The Walker Art Center announced its 2012-13 performing arts season on Thursday, and it looks to be another good one. Highlights include a new solo work by performance artist Laurie Anderson, an experimental multimedia/music piece by Wilco guitarist Nels Cline and several of his friends, and a day-long 60th birthday bash for composer/musician/producer John Zorn.
In all there are six commissioned works, three world premieres,…
A standing-room only crowd gathered at Common Good Books in St. Paul last night to hear Garrison Keillor and his radio crew perform scenes from Keillor’s novel, Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny. It was the second event in a three-day celebration of the re-location/re-opening of his bookstore at the intersection of Snelling Ave. and Grand Ave. (Tuesday night was devoted to poetry, and…
Ever since the Guthrie Theater announced its 50th Anniversary season two weeks ago, many in the local arts community have been boiling with indignation over the fact that the overwhelming majority of plays being presented by the Guthrie in its 2012-13 season are written and directed by men, and address what Charles Barkley, in a recent Saturday Night Live skit, calls “white people’s problems.”
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Among music fans there’s been a lot of chatter about Live Nation’s announcement that its first-ever River’s Edge Music Festival, on St. Paul’s Harriet Island, will be headlined by the Dave Matthews Band, Tool, the Flaming Lips, and twenty-five or so other bands of varying degrees of obscurity.
Live Nation is the world’s largest and…
With Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour, brought to you by Cirque du Soleil, the Gloved One has begun his ascension from tragically over-adored celebrity to ridiculously revered rock god. True Michael Jackson fans may be confused, however, because it appears that MJ is going to have to muscle past Cirque’s legion of acrobats, contortionists, and…
One of my favorite TV shows when I was a kid was Land of the Giants, a sci-fi series about the crew of a spaceship that crash-lands on an Earth-like planet where everything is 12 times bigger than they are. As shrunken-people stories go, it was much more satisfying than The Borrowers or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, in part because the set was full…
America’s love affair with stupidity has a long and shameless history, from slavery and Prohibition to professional wrestling, beer pong, and the average political attack ad. The one place you will not find much stupidity, however, is in the Broadway punk-rock-opera American Idiot.
Certainly, you will see young people making all kinds of ill-advised choices, and…
Judy Garland’s slow, sad slide into oblivion is one of American entertainment’s most tragic stories. Her death, at 47, from an overdose of Seconal, was stamped from a familiar template for stars overwhelmed by the pressures of fame. Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Anna Nicole Smith, Margeaux…
The much-anticipated 40-year retrospective of local artist/teacher/provocateur/imp Frank Gaard is up and glowing at the Walker Art Center. Said to be the largest collection of Gaard’s work ever assembled (though CO Exhibitions had a nice Gaard show last year), Frank Gaard: Poison & Candy features more than 200 works, including large-scale paintings,…
Julius Caesar may be the perfect parable for our time. Never in the history of mankind have so many leaders, dictators, and wannabe kings been deposed by the rabble or betrayed by their countrymen. And never before has the throne seemed more precarious.
Heck, even the governor of Wisconsin has angry mobs calling for his head.
So it makes perfect sense for the Guthrie,…
