Minneapolis / St. Paul Music Blog

Paula Joan "Polly" Alexander, a founding member of Minneapolis's first all-female rock band, Tetes Noires, died of a heart illness on October 22. She was 47.

"She had such a light heart, but she was a loner at the same time," said Alexander's former band mate Camille Gage. "She was a guitar player, and she liked to be in the back. She had such a wonderful sense of style beyond her time--sort of '50s and '60s kitsch. We all looked half-ass most of the time, but she always looked great.

"Her apartment was filled with kitschy stuff, all this Elvis stuff and smiley faces. I've been thinking about her all day: She loved this one Rick Springfield song, and one time she filled a cassette tape with just that song, and played it over and over."

TV lovers with lots of time to kill can now wallow in hundreds of hours of interviews with many of the medium's most important stars and creators. Thanks to the Google video site, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has made its interview archives available for online viewing. These are not soundbite overviews, but lengthy, multipart discussions of careers and programming history. There are about 400 online now (scroll down for the list), from Edie Adams talking about Ernie Kovacs to syndication pioneer Frederic Ziv. (Note: videos require Flash 7.0 or higher.)

The inevitable demise of movie theaters is only news to the industry itself, but now one of its biggest players is sounding the death knell. M. Night Shyamalan (Signs, The Sixth Sense) warned theater owners at this year's ShowEast convention that, if the studios have their way, DVDs will be released at the same time they hit the big screen. "If this thing happens, you know the majority of your theaters are closing. It's going to crush you guys." Meanwhile, the next move in DVD formatting-- Sony's Blu-ray discs and Toshiba's HD-DVD-- is already shaping up to be a "Beta vs. VHS" battle, and it's possible that neither will win, especially if Bill Gates has his way. Of course, if Hollywood just made better movies, none of this would really matter.

Following his cringe-worthy sitcom and even more embarrassing toothpaste shilling, it's safe to say Emeril has worn out his welcome. Rachel Ray has Oprah's financial blessing but she also has that creepy Joker smile. How is it that these kitchen clowns have their own big-time cable shows, while the genuinely likable Christopher Kimball is exiled in Saturday morning PBS? Kimball, the founder and editor of Cook's Illustrated, hosts America's Test Kitchen, one of the few culinary shows on television that views cooking as more of a science than an art. Kimball and his equally talented crew won't fancy up their raspberry cheesecake with sprigs of homegrown mint and lemon zest curlicues. They will, however, investigate over a dozen springform pans and twice as many brands of cream cheese. While his colleagues do most of the actual cooking, the gangly Kimball plays kitchen aide, quiz master, and guinea pig, asking a chef how many species coexist in a box of animal crackers or gamely downing Dixie cups of balsamic vinegarette for a taste test. Now that's a cooking show host. Kimball plugs America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook at the Edina Barnes & Noble November 8.

George Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu in the original Star Trek series and subsequent movies, has come out as a homosexual in the current issue of Frontiers, a Los Angeles GLBT magazine. "The world has changed from when I was a young teen feeling ashamed for being gay," Takei told the Associated Press. "The issue of gay marriage is now a political issue. That would have been unthinkable when I was young." Takei, a Japanese-American, spent ages 4 to 8 in a U.S. internment camp and grew up feeling ashamed of his ethnicity and sexuality. The 68-year-old Takei still acts and also serves on the advisory committee of the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program. Read the interview with Takei in Frontiers here.

The day after news came of the New Times/Village Voice Media merger, an email from Punk Planet was forwarded by Melissa Maerz (with the above tag), headlined "Punk Planet's distro woes." It reads as follows: "Hey there, Last Thursday we received some distressing news--the kind of news that made our very bones ache when we heard it; the kind of news that felt so significant we simply couldn't function after it sank in. With a few days time and the ability to process it, we decided it's news worth sharing: It was a letter from the president of the Independent Press Association, the not-for-profit organization that owns the company that distributes the majority of Punk Planet's copies, BigTop Newsstand Services. The letter acknowledged the truth of a rumor that had been running through indie publishing circles for months now: the distributor was having cash flow problems..."

Liz Phair can certainly generate an argument, but until now I'd never heard someone attempt to insult her by saying she's not Sheryl Crow: Crow has never written a lyric that anyone could call, with a straight face, "brilliant." And neither has Phair for some time, but some time ago is important here, because nostalgia is why I, for one, will still go see her show (despite her Britney headset and other weirdness last time). Because Exile in Guyville is about a lot more than "emotionally unavailable men" (see above link again). It's eloquently about that and about so many more aspects of being a young, creative, smart-but-periodically-fucking-up-big-time, possibly emotionally unavailable woman.

Low bassist Zak Sally announced to Pitchfork today that he is leaving the 12-year-old Duluth-born band. He has been replaced by Duluth multi-instrumentalist Matt Livingston. Sally said in a press statement: "I sincerely hope that someday we can sit in the basement and make music together, but for now, there are more important things than music."

Sally has been busy with his artwork, comic books, and rejuvenated publishing venture, La Mano. Last month, he told CP he wanted to focus on telling stories that resonated the way San Francisco-based La Mano artist John Porcellino's comic-book memoirs can, even when detailing simple stories of eating asparagus for the first time. Sally, who at the time was days away from welcoming his first child into the world, also said, "There comes a time in your life when you just want to make people laugh," perhaps a sign comics and family were to become top priorities for the artist.

Sally's currently working on a lighter follow-up comic to his beautifully dark and visceral Recidivist #3. He also has a cameo in Steve Martin's Shopgirl (reviewed here by Lindsey Thomas), where he plays a member of Hot Tears, the fake band Jason Schwartzman's character tours with. More CP Zak Sally and Low articles can be found here. The new Low line-up performs at First Avenue on December 9th.

He would head to Katrina benefits tonight and Friday, for one thing, if he were around Minneapolis. Okay, I actually have no idea what Paul Wellstone would do. But the third anniversary of his death passed today, and it just seems too eerie not to say anything, too accepting of the fact. Rent the movie about him, pick up the books, listen to a song for him, or read the old City Pages memorial issue. Or better yet, do something, anything, for somebody else, anybody else, to make the world (as they say) a better place. I don't know if that's what he'd do, but it's what you do if you want to be a human being. End of sermon.

2005 would have been the year John Lennon turned 65. Instead, it's the 25th anniversary of his murder. A new multimedia exhibit in Paris, John Lennon: Unfinished Music, recreates the phases of his life, from his Liverpool beginnings to a replica of the Abbey Road recording studio. Many previously unseen personal drawings and manuscripts are being displayed for the first time, as well as his last piano and Sgt. Pepper-era costumes. (One piece of Lennon-obilia that won't be displayed is the envelope on which he wrote the lyrics for "Give Peace a Chance"-- it's going up for auction next month, and expected to sell for a quarter-million dollars.) Of course, it's all the property and under the control of Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, who never tires of shooting her mouth off about her late husband: when she's not dissing Paul McCartney in a roomful of his peers, she's telling Bono that he's Lennon's lovechild.