeling is done it’ll triple as a coffee bar. Its second-ever exhibit features a painter with a similar bent toward combining art and transportation, New-York-by-way-of-Iowa’s Jim Zellinger. His boldly colored acrylics are … Read more
What sartorial item is more exclusive than haute couture, more status-laden than the perennially wait-listed Hermès Kelly bag? Why, the plains Indian shirt, of course: an animal-hide garment festooned with all manner of beading, colorful symbols and battle scenes, leather, horse- or human-hair fringe, and porcupine-quill embroidery. As stereotypically “Native” as a tomahawk or teepee, … Read more