It’s springtime in the Twin Cities, which means touring musicians are once again willing to add us to their schedule, including the talented New England singer/songwriters Dar Williams and Melissa Ferrick. On the light side, Dar Williams, with her quirky, melancholy songs about alternative radio, therapy, and how southern California wants to be western New … Read more
Regular listeners to A Prairie Home Companion might find these songs familiar. A frequent guest and onetime music director on the show, multi-instrumentalist maestro Ostroushko wrote the songs on Red Lodge as a challenge to himself to fill a five-week stint last March with entirely new work. The 10 songs here reflect the range of … Read more
Lucinda Williams is a stubborn lady, which has been both a blessing and a curse. She’s refused to compromise her genre-crossing, rough-edged songwriting, but it’s not easy to get ahead in country music when your influences also include Delta blues and electric-era Dylan. She’s too raw and electric for country radio and too twangy for … Read more
By far the most well-deserved Oscar of 2003, Hayao Miyazaki’s haunting anime was so far ahead of its competition in the Best Animated Feature category that it made them look like, well, cartoons. Indeed, there’s so much going on here it’s hard to absorb in one viewing. The ethereal and often weird plot follows Chihiro, … Read more
Sam Peckinpah’s fascination with human brutality was never so blazingly controversial than this 1971 revenge thriller, starring Dustin Hoffman as a milquetoast professor who confronts his capacity for violent revenge when his wife is attacked by local hooligans. At the time, it prompted critic Pauline Kael to call him a fascist director, and it’s no … Read more
This is the fourth showbiz-schmucks mockumentary from Christopher Guest and his Spinal Tap/Guffman/Best in Show troupe, and if we’re lucky they’ll be able to go all the way to eleven. This time around the target is folk music—lampooning the malcontents, losers, and loonies reunited decades past their prime for a Carnegie Hall memorial concert. The … Read more
As recent events have made painfully obvious, the peoples of the world still can’t get along. It would be nice to think that this, the biggest local film event of the year, might help bridge the gap in some way. With more than 120 films from 50 countries screening at theaters all over town, there … Read more
Just think, if this document had never been written, King George would still be pushing us around. He’d make us all drive on the wrong side of the road and wear powdered wigs, and demand that we call soccer “football” and freedom fries “chips.” That’s just the kind of tyrant he was. Luckily, the Declaration … Read more
What a treasure the Minnesota Zoo continues to be. Hard to believe it turns 25 years old this year; it seems like only yesterday when they were talking about a state-of-the-art zoological garden out in the cornfields of Apple Valley, just about the time we were all feeling kinda creeped out by Como. Here’s a … Read more
It’s nearly perfect that the mischief-minded David Sedaris first gained fame for being an elf. If you’ve heard of Sedaris at all, you know about his hilarious, sardonic memoir “The SantaLand Diaries,” detailing his petty humiliations as one of Kris Kringle’s helpers at Macy’s department store. Insightful, bitter and genuinely sidesplitting, it struck a nerve … Read more