February 2009
March 2, 2009Music venues close, Bedlam shows the love
By now, regulars to the Times Bar and Cafe in northeast Minneapolis, along with its friendly downstairs cabaret, Jitters, have had to find another place to catch some live music. Both closed, at least temporarily, last week. This isn't the first time the Times has had to retool, of course. It was famously bumped from Nicollet Mall when Target barged in many years ago. The closings are the latest in a string of other music venues lost to the times, as it were, in the past including Babalu, Rossi's, Sophia, and La Bodega. Jazz music, particularly, takes the hit, as noted on the KBEM website. So here's what you do: you get your cold self over to the Artists' Quarter tonight and... Read more » Posted on Monday, March 2, 2009 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (0) |
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February 26, 2009Review: "The Whipping Man" at Penumbra
It's tempting sometimes to think of the plays at Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul as being those of August Wilson and those of everyone else, Wilson being both a towering, canonical figure and an anchor of the theater's repertory. But that isn't for lack of trying on the part of contemporary playwrights who, like Wilson, were fortunate enough to find their way to Lou Bellamy. And The Whipping Man, running for one more week only (through March 8) at the premier African-American theater, succeeds with an uncanny maturity in using sharply drawn characters and rich metaphor to wrestle Wilson-like with epic American issues of race, religion, and responsibility. Set at the end of the Civil War, playwright Matthew Lopez leaps with a... Read more » Posted on Thursday, February 26, 2009 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (0) |
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February 20, 2009The Cities' best art house finds a hit
The Heights movie theater is like a lot of things in Northeast Minneapolis--old, larger-than-life, and increasingly hip. Oh, and containing an organ, which I somehow imagine a lot of the homes around there feature as, well, though not the massive pipe variety of the kind that sits front and center beneath the heavy curtain at the Heights, a beast that once dramatized the pratfalls of silent comedians. It's a trip back in time, and with the fall of the Oak Street Theater, the place's popularity has only been growing. In fact, with its latest series, From The Vaults of Universal: Seven Classic Films Noir, it seems to have hit its stride. Seats for last week's screenings nearly sold out. On Monday the 23rd, the series picks up again... Read more » Posted on Friday, February 20, 2009 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (1) |
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February 19, 2009The last show at ICEBOX Gallery
I've had a studio around the corner from the ICEBOX Gallery at the Northrup King Building for nearly eight years now. And like most artists in Northeast Minneapolis, indeed in the entire Twin Cities, I've looked at Howard Christopherson's framing business and photography gallery as a landmark, a rock, a pioneer, actually. The rest of us were kids playing around; Christopherson had been doing this since the salad days (if you didn't mind a cold-water tap and maybe a roach in your salad) of the downtown scene in the 1980s, when guys like him and Scott Seekins were squatting in the old abandoned warehouses. Christopherson was among the first of the downtown artists to shift base camp, to the crumbling factories of Northeast. He stuck it out,... Read more » Posted on Thursday, February 19, 2009 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (0) |
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February 12, 2009Preview: Elizabeth Peyton turns the Walker into Celeb City
There is cool and there is too-cool. The latter, in the case of contemporary art, often translates to "obscure." But the exhibition opening this weekend at the Walker Art Center--"Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton"--is no more obscure than People magazine. Or Rolling Stone. Or, more accurately, Andy Warhol. Peyton, who is just 38, paints celebrities and not just any celebrities but the coolest ones--the Strokes, not the Jonas Brothers; Keith Richards, not Paris Hilton; Kurt Cobain, not his former wife. She's also painted Abraham Lincoln, Princes William and Harry and other political figures. So where's the art? You're going to have to decide that for yourself, but look for clues in the incredible idealization, even romanticization, of... Read more » Posted on Thursday, February 12, 2009 in Front & Center | Permalink | Comments (0) |
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