Excuse me while I take a Jim Walsh, romantic-rock-historian moment.

I was actually nervous for this interview. That doesn't happen much anymore (unless she's really hot) but this time, nostalgia was working against me. You can tell there's something weird going on—my mouth is hanging open for the first half of the video. And I'm not a mouth breather. (I swear.)

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Minnesota has lost one of its most venerable cultural treasures—author Bill Holm died Wednesday, at 65, in hospital in Souix Falls.

For decades, Holm—a poet, essayist, memoirist, musician, and all-around renaissance thinker on all things Minnesota—has been writing wry, tender, lyrical odes to the small things that make life worth living, and the large things that unite us all. He was a true spirit in an era that tends to sap that sort of thing out of a man. All of us who knew him will miss his robust sense of humor and genuine love for the written word.

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Every once in a while you come across a musician who seems to have absorbed the collective knowledge of their instrument and, in relatively short order, built on that knowledge to expand the boundaries of what’s possible on their chosen instrument. In the small but vibrant world of fingerstyle acoustic guitar, the arc of innovators starts with Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, and Reverand Gary Davis, goes up through John Fahey,  Leo Kottke, and John Renbourn, and branches out from there to legions of great players—Chris Proctor, Preston Reed, Stephan Grossman, John Renbourn, Peppino D’Agostino, Duck Baker, Michael Hedges, and our own Billy McLaughlin, Phil Heywood, Tim Sparks, Dean Magraw, and Pat Donahue among them—who, along with hundreds of amazing players you’ve never heard of, are doing things with the acoustic guitar that were once unimaginable.

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I’ve always liked Samuel Beckett, but I’ve never seen him in person. Last night, at The Guthrie’s premiere of Happy Days, I finally did. Along with Krapp’s Last Tape and Waiting for Godot, Happy Days is another one of Beckett’s masterpieces of the absurd. The staging is as pomo as it gets: a seven-foot-high berm of sandy dirt rises from the Dowling Theater’s stage, and on top of the mound, Beckett’s heroine, Winnie, is buried “up to her bosom” (it looks like Jonah was jammed halfway down the whale’s blowhole rather than trapped in its mouth). Winnie is literally beached, with only a flimsy peach-colored nightie and a parasol to protect her from an overbearing sun. She rambles through a two-hour monologue, ostensibly addressing a husband living in a cave behind the berm. Willie, her husband, is a man who rarely speaks to her—he grunts a couple times, blows his nose once, interjects with two or three observations on his newspaper, and answers one of her questions in the affirmative. So Willie rarely speaks to Winnie, and he never touches her. Winnie’s only other accompaniment is a seemingly bottomless purse.

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If you’ve been following the dust-up over artist Shepard Fairey, you know that: a) the Associated Press is upset that Fairey didn’t ask permission to use a photo of Barack Obama taken by an AP photographer to create his now iconic “Hope” poster; b) Fairey sued AP over the matter before AP had a chance to sue him, and c) Fairey is now the most famous artist in the country. 

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If Thursday night’s program by the Minnesota Orchestra’s new artistic director of jazz, Irvin Mayfield, is any indication, we are in for some flights of stellar musicianship and a wee bit of frustration. The musicianship is a lock, since Mayfield is one of the finest jazz trumpet players in the country, and all his friends are among the best on their respective instruments. He hangs with a crowd that can play. The frustration has to do with the unruly acoustics of Orchestra Hall, which are ideal for the orchestra itself, but tend to get boomy and mushy as soon as anyone plugs in an amplifier. 

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There’s something lonely about the way we watch movies these days, with everyone bunkering at home in front of their recession-discounted HDTVs. Gimmicks like Blu-Ray My Chat are bringing social networking to the housebound movie nut, but as a portal to deconstruct that heady masterpiece The Bourne Ultimatum? Really now, I think we need to get out more.
 
Here’s something worthy of a trip: live director commentaries. Watch the movie with its director in a proper movie theater and with a crowd of equally obsessive fans—basically a DVD/Blu-Ray commentary track, except the director comes to you and you get to talk back. Florida transplant Tim Masset calls these freewheeling events The Talkies, and he has organized ones with John Waters, George Romero, and Herschell Gordon Lewis. Last night he brought John Cameron Mitchell to The Heights Theatre to do play-by-play of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the Plato-quoting tranny rock musical Mitchell created, wrote, directed, and starred in off-Broadway and then eight years ago made into an unexpectedly fabulous film. 

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Just a reminder: Former Jayhawks members Gary Louris and Mark Olson perform tonight (Thursday) on Late Night With David Letterman. Many thought this night would never come, yet here it is. Word is that it will just be the boys and their guitars (no gratuitous backup from Paul Schaeffer and company). They'll no doubt be playing something off their new album, Ready for the Flood, which will be a good primer for those of you who nabbed tickets to their Varsity shows on Feb. 21 & 22. 

You know the state of local arts criticism is in the crapper when the head of the Guthrie's public relations department is begging for critics to be more . . . critical. In this piece, posted on the local arts journal Playlist, Guthrie PR director Melodie Bahan bemoans the lack of incisive writing in our local daily newspapers, particularly their tendency to write "shallow puff pieces"—the very articles she, as a publicist, encourages them to write!

Bahan also wonders where the Twin Cities' Frank Rich is—that over-educated, arts-loving, hyper-articulate super-journalist who writes with the soul of a poet and doesn't mind being paid like one. If anyone locates him/her, by all means lets us know.

Bahan's primary target is the Star Tribune, of course, and David Brauer at Minnpost is reporting that the folks on Portland Ave. are not going to be sniped at without sniping back. Everyone loves a catfight (er, healthy exchange of opinions), so check it out.

Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine profiled post-feminist sexologists. One of them, Dr. Meredith Chivers, a scientist at the University of Toronto, studies sexual desire by showing film clips of copulating heterosexual couples, homosexual couples, and bonobo apes to men and women sitting in Lay-Z-Boys. The subjects’ genitals are hooked up to delicate instruments measuring blood flow in order to determine arousal, and they were asked to simultaneously type their subjective responses to the videos on a keypad while they watched.

The men in Dr. Chivers’ experiment demonstrated straightforward responses—the straight men responded…ahem, positively to the straight couples, and the gay men to the gay couples, while neither group was turned on by the apes. And the agreement between the genital measurements and the keyboard responses were consistent.

The women, on the other hand, were all over the place—some were turned on by the homosexual sex, some were turned on by the heterosexual sex, and yes, some were turned on by the apes. Not only that, but the agreement between genital measurement and keyboard response wasn’t consistent at all. The article quoted Freud, who said, 100 years ago, “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is What does a woman want?” It’s 2009, and Chivers’ answer, and the NYT’s, seems to be: "?!"

Last week, I saw two plays that also tried to make some sense, if perhaps not quite as empirically, out of desire and the desired. I saw Spring Awakening, an award winning musical that ran for a week at the Orpheum, and Hitchcock Blonde, an experimental play that opened at the Jungle on Friday. Now, I wasn’t hooked up to any machines with the ability to empirically measure biological data, but Spring Awakening didn’t do much for me, while Hitchcock Blonde—well, as Hitch himself might say, I found it…stimulating.

And I’m a dude, so I’m pretty sure of myself.

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