The Morning After . . .

Photos: River’s Edge Music Festival

Congratulations to Live Nation for successfully pulling off (and putting on) the first-ever River’s Edge Music Festival this weekend. The headliners, Tool and Dave Matthews Band, were great. Getting to and from site was easy. And it was a picture-perfect weekend to boot—so here are some pictures:

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The Walker Arts Center Announces its 2012-13 Performing Arts Season

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,…

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The Grand Opening of Garrison Keillor’s Common Good Books

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…

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The Guthrie’s Women/Race/Facebook Problem

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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Harriet Island: Where all good festivals go to die

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…

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Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour @ Target Center

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…

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Review: Lifelike @ Walker Art Center

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…

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American Idiot is surprisingly smart

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…

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Review: End of the Rainbow @ The Guthrie Theater

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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…

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Frank Gaard: Poison & Candy @ Walker Art Center

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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,…

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