Slipknot kicked off its 2009 All Hope is Gone Tour at the Xcel Energy Center on Friday night, with lead singer Corey Taylor promising to “lay waste to the entire United States of America” during the band’s thirty-four-city romp across the country over the next two months. 

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I’ve come to the regrettable conclusion that many of the great family-dysfunction plays of the twentieth century (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Tennessee Williams), A Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Eugene O’Neill), Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller), to name a few) are becoming obsolete. Or at the very least their anachronisms are starting to look like charming artifacts of another era, like women’s corsets and men who go to war because it’s the right thing to do. 

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It’s hard to think of Angus Young as a guitar god. The ridiculous schoolboy outfit. The onstage theatrics and stripteases. These are the kinds of antics usually employed by guys who are trying to cover their less-than-stellar chops (the boys from KISS and Slipknot come to mind). And maybe you don’t consider Young to be up there with Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, or Stevie Ray Vaughan. Rolling Stone sure doesn’t. In the magazine’s 2003 list of 100 greatest guitar players, Hendrix, Clapton, and Vaughan made the top ten.

Young was number ninety-six.

But what do editors know?  In 2004, Guitar World polled it's readers for fan favorites, and Angus and brother Malcolm (apparently, they come in a pair) ranked number three. The people had spoken: they love AC/DC, and it was never more apparent than at the Xcel last night.



It was the second of AC/DC’s sold-out stops in St. Paul as part of their Black Ice tour. I wasn’t at the first show, but the guy next to me was, and he said little had changed. AC/DC doesn’t put on a concert for their fans; they throw a party. For this celebration, a fire-spitting train crashed onto the stage to open the concert with “Rock ‘n Roll Train,” they lit up the arena with pyrotechnics during “TNT,” a giant blow-up doll named Rosie came out to tap her foot (really) to her signature song before disappearing backstage, and a giant bell descended from the ceiling just so lead singer Brian Johnson could swing on it to start off “Hell’s Bells.” Every song had some sort of theatrical element—whether it was a graphic cartoon playing in the background or crotch-shots of Angus doing his famous hop. AC/DC knows you’ve heard the songs before, so they throw in a little extra for your $100-plus seat.

But the most amazing ten minutes of the night came during Angus’s-the people’s guitar god—solo at the end of “Let There Be Rock.” Because once Angus took center stage—then a platform above the stage, then the catwalk and a platform in the middle of the arena that rose to ten feet, back to the middle of the stage, back to the catwalk—the fifty-three year old ran up and down the stage, playing the entire time, never missing a note. The crowd went crazy, and Angus loved every second of it. He had shed his shirt and jacket, leaving only his small schoolboy shorts, his long, sweat-drenched hair, his guitar, and 13,000 screaming fans. If he thought the crowd was getting bored, he would play one-handed for a while—while running, hopping, goading the crowd. It was the last song before the encore, and even without “Highway to Hell” and “For Those About to Rock” (my only disappointment of the night, no “Who Made Who”), the crowd would have left happy. AC/DC had put on an amazing show, with Angus at the center.

Sometimes the people are right.

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Some of my best moviegoing experiences have been had in some of the most unhygienic theaters. The places that seem to take movies most seriously often have grubby floors, ticky-tacky construction, and undernourished ticket-tearers, and I happen to have no problem with filth (or famine) in the name of cinephilia, so I happily suffer. You might not be so inclined.
 
But let’s agree on this: Where we see a movie inevitably shapes our experience of that film. And when a movie plays in the Walker Art Center Cinema, it comes with helpful baggage that the lovable, fleabag arthouse cinema is increasingly unwilling or unable to provide. Beyond superior technical presentation, unobstructed sightlines, and spitspot floors, what you’re really getting is assurance that the film has a place in the cinematic canon or at least something very interesting (and periodically aggravating) to say. With a glut of good films competing for theater space and your dollars, the Walker imprint provides a critical sieve.

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Freedom is one of America’s core ideas—but freedom itself is a slippery concept. For the Puritans, freedom from an oppressive king and onerous taxes did not mean freedom from hardship, hunger, or violence. Much of America’s immigrant population traded freedom from war and various forms of injustice for grueling factory and field work in squalid, subhuman conditions. And even today, while most Americans would say they are technically “free,” they are nevertheless slaves to their jobs, mortgages, responsibilities, and various needs, wants, and desires, few of which can ever be fully satisfied for long. 

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When you think about it, the library is the ideal place for an art gallery. It draws people from all walks of life. There’s an energy and vitality that many a gallery would envy. And the Minneapolis Central Library’s Cesar Pelli-designed building is a work of art in itself. Not surprising, then, that a show like 32x4, with its focus on community and shared history, fits in well.

The name of the exhibit refers to the four photographers—Michael Dvorak, Dusty Hoskovec, Sarah Stacke, and Xavier Tavera—commissioned to photograph thirty-two Twin Cities neighborhoods. Some of the neighborhoods are familiar, others not so much. Yet odds are you’ve driven through many of them at some point, even if they didn’t register as distinct neighborhoods.

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As far as local nouveau-Puritanism entertainment goes, it’s hard to beat Jim Walsh’s songwriter showcase, The Hootenanny. A bunch of singer-songwriters line up on a coffeehouse stage (this season, The Beat Coffeehouse in Uptown), each seated with an acoustic guitar slung around their necks, the shiny blond instruments resting on their laps. In between songs, the musicians banter about the three Rs: reality, relationships, and writing. The hoots start at 6:30, and the wholesome environment encourages people to bring along their kids—the little people sit and color in their coloring books while the adults pay attention to what’s going on onstage. It’s like church.

So I say nouveau-Puritanism because this is entertainment filled with content that most people would consider to be good for you. A stage full of smart singer-songwriters singing sensitive, somewhat-literary songs, wherein they consider, either directly or obliquely, their own existence, in turn provoking the audience to (hopefully) consider their own. Plus, there’s not a lot of swearing. And last night, Jim was trying something new—he’d invited a couple local poets to read, alternating performances with the musicians.

Jim knew I was holding a poetry reading myself this weekend, so he dropped me a line yesterday afternoon inviting me up to read a John Berryman poem  and talk about the little reading we were holding Friday night. Onstage, Dan Wilson was sitting right next to me, and I remembered that Dan’s older brother Matt, who was an English major at Harvard, had written a song about Berryman’s suicide for Trip Shakespeare, “Washington Bridge.” Dan (who was an art major at Harvard himself), remembered it, and he played a snippet:

Red metal archway, the Washington Bridge,
Made rings in the water.
Rings in the water underneath a white sky
Made a cuckold a widow

He stopped. “Dark,” Dan said, as if it was just occurring to him.  

I had to split the hoot early to get to the Walker event I’m about to review (any minute now) and, luckily for me, an old friend was leaving at the same time—her friend's ten-year-old daughter was getting a little squirrelly with all the breaks for poetry.

On the car ride down the hill to the Walker, she complained about the hoot’s tone. “There just wasn’t that much HOOTENANNY to tonight’s hoot, with everybody up there talking about all that intellectual stuff.” She turned left on Vineland Place. “Especially if people are bringing their kids.”

She dropped me off at the door, and I ran up the stairs to the McGuire Theater, where a bunch of New York theater types calling themselves The National Theater of the United States of America had come to town to throw their own nouveau-Puritan program of entertainment, except instead of a Hootenanny, they were calling theirs a Chautauqua(!).

 At the beginning of the performance, walking out to a fanfare played by a brass band, a tall, slender dude in a white suit (think Mark Twain) was led to a podium decorated with cornstalks and threshed wheat. Summertime sound effects were pumped in—crickets and the low hum of flying insects, etc. Through thin, nearly pursed lips, Mr. Richard “Dick” Pricey, introduced himself in language befitting his period suit.   

He went on to explain that this Chautauqua was inspired by a late nineteenth -century lecture series that began on the shores of Lake Chautauqua in New York. By including artists, scientists, local historians, and other sober-ish thinkers on the bill, a Chautauqua tried to distinguish itself from the more popular big-tent Evangelical revivals of the same era. A projection screen was lowered, and Pricey flipped through some slides, outlining the program that us yokels would be exposed to—some local history, some singing, lectures on cartography and high vs. low culture, a selection of folk, modern, and po-mo dance, and a finale cryptically referred to as “Bright Lights.”

Now seems like the time to introduce a slide of my own. Actually, I'm borrowing it from a friend, local brain Dessa Darling. Dessa has devised a Venn diagram wherein she considers the potential points where art, entertainment and interesting subject matter intersect in order to engage an audience:





 

A = Interesting
B = Entertaining
C = Artful
A U B (all of A and all of B) = Engaging





                           Engaging                   

Well, last night’s Chautauqua! was all over Dessa’s map.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

From Aristotle to Ms. Darling, writers, philosophers and artists have theorized about whether to be, or not to be, entertaining, interesting, or artistic regarding the end goal of moving an audience. (Although where you should move them—to contemplation, action, tears, or just through the ticket line—has been just as heavily discussed.) Last night, this all-over-the-mapness was exactly the point. To their credit, the NTUSA—true avant garde New Yorkers—were intent on seeing how far they could take it in every direction.

Early on, Pricey brought Walker archivist Jill Vuchevich to the podium to talk about T.B. Walker, the 1920s lumber baron who founded the art center in which the Chautauqua was taking place. She droned through a seven-minute lecture as if she was reading it right off Wikipedia—so not really entertaining, but definitely interesting.

Later, when a pastiche of a modern ballet recital culminated in a pas de deux between a local roller derby team and a local women’s hockey team, all set to “Crazy on You” by Heart—definitely entertaining, and definitely interesting, but maybe not artful (their number was set to Heart). 

As the ringmaster of the show, the actor portraying Dick Pricey covered the most ground. When he was explaining the evolution of art from the Enlightenment through the Industrial Revolution to the Hyper-Consumerist era of today, he was interesting. When he was singing funny little country duets with another character, or running back to the podium sucking wind after leading a masked faux-Cossak dance, he was entertaining. But when he closed his prim mouth and stammered, or in the finale, when he anxiously stripped his clothes off and braved the-road-to-Wellville full-frontally, his uptight, intellectually haughty character seemed to be getting close to conveying the deep reservoir of intense embarrassment that comes along with entertaining a mob. This is the territory I wish he, and the entire troupe really, would’ve explored more deeply. That intersection of real human emotion through experience, together with the overarching theory of the show—that’s closest to where art's amorphous form resides. As it was, most of the time Pricey was just a goofy dude in a Mark Twain suit running through some critical artistic theory like a frosh who had just gotten a hold of Adorno’s Culture Industry for the first time. I mean, sure, you have to love the fact that he was asking, that he was pushing it—the fact that he wasn't at home playing Xbox 360 in the middle of a cloud of meth. But if you were a paying customer last night, you most likely went away thinking: entertaining, yes, and interesting, at times, but maybe not quite artful.

Now, in his new book of essays, Michael Chabon says, “I’d like to believe that…I write to entertain, period.” He says that the human brain is an “organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth, and over a wide spectrum.” But after years of having video games, and movies based on video games, and reality TV, and game shows and if-it-bleeds-it-leads news programs, and parodies of said programs, all foisted on us under the broad label of “entertainment,” well, no doubt "entertainment" has become something of a dirty word, or at least something of a vacuous word.

Last night, both Jim Walsh with his Hootenanny and the NTUSA with their Chautauqua demonstrated that they are trying to change the game—that entertainment can be good for you (we can save the question of whether that’s as noble of a goal as it sounds for another review). As Chabon writes, “We have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.”

Chautauqua continues at the Walker Art Center through Jan. 10, walkerartcenter.org

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Richard Nixon’s admission, in the legendary 1977 television interview with David Frost, that he “let the American people down,” may be the last time a U.S. president has looked into a TV camera and told the unvarnished truth. There are currently three different ways to experience this particularly poignant moment in American history: In the Ron Howard film Frost/Nixon now playing at not nearly enough cineplexes in town; in the DVD version of the original interviews (which has somehow distilled four hours of programming down to eighty-eight minutes); and in Peter Morgan’s play Frost/Nixon, running through the weekend at the State Theatre and upon which Ron Howard’s film is based. 

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