I don’t know why Broadway has become a dumping ground for American Idol contenders. The show (which I love, by the way) is supposed to be a search for the next great American pop star. A Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears—not a Bernadette Peters. So whenever I see that Clay Aiken is starring in Spamalot, or Fantasia is in The Color Purple, or half the cast of Rent is made up of AI rejects, I can’t help but feel bad that Broadway has had to turn to these pop-culture footnotes in order to sell tickets. Last night, American Idol season-five winner Taylor Hicks was absent from his usual role as Teen Angel in the touring production of Grease (it seems he had previous New Year’s plans and will only grace the Orpheum for the Jan. 2-4 performances).

He wasn’t missed.

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Artist's books defy easy categorization. They are works of art in book or book-like form, or, in some cases, art that simply incorporates books but would be difficult to, say, read. The Walker pays homage to this enigma with " Text/Messages: Books by Artists," a new show that draws from the center's sizeable collection of artist's books. 

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The way time marches on these days, it's easy to forget that not long ago it was neither safe nor wise to venture south of Seventh St. on Hennepin Ave. downtown. Those who did quickly found themselves accosted by a small army of drunks and drifters, people who were either unable to afford or simply unwelcome in the sweaty assortment of bars and strip clubs that lined the avenue.  It was a hellhole, in short--a miserable, godforsaken stretch of cityscape that deserved to die. And though I'm sure there are people who bemoan the lack of grit and grime in the area now, on Friday night it was difficult not to reflect on how far all those city council battles of yore have brought our humble, once-degenerate downtown. 

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TiVo has excised commercials from my life, and most of the year I feel pretty smug about that.

One of the many gifts of my god-sent DVR is making commercially interrupted programming instantly commercial free. I can shrink 60 Minutes to forty by sending the Cialis ads and Lipitor pitches into a fast-forwarded blur. The hours I've saved juicing the system--it's impressive.

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There's always something "let's put on a show!" about the Ballet of the Dolls. This can be charming (as I'll explain in a moment), but if you're not in the mood--if you've come in grumpy and would just like your entertainment straight up--please, then you're apt to be painfully aware of the mere humanness of it all. More so because the Dolls traffic in Broadway-esque productions--they tell stories through Myron Johnson's flashy, stylized, musically bound, and mostly familiar choreography; through the performers' dance-acting, and through their homemade costumes. Real Broadway, with the advantage of great heaps of capital, doesn't require much of the audience, just that they sit there with their eyes open while the great entertainment steamroller flattens them--so how can the Dolls compete? 

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If you think Wall Street is awash in blood, you should've seen First Avenue last night. At 7 p.m, a healthy hour and a half before Oasis was set to go on, my buddy scalped a pair of tickets in the fourth row--$68 face value--for thirty bucks apiece. Thirty bucks. Fourth row. Floor. Zero negotiation. That was the scalper's IPO.

It was a massacre out there.

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In the pantheon of living guitar legends, Larry Coryell ranks right up there with the best of them, even though his name has less marquee value than many of the musicians he has spent his career playing with--e.g., John McLaughlin, Miles Davis, Al DiMeola, Chick Corea, Stephane Grappelli,  Jaco Pastorius, Charles Mingus, and Dizzy Gillespie. Coryell stopped by the Artist's Quarter in St. Paul on Saturday night to play a couple of sets (a rare occasion in these parts), and was greeted by a roomful of faithful followers eager to sit, if only for a few moments, at the master's feet. 

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Florence Foster Jenkins was the Andy Kaufman of her day--a singer so awful that she became a joke unto herself, a laughingstock. The difference is that Kaufman knew what he was doing; it was the audience that wasn't quite sure. Jenkins, on the other hand, deluded herself into thinking she was one of the world's greatest sopranos, even though it was plain to everyone within earshot that her sense of pitch and rhythm was abysmal, and her claim to greatness a hilariously over-the-top conceit, like Louie Anderson claiming to be the fastest sprinter in the world. 

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