It's called an encore," the young woman next to me explained to her friend. "It's not over yet," she said, nodding with encouragement. Her friend was anxious and I knew why. British pop star Natasha Bedingfield had left the Fine Line stage after an hour without performing "Unwritten."

"Unwritten" is a monster of a pop song, and the obvious reason as to how a cute but sub-Christina Aguilera-level belter had sold out the joint. Daylight streaming in the club during the early show stole some of the glamour from Bedingfield's sparkles, but she attracted a mix of two groups: iPhone-owning tweens and the parents who love them, and late-twentysomething women and the men who love them. It was a suburban crowd with lots of sleek hair and the tidy outfits, and that made sense. Bedingfield's "Unwritten" has two major claims to fame: It's the theme song for The Hills, the popular reality show which began as a spinoff of Laguna Beach and is thus forever tied to Orange County and the tanned, enhanced blondes whose dubious hopes and romances carry them northward to Los Angeles. Today, it has pulled tan blondes northward from Edina.

The song's second claim to fame provides my own personal connection to the song, the reason why I can sing eight bars of the chorus—it's used in commercials for Pantene products. "Feel the rain on yo-ur skin/No one else can feel it for you/Only you can let it in." There's not a show on prime time this ditty hasn't interrupted. Oh, and Barack Obama used it in his campaign.

Is there anything "Unwritten" can't do? Well, it's been rumored that while it can treat sunburns, it doesn't soothe the itch from bug bites. But that hit was from an album released back in 2005, and when Bedingfield opened with "Piece of Your Heart" off this year's Pocketful of Sunshine, it became clear that her Fine Line appearance would concentrate on her more recent clichéd songs about love, rather than her previous clichéd songs about self-determination. "It's quite intimate in here," she said pleasantly. In her native England, she probably sells out clubs thrice this size, but she's a good sport. In tailored navy trousers and a sporty white belt, she flashed her midriff and a big smile but otherwise looked quite tame for a member of the Maxim Hot 100 (she's #72, while the young stars of The Hills, Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag, are numbers 56 and 32, respectively).

"This song is about finding your soulmate," explained Bedingfield needlessly. Her lyrics are all generic variations on a tired theme. But her delivery has enough personality to make up for it. She puts rocker-swagger together with husky-alto yelping and island-party bass lines and pulled off an admirable feat: a commercial act that doesn't feel like it's pandering. By the time she got to "Love Like This," the audience was happily singing along to make up for the lack of Sean Kingston. Bedingfield can do Beyonce-melisma when called for, and she can pull off crooning, reflective ballads. When she sings "Wild Horses," you can imagine Disney music directors eagerly enlisting it for a scene in their next big modern fairy tale.
After a dozen songs she's ready to call it a night. But the show can't be over until "Unwritten" is sung, and when the call for an encore brings her back on stage, arms fly in the air as the first few distinctive guitar phrases ring out. "Unwritten" is a joke of a theme song for a show as unimaginative and obviously scripted as The Hills, but its message of endless possibility and optimism couldn't be more perfectly suited for 2008. Whether you're talking about your last boyfriend or your last haircut or your last government, the future is still a blank page, a clean slate. And for all it's commercial appropriation, that still makes "Unwritten" a rousing theme song for hopeful people living in dissatisfied times.

To gay men of a certain age, Armistead Maupin, author of the Tales of the City series of novels, is more than just an iconic literary figure. He is a hero! I was just out of college when the first book came out, and the humor–and the outrageousness–helped hasten my becoming the old queen I am now. And in the second book, when landlady Mrs. Madrigal was revealed to be the transsexual son of a whorehouse madam, I thought, “This is the world I want to live in!”

For me, what helped to make Tales of the City so radical wasn’t the dizzying array of sexualities on display. It was that Maupin had basically redefined the nature of family. Frankly, that is hardly less radical a notion today. Let’s talk about real family values. He dared to say that all these diverse and unique (some might say freaky) individuals could be a family simply by defining themselves as such–and then live up to the highest ideals of that term, albeit in unique and individual ways. I’ve always found that an ideal to aspire to.

So I approached meeting Maupin and hearing him speak at the State Theatre for Hennepin Theatre Trust/Loft Literary Legends series with a great deal of trepidation. I wondered how he could possibly live up to all my high expectations. But he exceeded them. Both onstage and in person, he has all the wit and humor of the books–and all the warmth and humanity as well.

He started out reading an extended section of Michael Tolliver Lives, a 2007 novel that picks up the lives of the Tales in the City gang eighteen years later. It wasn’t really a reading; it was a performance by a master entertainer. He displayed the same deadpan style when telling personal stories, only more self-deprecating.

(Michael Tolliver Lives is a worthy successor to the Tales in the City series. In fact, it is significantly better than the last couple. It is a compelling read in its own right, while honoring the history and the characters. However, Maupin doesn’t seem to know quite how to end it; it runs out of steam towards the end. But the whole earlier series had that problem. The last novels were running on empty compared with their predecessors.)

Claude Peck, senior arts editor at the Star Tribune, proved an excellent moderator. He approached his subject with real eager interest and insight, while avoiding any trace of being a sycophant. Often, though, he ended up being little more that Maupin’s straight man. (No pun intended…) Maupin seemed to look at every question as an opening, and there were very few he didn’t rise to.

For instance, reflecting on his returning to Tales in the City after a decades-long hiatus, Peck asked, “What got into you?” “There’s a very rude answer to that,” Maupin replied without missing a beat. He never seems to have met anyone that he couldn’t poke fun at, but there was never any sense of being mean-spirited or nasty.

Indeed, I found him disarming in his honesty. “The more I confess the worst about myself in print, the less alone I felt,” he said. That attitude of gentle compassion extended to everyone that he talked about–except perhaps the religious right.

But before I crown him with too shiny a halo, I am pleased to report that he was also a wonderfully gossipy old queen. He told some delicious Hollywood stories, like the fact that both Ashley Judd and Cynthia Nixon were up for the role of Mary Ann Singleton in the Tales of the City miniseries, a role that went to Laura Linney. And he talked about how the main character in his novel Maybe the Moon, the dwarf, was modeled on a friend of his who had actually played E. T. in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.

The question of why he returned to the Tales of the City characters prompted a telling explanation of why he dropped the series in the first place: “Those were the days when HIV was still a death sentence. And I didn’t want the queer to die at the end.”

But HIV-positive Michael Tolliver does not die. In fact, Michael Tolliver Lives–and very passionately. (Maupin admitted that this book is more sexually explicit that the earlier ones.) Michael has survived to the ripe old age of fifty-five and is perfectly happy in his life. Maupin accomplished the difficult feat of making contentment dramatic and interesting and sexy.

Casting the story in a broader social and cultural context, Maupin said that what he wanted to do in this book was to celebrate this generation. They had grown up in invisibility, had started a revolution and then survived AIDS. “We’re still here!” he said triumphantly. Hearing that, it was nice to realize that I do indeed live in that world I always aspired to.

Summer solstice. 81 degrees and sunny. Walker Sculpture Garden. Four bands.

Given those stats, does it even matter which bands played and how each one performed? Every Walker After Hours event in the last year has been completely overrun, whether it featured Frida Kahlo or suburban landscapes. And Minneapolis clearly missed this event, which had featured the Jayhawks and Wilco in the past. Rock the Garden brings together the city's favorite brand in institutionalized art, and its favorite brand in independent rock, in its favorite season. Yes, the lineup (Bon Iver, Cloud Cult, New Pornographers, and Andrew Bird) seemed as sexy as the Walker's decision to put up a Paul Bunyan statue in the middle of their temporary mini-golf course (hey, it's all recycled!), but as the Strib's Chris Riemenschneider pointed out in his incisive column on the lineup Saturday, the Walker and its cosponsor, The Current, obviously know their crowd.   

For most of the event (that is, until Andrew Bird took the stage at 8:30), deciding on which line to stand in (corn dog/beer ticket/beer) was much more important than which indie-rock singer was crooning in which delicate falsetto in the background. Anticipating supply and demand became everything: Your ability to actually pay attention to a band, let alone enjoy it, hinged on when you decided to stand in the beer-ticket line and when you decided to stand in the actual beer line. And your biorhythm better be a little more angular than the typical Current fans if you had any chance at getting a bite to eat during the six-hour extravaganza. When Bon Iver was finishing around 5:30, the corn dog line was ten minutes long. When New Pornographers were playing around 7:30, I watched a red head stand in line for a hamburger for at least forty-five minutes. The poor food service employees manning the small grill were overwhelmed by a thick, suppurating queue that reached from the garden to the steps of the Walker in the middle of a blocked off Vineland Place.

Cloud Cult was too hippy-dippy even for a summer solstice concert, and other than the ELO cover they closed with, the New Pornographers bored me, especially with the only two stars in this so-called Canadian Supergroup, Neko Case and Destroyer's Daniel Bejar, absent. The bookends, Eau Claire's Bon Iver and Minneapolis's avant-indie adoptee Andrew Bird, were the two acts worth moving to the front and leaving the concessionaire's tangletown behind. Bon Iver's story cycle is still haunting even under perfect summer skies, but First Ave., where he's playing on August 15, is probably a better venue for seeing him. And Andrew Bird, with his crew of Minneapolis savants, Dosh and Jeremy Ylivsaker, is doing things onstage—simultaneously plunking strange chords on his guitar, whistling, and looping his violin live—that I've only seen attempted by Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood. Ridiculous.

Unfortunately, even Bird chose to forgo the only opportunity for real risk in his set, when he apologized before dutifully leaving the stage for a ten-minute break during a short lightning storm.   

Photographs by Sara Montour.

It’s no secret that TU Dance always puts on a good show. The company founded by former Alvin Ailey stars Uri Sands and Toni Pierce-Sands earns sold-out houses and standing ovations in response to Sands’s smart, lively choreography, and the company’s sleek, keen dancing. TU Dance offers acrobatic leaps, twisting, thinky partnering, and heartfelt emotion; no wonder audiences love them. But as the company enters its fourth year, in what direction is it going?

This concert opens with two revivals and closes with two premieres. “Lady” (from 2003, before the company was quite formed), an African-inflected work set to the soulful music of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, finds Sands in an easy, theatrical mood, arranging movement frontally, for the audience, along the line of some conceit he finds in the music—a gaggle of giggling girls, say, or a trio of swaggering men. I find “Lady” on the dull and predictable side, except when the ecstatic cutting free of one company member or another raises the dance above itself, above the sequence of audience-oriented steps. But “Lady” does contain a gem: a little duet for Sands and Pierce-Sands that switches between sensual adventure and gentle kindness, between complex moves in which Pierce-Sands’s long legs act as compasses, leading the pair from one involution to the next, and soft companionate curves, one body holding up another.

In the second revival, “For You” (2007), one audience member is seated on stage and six dancers dance directly in front of and for this single viewer, aiming their looks and their forms in his or her direction. Last time I saw this, I felt mostly embarrassed for the singled-out audience member, who is the recipient of some truly treacly smiles. This time, however, I saw how the one viewer acts as an imaginary magnifying glass for the rest of us, inviting us to experience the kaleidoscopic swirl of bodies on stage. “For You” is elegant modern dance, sweeping and athletic. Sands has a bent for the arduous in partnering, which results in risky, almost combative moves as two dancers tumble over each other, catching a few impossible balances on the way to the ground. Still, overall “For You” is strikingly humanist in its close-up view of the dance’s delicate negotiations.

The first premiere, “Likedatliciousonicdindaadaa,” is easily the hit of the night. Here, Sands dives into urban dance (club dance, popping and locking, breakdance), sliding a cute duet and two brief, shadowy solos onto the stage before finishing off with a full company freak-out. Sands has featured urban dance before, but never in quite this way. Before, he seemed to assume that his academically trained dancers could handle a little groove, when in fact they often couldn’t, resulting in a secondhand account of street dance. This time, though, it looks as if Sands and company have done their research and taken a few classes. More importantly, Sands isn’t just flinging up some flat version here; he’s investigating. Where does the snap that begins breakdance come from? he seems to ask, starting his own quick solo with a tortured agitation of his hands. I’ve never seen Sands bring his intellectual muscle to bear on this type of dance; it’s a promising new direction for him.

The second premiere, “Ash and Dust,” shows Sands in his moody, quirky, this-is-a-strange-cold-world vein—neurotic gestures, weird, splayed-out bug moves, cut-off relations between dancers, and an atmosphere of high seriousness. “Ash and Dust” is his least successful foray in this direction: its invention is dulled by an unmoving pseudo-narrative and hemmed in by the repetitive music (seemingly ripped from some Merchant-Ivory film about an unfortunate clockmaker). Sands has created beautiful, evocative work in this vein before, but “Ash and Dust” falls short—perhaps because Sands aims at a more accessible “meaning” here.

So what does this evening add up to? A lot of enjoyable dancing, but also some confusion. Sands does African-modern, cool modern, urban dance, and his own ballet-modern hybrid; he makes frontal, straight-up entertainment as well as high-concept dance artifacts. Clearly he’s excited by a lot of different things in the world, and no one would want to change that. But I’m not sure his invention, plentiful as it is, stands up to his wide range. Seeing the same distinctive move used in two completely different contexts undermines its integrity in both, and gives one the feeling that Sands isn’t going quite far enough after his inspiration. A little deeper investigation would help the company’s dancers as well. Between the high turnover at TU Dance (I count at least five dancers making their TU Dance debut this fall) and the variety of dance styles, even dancers as good as these are bound to fall flat somewhere. This time, the least convincing dance came in “Lady,” where only a few dancers could let loose enough to look as if they were genuinely dancing and not just performing steps.

Don’t get me wrong, this is an excellent company and always well worth seeing. But by setting their own bar so high, TU Dance invites the question: could they do better?
            
TU Dance performs at the Southern Theater through June 29.

Say what you will about the 1970s, but where music is concerned, it was a decade of extraordinary fermentation, with interesting musical experiments bubbling up all over the place, not the least of which was an alchemical concoction of rock and jazz called “fusion.”

These days, everything is fused to everything else, so the idea doesn’t seem quite so revolutionary. But back then, in college dormitories, coffee shops, and cultural hotspots all over the country, fusion jazz was exciting because it seemed to offer an intelligent escape route from both the three-chord monotony of rock ‘n’ roll and the meandering pointlessness of so much modern jazz. Picking up where Miles Davis left off, a couple of young jazz notables named Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke hooked up with several players before betting their band’s future an eighteen-year-old dropout from the Berklee College of Music, Al DiMeola, and a self-taught drummer named Lenny White. These four formed the core lineup of Return to Forever, a band that many thought was going to reinvent both rock ‘n’ roll and jazz at the same time, leading us all into a more sophisticated, adventurous, and respectable musical future.

Uh, didn’t happen. Like so many other promising ideas of the 1970s (free love, pop rocks, the slip ‘n’ slide), it fizzled. Instead, fusion became a kind of musical joke. On the radio, it morphed into a thousand different permutations of smooth jazz, all of which sounded the same, and the daring technical brilliance we guitar-plucking wannabes so admired came to be regarded as just a bunch of self-indulgent noodling. A few respectable bands—the Yellowjackets, Spyro Gyra, The Pat Metheny Group—kept the fire burning, but the revolution didn’t happen quite as advertised.

Yet things have changed. Since Return to Forever broke up in the early 1980s, all four members of the band went on to establish themselves as nothing short of legends on their respective instruments. It’s only remarkable in hindsight that four of our country’s most gifted musicians were able to find each other so early in their musical careers and do something so extraordinary in such a short amount of time. Which is why, when Chick Corea, Al DiMeola, Stanley Clarke, and Lenny White took the stage last night at the Orpheum, virtually everyone in the audience leapt to their feet and gave them a long, deliriously loud standing ovation. This outpouring of love repeated itself after each tune, and sometimes after solos within a tune. I stopped counting the standing O’s after thirteen or so, because my thighs were starting to cramp up.

And once the music began, it was instantly apparent that none of these guys has lost a beat—indeed, they may have gained a few. Their fingers are still limber, and combined they have an extra century’s worth of musical intelligence under their belts, so they sounded tighter and cleaner than ever. DiMeola can still spit lightning out of all six of his guitars, Stanley Clarke has clearly spent the intervening years traveling to distant galaxies for musical inspiration, Chick Corea is still a playful, brilliant little imp on keyboards, and Lenny White is simply a monstrous, tireless innovator on drums. Their records may sound a bit dated, but live, Return to Forever sounds like a group of proven musical geniuses who started a conversation a long time ago but never had the chance to finish it. Now, twenty-five years later, they have picked up the discussion and are clearly enjoying it. The surprising thing is how much they still have to say.

“We want to thank you all for sticking with us these past twenty-five years,” Lenny White told the crowd, adding “especially since we haven’t done anything.” White also had the zinger of night, telling the audience, “In an era of boy bands, this is an all man band!,” complete with fist pump. Then, of course, they went on to prove it, playing an all-electric set, one mostly acoustic set, and a couple of blistering encores.

The set list for the evening reads like the program at a Dungeons and Dragons convention: Hymn of the 7th Galaxy, Vulcan Worlds, Sorceress, Song of the Pharoah Kings, The Romantic Warrior, Duel of the Jester and Tyrant, Medieval Overture, etc. But the concert itself was a kind of transcendent time capsule, one featuring songs with familiar starting points that ended up in places no one in the audience had ever heard before, because they’ve never been played that way before, ever, and may never be played precisely that way again. To give you an idea of how much improvisational territory was covered, consider that the concert lasted more than three hours, but technically speaking the band played only ten or eleven songs. The rest was sheer musical mastery.

And sure, it was thrilling to hear many of Return to Forever’s signature riffs, with DiMeola and Corea racing each other through all sorts of myxolydian madness, and Clarke and White funkifying the groove behind them. But the highlight of the evening was, believe it or not, Stanley Clarke’s otherworldly solo on an upright bass. At times jazzy and delicate, at others angry and mournful, and still others playfully irreverent, Clarke bowed, popped, slapped, banged, tapped, strummed and cajoled his instrument through what amounted to a mini seminar on the history of bass, as well as a mind-bending glimpse at what bass players might be called upon to do in the future—if in fact it turns out that Stanley Clarke is god and not Eric Clapton.

Return to Forever’s stop in the Twin Cities was such a momentous event that it would be easy to forget it was simply the beginning concert of the 10th annual Twin Cities Jazz Festival, which runs through June 29. Many of the upcoming concerts on Peavey Plaza and in St. Paul’s Mears Park are free, so make a point of getting out there to see a show one of these fine, sunny days. Who knows—the future members of an iconic band full of geniuses may be playing their hearts out right down the street.

For a full schedule of the Twin Cities Jazz Festival, go to twincitiesjazzfestival.com.

Popular culture hasn’t always been kind in its portrayal of Star Wars fans, who are often perceived as chubby guys with glasses who live in their parents’ basement, playing scenes of Natalie Portman running in slow motion over and over. Obviously, the six-part series has a broader appeal, or it would never have amassed more than $4 billion in worldwide box office. And on Saturday morning at the Science Museum, as a family-dominated crowd armed with point-and-shoots waited in line to see Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination during its last U.S. stop, surrounded by licensed recreationists donning pitch-perfect replica costumes (there was even a Darth Vader with the ominous-sounding breathing apparatus), it became apparent that even science has been Disneyfied.

At first, it did feel more like a day at Disney World than a day at a museum. Kids with newly purchased plastic light sabers (the Science Museum didn’t miss a single merchandising opportunity with this exhibit) and shirts emblazoned with Anakin and Yoda, chased down Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker for pictures. Storm troopers posed with preschoolers (and, yes, this reporter) while parents snapped away, and everywhere you turned you heard someone humming John William’s unmistakable theme. The excitement in the lines outside the U.S. Bank Great Hall that housed the exhibit was palpable, as if the crowd was about to take a plunge on a ten-story-tall flume ride. Or even better, see a surprise screening of the yet-to-be-filmed seventh movie.

All distractions melted away as the line snaked into the hall and the crowd was met with perhaps the most impressive artifact from the sci-fi films, the actual landspeeder that zooms Luke across the opening scenes of the first film. After that, it was true Hollywood magic. There were costumes—Hans Solo, a giant Chewbacca, post-apocalyptic Tusken Raiders—and dozens of miniature scale models, including Imperial Star Destroyers from the first films and the armored tanks in the epic Episode I battles. There was a C3PO that had been stripped of his gold façade to expose the thousands of wires underneath, and a Yoda puppet sat next to the Jedi training remote. For fans, it was as close to these six movies as they’re ever going to get.

But amidst the props and models safely shielded by walls of Plexiglas there was also a kind of magic Hollywood can never replicate. Staying true to the SMM’s mission to help spread scientific knowledge, twenty interactive components kept the smallest visitors in disarming awe. While their parents snapped picture after picture of Obi-Wan’s robes, kids were at the magnetic propulsion lab gasping as the Lego carts they created, which zoomed across a table powered by nothing but the force created by opposing magnetic poles. They sat wide-eyed in front of a screen, watching as the buttons they pushed controlled the emotions of the animated face before them. They struggled to make a real life robot walk across a platform, a task the Imperial All-Terrain Transports from Episode V made look so easy. On a Saturday morning, among all the shiny souvenirs and flashes coming from their parents’ cameras, they learned a little something.

And as they left, they could still have their picture taken in front of a green screen and pasted onto Anakin’s body—a souvenir that will surely be used to embarrass them years in the future.

Now, that’s magic.

Star Wars runs through August 24 at the Science Museum of Minnesota.

The first two things everyone wants to know about Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience, the $26 million stage version of the popular BBC television series, are: How realistic do the dinosaurs look? And how big are they, really?

Well, I’m here to tell you that the dinosaurs are really, really big, and they look remarkably real. In fact, some of them are huge. Ginormous, even. Thank god these beasts are extinct, because if they weren’t we’d have to rethink the whole beauty of nature thing, not to mention the camping policies in our national parks. The tallest one, an adult Brachiosaurus, takes up half the floor and its head almost touches the lighting grid. The Stegosaurus is the size of a garbage truck, and the Torosauruses make your average rhinoceros look like a beanie baby.

Back in 1999, when the television series began, it was hailed as the most realistic depiction of dinosaur life ever created, with computer-generated dinosaurs hunting and eating each other in graphically glorious detail. The stage version is basically a 3D TV show, complete with a paleontologist narrator who acts as the audience’s guide through three distinct periods in dinosaur history. It’s created by the BBC, so there’s an educational component, but the thing isn’t so loaded down with knowledge that kids won’t have fun. Think of it more as a circus with footnotes.

Of course, what kids love best about the TV series is that it shows dinosaurs killing each other and ripping each other’s guts out. There is a smidgen of obligatory intestine in the stage show, and a band of raptors do a little carcass munching, but that’s about it for the gore. Mostly what we see is two or more dinosaurs lumbering around, threatening to fight each other, and occasionally roaring at the crowd.

But that’s enough, because . . . have I mentioned how big and realistic-looking these dinosaurs are? The skin texture and movement are particularly impressive. Indeed, what Walking with Dinosaurs really represents is an entirely new form of arena-based entertainment. No longer are arenas like Xcel limited to concerts, hockey, basketball, and the occasional ice capade. With a little multimedia, some professional stagecraft, and a few million dollars, it’s now possible to bring extinct creatures back to life, almost, and charge people from thirty to seventy-five bucks a head to see it. That’s pretty incredible, considering that the coolest thing in dinosaurs when I was a kid was my plastic T-Rex, which, at the time, represented eighteen inches of pure evolutionary fury.

But as impressive an achievement as Walking with Dinosaurs is, one sometimes wonders if we adults might be going overboard in our ever more miraculous attempts to amaze the kiddies—to the point where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to amaze them at all. At Walking with Dinosaurs, during the climax of the show, when the mighty T-Rex is saving its baby from the evil encroachments of a pair of angry Torosaurases, I heard the kid behind me ask his mom, “Hey, when we get home, can I watch TV?”

Truly amazing.

At the end of Kanye West’s Glow in the Dark concert at Target Center last night; after Kanye’s spaceship triumphantly returned to earth (yeah, literally); after he did all the hits and publicly eulogized his mother; after he brought out Lupe Fiasco to duet on a searing version of “Touch the Sky”; after the greatest arena rap concert that’s ever been performed; the crowd was treated to a bizarre encore: From the lip of the stage, in front of his orchestra pit, Kanye went on a stunning, nearly twenty-minute rant against the media.

He told his 10,000 fans that after witnessing what they had just witnessed, go out and read the reviews, and watch the coverage, and be skeptical of the haters. “I’m just screaming at the refs,” Kanye preached, over the last strains of the orchestra. “Why are they always pointing out my ego and talking about how ‘he’s so crazy’ instead of talking about how the crowd felt when they first heard ‘Stronger,’ instead of pointing out how you all sang along to and were uplifted by ‘The Good Life’?”

Defiant, Kanye chastised the media for not being able to understand ironic self-deprecation. “Yeah, I got an ego!” he said. “Ever since my momma died, I decided I’m not going to hide my greatness anymore. I am the best. I am Michael Jordan.” He then put the world on notice that he will not be deterred from achieving the stature of Greatest of All Time. “Watch out, Madonna. Watch out, Elvis. Watch out, Tupac. Watch out, U2. Watch out, Radiohead.” 

He didn’t play another song. But nobody left. Everybody stood there, paralyzed, and listened to what he had to say. Then the lights went up. Kanye was gone.

It was the 9/11 of encores.

People were bewildered. Filing out, looking at each other, confused, trying to somehow shape it into at least the first stages of articulation: What did we just see?

Well, that’s what the media is here for, kids. And I’m no hater—I’m going to tell you what we all saw, objectively, to the best of my abilities:

We just saw a Great American.

This was the last stop of the Glow in the Dark Tour in America, and now Kanye’s headed to Europe. His message will resonate there too, because it is a quintessentially American one that works everywhere in the Western world. It is the message of the heroic individual’s pursuit of freedom, couched in Judeo-Christian terminology. It can be penitent, but it’s always resolute. As Kanye put it: “Wait ‘til I get my money right/Then you can’t tell me nothin’, right?”

Kanye’s first song, “Good Morning,” acknowledged the responsibility that comes with martyring yourself to commercial success. After Lupe and N.E.R.D. and Rihanna had opened up, playing on the front eighth of the stage in front of a gigantic black curtain, after forty-five minutes of setting up, the building went dark. A huge, fifteen-foot-by-twenty-foot computer monitor went on and a feminized robot voice prodded, “Wake Up, Mr. West.” Kanye was lying on the keyboard, curled up in the fetal position on the corner of a huge laptop computer, sitting in a fogged-out moonscape. He shook off grogginess, stood up in his sci-fi Kanye Bespin battle gear, and as morning broke on a gigantic screen behind him, he rapped about his mission.

Good morning, look at the valedictorian
Scared of the future while I hop in the DeLorean
Scared to face the world, complacent career student
Some people graduate, but we still stupid
They tell you read this, eat this, don’t look around
Just peep this, preach us, teach us, Jesus
Okay, look up now, they done stole your streetness
After all of that, you receive this

I’m serious about this (even if Kanye is only half-serious). Yes, Kanye has a painfully obvious Christ complex and he’s fixated on brand names. But why should that disqualify him from being a great American? Yes, his message is sometimes conflicted for a pop star’s: In some songs, he actually scourges himself and others for pursuing soulless commercialism, and on others he raps, “I’m like the fly Malcolm X/buy any jeans necessary.” But his College Dropout/Late Registration/Graduation album cycle, which he performed seemingly in its entirety last night, can’t be parsed as easily as he "hates authority and loves designer jeans but he’s actually guilty about it because he’s a Christian.”   

The crowd last night was at least eighty percent white, and probably mostly between eighteen and twenty-five. This particular generation and class has never been more down with the message of hip-hop--self-improvement, both artistically and materially—hell, even morally—through commercial success. They sang along to every word of “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” a song about earning enough money to become completely independent and asserting your individuality.

That’s the American dream, right? They waved their hands up in the sky during “The Good Life,” which is about overcoming adversity, overcoming the haters, and getting on TV. Just like most Hollywood movies or American literature, Kanye’s message is about aspiration, it’s ambitious. It’s a fresher “Yes, We Can!” with an even stronger broadside against the conformity machine. Yes, there are moments of self-doubt and spiritual recrimination along the hero’s way—but those moments are to be overcome too.

This is how much of a great American Kanye West is: On his first album, he rapped about wanting to fly away from his job at the Gap on a spaceship.

And now he has one.    

Oscar Wilde is one of most famous homosexuals in history, so it sometimes surprises people when they learn that Wilde had a wife named Constance and two children. Divorced before Wilde reached the pinnacle of his fame, Constance is one of history’s forgotten women: a spirited, intelligent person in her own right, but one doomed to live in the shadow of Wilde’s legacy, as well as endure the humiliating consequences of his homosexual passions.

Thomas Kilroy’s play, The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, now playing on the Guthrie’s Proscenium Stage, is a moody, serious, artful exploration of the dark side of Wilde’s life, told through the unsympathetic eyes of the wife whose life he all but destroyed. The stage is all soot and brick, with black, spiraling staircases that suggest DNA, implying that the Wilde’s ordeal was, among other things, a tragedy of genetics. The accompanying music is a piano and a mournful cello, and the action is buffeted by four puppeteers dressed in black who act as swirling agents of fate, helping the action along and providing several moments of theatrical grace and beauty.

Since Wilde is also one of the most flamboyant characters in history, it’s hard to imagine how a female character could out-dramatize him, but Sarah Agnew invests Constance with so much vitality and common sense that she makes Matthew Greer’s Oscar look like a bit of a buffoon. Her tongue is much sharper than Wilde’s, and carries more sting, a contrast that makes his witticisms seem frivolous and inappropriate, like a child arguing with an adult.

For the most part, the play explores the love triangle between Constance, Oscar, and Oscar’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, played with gay abandon by Brandon Weinbrenner. But it also dares to descend into the period of Oscar Wilde’s life no one likes to talk about—his two-year imprisonment for lewd behavior. Wilde’s life isn’t so funny when he’s being beaten and scrubbed by prison guards, or when Constance is auctioning off their belongings to avoid going bankrupt. Wilde may be the one behind bars, but she’s imprisoned too—by heartbreak, motherhood, and the humiliation of being forever associated with one of the nineteenth-century’s most notorious homosexuals. Talk about social suicide.

Constance and Oscar do love each other, though, and Constance’s ability to rise above her anger to support and befriend Oscar gives their love a dimension of dignity that it would otherwise lack. “Life with Oscar was theater, a different performance every night,” says Constance, so telling their life story in a theatrical way, with the children played by puppets and a chorus of sprites constantly whirling around in the background makes both literal and metaphorical sense. Wilde’s children are puppets in the sense that he pulls the strings of their lives, and they are voiceless because, really, they have no say in the matter.

The play takes several deep dives into Constance’s psychology too, but the “secret” behind her secret fall is a bit anticlimactic after all the turmoil of Oscar’s betrayals and dalliances. Still, The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde is a fascinating exploration of one of the literary world’s most curious love triangles, a play that uses art to peel away the layers of truth hiding beneath the surface of mere historical fact.

The Secret of Constance Wilde continues at The Guthrie through July 11.

A few years ago, local documentary doyenne Melody Gilbert made a film called Whole that unearthed one of the oddest of all subcultures—able-bodied folks who wanted to be amputees. The oxymoronic title telegraphed their dicey predicament. Only by cutting off or otherwise disabling one of their own limbs could they truly feel complete.

Gilbert’s film was a no-frills exploration of a clinically recognized disorder and her subjects an otherwise unremarkable group who happened to draw a crappy number in the genetic lottery. Their bizarre predilection didn’t seem nearly so grotesque when it was explained in the familiar psychological lexicon of gender identity and body dysmorphic issues. If anything, Gilbert’s integrity as a journalist (and the constraints of her budget) made for an unexpectedly respectful, restrained film. The subject screamed for a hyperstylized Errol Morris treatment.

I shouldn’t be surprised then that a young screenwriter has now done for body integrity identity disorder what David Cronenberg did for the kinky car crash fetishists of Crash —made something inherently weird and dramatic into a muddled bore. Writer/director Carlos Brooks uses wannabe paraplegics as the dramatic hook (or at least the marketing peg) of his debut feature Quid Pro Quo. It’s a confused little movie that’s part thriller, part co-dependent romance, and part simple-minded riff on the search for authenticity and self-love—but not nearly enough of a comic romp to be enjoyed as cult trash.

Our wheelchair-bound protagonist (Nick Stahl) is a public radio reporter named Isaac Knot (say that fast several times) paralyzed from a childhood car accident that the movie flashes back to several times to let us know that it’s I-M-P-O-R-T-A-N-T. Following up on a story lead about a wannabe amputee, Isaac meets able-bodied restoration artist Fiona (Vera Farmiga) who wastes no time in stripping to a bustier and leg braces and letting Isaac know that she wants to be just like him. As in…confined to a chair. A quickie romance ensues as Fiona moves out of the closet with her obsession and into a wheelchair, and Isaac buys a pair of shoes that seem to magically cure his paralysis.

The mutually beneficial deal winked at by the title will spoil this happy coupling and reveal the magic shoes for what they really are. It will also confirm why Brooks has styled and lit every scene like it was a forties noir. Confirm, I said, not excuse.

There is a considerable disconnect between the script’s facile preoccupation with identity (“normal is a setting on a washing machine”) and its detective fiction guise. Neither feels true. Nor does Isaac’s instant attraction to Fiona whose wild-eyed vamping doesn’t exactly disguise the cauldron of mental health issues bubbling beneath the surface.

The most enjoyable part of last night’s Walker Art Center sneak preview was the discussion afterwards with producer Sarah Pillsbury whose eighties and nineties film credits are formidable (Desperately Seeking Susan, River’s Edge, Eight Men Out, And the Band Played On) but probably not as familiar as her Minnesota milling dynasty. The Minnesota-raised daughter of former Republican state senator George Pillsbury lives mostly in California and is a liberal philanthropist/activist for social justice and voter participation issues. Quid Pro Quo, which premiered at Sundance, is her return to feature film producing after a seven-year hiatus.

Wearing a “Vote November 4th” T-shirt and removing her sandals for the audience Q&A, Pillsbury acknowledged the film’s niche appeal (“I think we’ll offend people”) and her disappointment with the very limited theatrical release planned by Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures: “Right now it’s probably the most limited release plan of any movie I’ve been involved in.”

Oh, but there’s always DVD. And for this film, she confirmed, an excerpt from Whole will be one of the DVD extras. Gilbert’s documentary may be the necessary salve to cut Quid Pro Quo’s uniquely alienating brand of weirdness. Against the much more nuanced true story, Brooks’ dull detective story will be exposed for the phony that it is.

“Is your line moving yet?” It was after 7 p.m. and my buddy Mark was texting me from further back in the line—he was on Kellogg and Wabasha. I was across the street from the James J. Hill library, and had been standing here since 5:30  p.m. ever since I budged in line with my friend Bridget. It was a very arugula-and-white-wine section of the line. Lots of white people with nice glasses. Very MPR. And as lines go, this one went down the block and out of sight.

In the hour and a half I’d been stuck in front of the library, about three million Obama T-shirt and button vendors had passed by. Both Obama-on-the-cover-of-Time T-shirts were available (the “And the Winner Is*” and “The Candidate”), and one with Michelle and his two kids, and the one with the ‘08 on the back. All going for “half-off!”

Now it was 8 p.m. There was a helicopter overhead. More texting. This time from Melissa: “Listening to McCain right now. Wow, such an uninspiring old man.” And another: “CNN just projected Obama is the nominee.” Others in the group were getting texts too. “Another group of superdelegates just went for Obama,” another guy named Steve said.

The line began to move and a whoop went up. We marched a few hundred feet into Rice Park. More T-shirt vendors. More button hawkers. Some had little carts. Some had stands. The line lurched forward again, crawling along the outside of the Landmark Center.

As we got to the Xcel Center plaza, there was yet another wave of T-shirt vendors. Hundreds of umbrellas were stashed in the bushes and hanging from trees. Garbage cans overflowed and abandoned tailgating chairs littered the sidewalk. More helicopters, dipping lower, trying to get a good shot for the news. This was a big game.

Now there were more T-shirt vendors, with carts spaced every few feet. And young people with volunteer laminates shouting, “Stay in this line and turn ON your electronic devices!” There were a few protesters with anti-war banners across Wabasha, which was blocked off and empty. Then there was a big fire truck and, finally, lines forming for the security check. One last T-shirt vendor before security: “If you’ve made it this far without buying a T-shirt, I admire you.”

Then we were sucked through. It was 8:30 p.m. Up to the club level to find seats we went, and found eight good ones along the back ledge. The place was only half full, but it was impossible to tell how many it could hold. There was no sheet of ice. No gigantic stage set up. Just a little stage with one microphone and two teleprompters on the blue line at the west end of the arena. There was a big riser with what must have been a hundred cameramen and that MSNBC correspondent lady (later I heard that local-boy-made-NYT Thomas Friedman was down there too, getting the rock star treatment). Behind the riser were twelve or so long tables set up for writers with laptops spaced every few feet.

But the crowd was watching themselves on the scoreboard. Concessions were open. Nachos! Hot dogs. Soda pop. Standing in line, another text, this one from a friend in Connecticut: “Hills is speaking now…doesn’t sound like a concession.”

They were pumping “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now.” Then U2’s “City of Lights.” Then Aretha. Then Springsteen. Then James Brown. Then, the scoreboard started showing an Obama speech. It felt like the eighth inning, before the big rally at the Dome, when they play the Bluto from Animal House video. “Over? Did you say ‘over’? Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?” It was the highlights from Obama’s famous “Blue State/Red State” speech. Footage of Obama surrounded by children. The crowd roared.

“We’re in.” Text from my buddy Mark again.

I looked around my section. Two Somalian chicks with shiny silk headscarves. A white couple in what looked like brand new North Face rain jackets. A big black woman with her weave held in a yellow scrunchie. Had to think about it: Who would this arena hold for the Republicans in September? Probably a much different crowd.

At 9 p.m., Joann Syverson got onstage. “Who?” somebody in my group asked. Not Ellison. Not Franken. Not a big Dem hotshot. Joann addressed the crowd. “I’m proud to be a Democrat.” Huge cheer. She went on to talk about her son in Iraq. Talked about how she was a convert from Republicanism. The arena was as full as it was going to get. There were still some half full sections on the east end. But evidently, according to the news reports later, this was 18,000 people.

Now Joann was introducing Michelle. Huge roar. Her intro for Barack was drowned out by the crowd noise. The PA started cranking U2’s “Beautiful Day” while the lyrics were closed captioned on the scoreboard. (Something about Bedouin fields? Weird.) You could spot Michelle down there first. She was dressed in purple! Viking purple! Prince purple! Nice touch. Barack and Michelle were standing arm in arm. He was wearing one of those powder-blue ties with that suit cut like a rat packer—just casual enough, just dressed up enough. He didn’t do that youthful pop pop pop step up the riser this time. He was moving more slowly, consciously gliding up the steps arm in arm with Michelle. Presidential.

Then he was alone on the small riser. The five women I was with were already crying. “Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.” Now everybody was crying. Men. Women. You’ve seen the speech on TV. Here's a link to the whole thing.

He started by talking about his white grandmother in Hawaii, who couldn’t be there because she doesn’t travel. (He didn’t actually say “white grandmother,” but we got it.) He thanked every American that helped in the primary from the "snows of Cedar Rapids to the sunshine of Sioux Falls.” He was gracious towards Hillary. Really gracious towards Hillary. Called her run historic, later pointed out that “fiscal responsibility and shared prosperity can go hand in hand, just like in the Clinton years.”

He teased McCain with a nice bit of rhetoric: “So I'll say this:  There are many words to describe John McCain's attempt to pass off his embrace of George Bush's policies as bipartisan and new. But ‘change’ isn’t one of them.” 

He hit his policy points like beatitudes. Feed the hungry. Care for the sick. End the war. Clean the air. The biggest roar from the crowd was for his education platform. “To finally decide that in this global economy, the chance to get a college education should not be a privilege for the wealthy few, but the birthright of every American.”

Then, namechecking. Roosevelt. Truman. Kennedy. Philadelphia. Gettysburg. Greatest Generation. Selma Bridge. Glass ceiling. His voice started to gather holy steam. “America, this is our time.” Now he was really preaching, surfing the melisma at the top of his voice: “this was the moment when the riiiiise of the oceans began to slowwww and our planet began to healllll!”

Then somebody punched a button for Springsteen’s “The Rising.” (Obama’s ground team has earned their reputation and won this primary because they know what they’re doing. This was St. Paul, Springsteen and U2 were good moves.) Michelle came back up in that pretty purple belted dress. The two of them waved at us.

He’s good. 

One last text: “Great speech!”