Cake In 15

While watching a Cirque du Soleil show, it’s sometimes difficult to detach to a point of reflection – Cirque is the stage version of an action movie where lots of stuff blows up and there are a few obligatory “romance” scenes to hold your senses at bay and let you recover in order to send […]

I admittedly attended Walking Shadow’s regional premiere of Robots vs. Fake Robots this past weekend with relatively low expectations from a play with such a title – It sounds like an easy concept, right?  And having seen it, I can attest to it being a simple concept, yes, but also surprisingly poignant, occasionally startling, and […]

This article could also have been titled A Reaction to the Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. But that would have been an over-lengthy title. Observation: Now if you google “intelligent homosexual” you get a series of hits on Tony Kushner. That must be nice for him. Two […]

A few weeks ago I found myself at Treehouse Records browsing through their “New Arrivals” bin and contemplating change. This was me, seven years ago, except you’d have to substitute Cheapo for Treehouse and substitute “Used CD’s” for “New Arrivals” and substitute the album I did buy (Mountains, Choral) with a used God Street Wine […]

I bought Dark Was the Night a couple weeks back on vinyl – it was sort of an impulse buy, and the vinyl was $28 while the CD was $15, but I got it anyway. I took it home, opened it up, and discovered that despite my extra $13 expenditure, the package did not come […]

In Walking Shadow Theatre Company’s regional premiere of Albert Camus’ Caligula, all the emperor wants is to possess the moon – to have what cannot be had, to turn impossible on its head and in doing so, to show people the truth of life (or at least, his well-thought out but perhaps ill-conceived interpretation of […]

Some few months before the swollen floodwaters of the Red River would overtake the Empire Theater and a fire would rage next door, ravaging a portion of downtown Grand Forks, Leo Kottke played there. It was probably January or February of 1997, the snowiest and coldest winter I can remember (although our current season is […]

A couple days before Christmas, Minneapolis packed the Cedar Cultural Center to the brim, standing room only, people pulling chairs this way and that, scurrying around trying to find the best possible view. As Chastity Brown took the stage, I suddenly imagined myself as John Cusak in that scene in High Fidelity where Marie De […]

Listening to Western Fifth’s recent release Stand Like a Thief is a little like dancing that achingly fleeting slow dance with the girl (or guy, depending) that you almost but never quite asked out in high school. This is not to say by any means that the music itself evokes high school – it feels […]

My sophomore year at the U of M, I enrolled in an upper level Cultural Studies course called “Music as Discourse.” We spent the large part of a winter digging deep into pieces of music – Laurie Anderson’s O Superman, a version of Oh Danny Boy as sung by an Irish folk singer whose name […]