Minneapolis / St. Paul Music Blog

That's a key line from NOFX's "Seeing Double at the Triple Rock." The SoCal pop-punk stalwarts are shooting a video for the new track at its namesake club on March 6. In the song, the band gets "snowed in" at the bar (Don't you hate it when blizzards completely shut down Cedar?) and spends the afternoon "watching Paddy talk." This town has an overabundance of punk fans who'd happily shoot the shit with Dillinger Four's Patrick Costello without cameras rolling, so it's no surprise that the shoot's request for extras was quickly filled. Lucky "background artists" have to dedicate three to four hours to the filming. They're also required to show up dressed as priests and nuns.

Slate has posted a fascinating essay/slideshow by local photographer Alec Soth. It's excerpted from his most recent major project, "NIAGARA," which debuted at the Gagosian Gallery in NYC last month. Soth's intimate photos, shot around the Niagara Falls area, capture hand-written love letters, shabby motels, and flaccid, naked couples. As the pictures flash by the artist ruminates on love and its (often ugly) aftermath. The collection will be published as a book next month and goes on display at the Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis starting April 7th.

Local artist Jaron Childs paints pain. He uses found photos of people crying, sobbing, or bent with loss, and re-creates them as photo-realistic images of ghostly and mysterious cousins twice removed of the original painful moment.

The titles of his paintings, currently on display at Soo Vac, are the same as his source material: Google image searches resulted in "628.jpg" and "crying(2).jpg," among 15 other found photos, that Childs has painted in careful brush strokes. But there are no links to stories or other searchable clues provided in the enlarged images; all that remains are interpretations of human loss and anguish via Childs' painstakingly realistic reconstructions.

In a new feature at Culture To Go, I've sent out five silly questions to a local blogger to find out about their life beyond being chained to their keyboard. First up is Mary Lahammer, a host and political reporter for Almanac on TPT2. When Mary's not blogging at the Almanac site, she's on the capitol beat for public television. Mary has scored a few Emmys and City Pages named her "Best Newscaster" back in 2002. We also think her last name means "The Hammer" in Italian, but our knowledge of things Italian don't really go beyond eating Chef Boyardee everyday. I thought of the silliest, most inane questions in the five minutes I allotted myself and fired them off to The Hammer. Here's what she had to say...

John Fogerty is an AC/DC fan. That's one of the revelations in this interview I conducted with the former leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival late last fall when he was out promoting his first-ever collection that includes hits from both his Creedence era and his later solo work.

 

The Disney dog-sled movie, Eight Below, has inspired a slew of groan-worthy headlines. Can you top these stinkers?

Eight Below is Top Dog
Eight Below Licks Film Rivals
Eight Below Mushses to No. 1 Debut
Eight Below: A Mushed-See Movie
Eight Below Paws its Way to Box-Office Success
Sled Dogs Prove Ample Actors in Eight Below
Some Nifty Canines Star in the Exciting Eight Below
Eight Below: A Dogged Survival Tale
Eight Below Warms the Heart Despite Faux Paws (*)
Sled Dogs in Eight Below Tug at Heart Strings
Eight Below Freezes Nuts Off US Weekend Box Office
The Universe Must Be Inverted, Because Dogs From Heaven Have Found Eight Below (**)

*(Yes, this headline is real, and as far as we know so are the dogs' paws.)

**(Ok, this isn't real, but we think it's "A Cut Above the Other Eight Below Headlines.")

A couple of different organizations are working to restock the bookshelves along the Gulf Coast. The New York Foundation for the Arts website is encouraging folks to send any and all hardcover and paperback books to the New Orleans Public Library. Some will be stocked and others will be sold for fundraising. When mailing, be sure to ask for the library rate from your friendly neighborhood postal worker. The address is Rica A. Trigs, Public Relations, New Orleans Public Library, 219 Loyola Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70112.

Book Relief spreads the literary love to the classrooms. Nine book distributions have already been held on the Gulf Coast, with over 1.5 million books being distributed. Book Relief's goal is to donate at least five million books to organizations, schools, and libraries supporting the evacuees, and replenish the schools and libraries being rebuilt on the Gulf Coast. Click here for donation information.

While visiting the gymnasium the other night, my companion picked up a Time magazine to skim while trudging on one of the infernal machines. The news was a bit dated: The issue had hit the street on January 15. Most of the pages were given over to the global war that we find ourselves in and its effects on the media, the labor force, the commodities market, etc. That old war hero McCain, for instance, was issuing yet more proclamations on how we could still win the fight.

While most of the news related to whom we're attacking these days, the publisher's note in the front of the edition boasted more cheerfully about Time's global reach: "Time has come to be...a truly international magazine (now that we are publishing special editions on every continent except Antarctica)." The ads, though, appealed to bedrock native values. Even healthy, square-jawed men drink milk! And, naturally, those men will want to drive a healthy, square-jawed new truck from Ford or Dodge!

Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly's Local is a comic book series about a city-hopping young woman named Megan. Minneapolis gets some ink with issue #2, "Polaroid Boyfriend," thanks to St. Paul resident Kelly. The story of Megan's disturbing and/or romantic relationship with a stranger takes place on a three-block stretch of Lyndale Avenue South, and it's got the landmarks (Hum's Liquors, the Wedge Co-op) to prove it. Locale aside, the book is like a visual scavenger hunt for Twin Cities readers who will no doubt spot details like a Spyhouse to-go cup or a Chino Latino billboard.

Leave it to scrutinizing local eyes to also pick up on the inaccuracies. For one, the main character works at Oarfolkjokeopus--which was renamed Treehouse Records years ago. A disclaimer says that the story takes place in 1995, an excuse which is betrayed by all sorts of musical anachronisms: Low's The Great Destroyer on the store's shelves, a Heiruspecs CD lying on the floor of Megan's studio apartment, a flyer for a Soviettes show at the Triple Rock on her fridge. Kelly blames the mistakes on trying to get the book done in a hurry. But irked residents may find solace in a snarky Twin Cities primer in the back, which includes factoids like, "[In 1866] the first Minneapolitan discovered St. Paul, immediately grew bored and returned home."

When professional dancer Liz Wawrzonek first met Lauren Schad and Gina Kent, they were dressed in bunny costumes, or as Wawrzonek describes it, sequined unitards with "rabbit tails on their cute little butts." It was Easter, hence the uni-bunnies, and Schad and Kent were tap dancing at the Triple Rock as openers for the local punk band Dillinger Four. For Wawrzonek, colored eggs, plastic grass, and melted Peeps didn't immediately spring to mind. Instead, her first thought was, "How do I sign up to be a tap-dancing punk-rock Playboy bunny?"

Turns out Schad and Kent weren't Playboy bunnies, just skilled costume designers who called their dancing duo the Shim Sham Shufflers, had a shared dream of dancing, and never stepped a tapped foot into a dancing class.

Manhattanites aren't too pleased to find little red double-decker buses trolling through their city as part of a recent Target promotion. Seems the Minneapolis-based company thought it'd be a grand idea to promote British designer Luella, who has partnered with Target for a preppy-punk clothing line, by parading around town double-decker buses outfitted with the Target bullseye logo. Last August, when Target struck a deal with the New Yorker to become the sole advertiser for one issue of the magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times called it "the most jaw-dropping collapse of the so-called sacred wall between editorial and advertising in modern magazine history." Has Target, and advertising in general, gone too far? Or would New Yorkers be more comfortable with the onslaught if this were a company like Gucci?

"In the middle of the ocean/In the middle of the night/We'll keep on fighting/Until we bring daylight," sang gospel electric guitarist Charlie Jackson on his old '70s Booker single "Something to Think About" (audio here), a lonely call for solidarity in the violent wilderness of the American South--and one of the best songs ever recorded about the Civil Rights Movement (others here). Jackson died on Monday in Baker, Louisiana (here's today's obituary in the Advocate); he was 73. The above song and others were collected three years ago on a wonderful CaseQuarter Records CD titled God's Got It (scroll down), a well-reviewed document that made many Top Tens and still astounds on 50th listen. (Buy it here, here, or here.) What follows is an open email from Kevin Nutt at CaseQuarter...

A couple in Duluth this week proposed renaming their street Wisteria Lane, based on the trifling but high-rated ABC show Desperate Housewives. Apparently their street was filled with so much petty drama they thought the name suited their little hood.

Thankfully, the City Council rejected the couple's request, otherwise Minnesota would be known as the home of governors who wrestle and stalk, weird things called skyways that unfortunately aren't made entirely of glass, and a street embarrassingly named after the world's most vapid primetime players. If you're going to name a street based on a television show, at least use a good show for inspiration, like this one in the picture to the left. It looks like the folks who named DuBois Avenue must've really loved the butler-turned-politician Benson DuBois, from the 80s sitcom Benson. Don't you think? Don't you?

If you could rename your street anything you wanted to, what would it be and why? And what other Twin Cities streets should be renamed?

E. John Bullard, director of the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), has announced the museum will open its doors again on March 3, following repair and clean-up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden next to the museum reopened Saturday, December 10. Thanks to members, donors, and grant organizations, NOMA will now be free to residents of Louisiana. Donations are still being accepted at NOMA, Katrina Fund, P.O. Box 19123, New Orleans, LA 70179.

A Prairie Home Companion, the new film written by Garrison Keillor (who also stars) and directed by Robert Altman, was a crowd-pleaser at The Berlin International Film Festival, and is considered a strong contender to win its Golden Bear award. (The winner will be announced Saturday the 18th.) In the movie, Keillor does his last show (if only!), with an all-star, Altman ensemble cast that includes Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, and Tommy Lee Jones. As everyone knows, it was filmed at Fitzgerald Theater, making it the second Twin Cities-based movie in the past few months to be a hit in Germany. (The other is Factotum, based on the Bukowski novel.) The Golden Bear isn't the only award nomination Altman is waiting to hear about: the 80-year-old director is up for a lifetime achievement Oscar. If he wins, it will be his first Academy Award.

Today is the last day on the job for my friend and City Pages arts editor Dylan Hicks, who is moving on to pursue other endeavors. Dylan hasn't asked much of me, other than about a thousand words of clean copy every Monday morning. Oh, scratch that: once, when he occupied the lofty post I now inhabit, he asked me to look after his son while he attended a show. I agreed, then promptly forgot, leaving daddy Dylan scrambling to find a more responsible party. Despite my having left him on the lurch, Dylan never voiced a word of recrimination. He's that kind of guy: generous and ethical (and as funny as anyone you'll have the pleasure to meet). Finally, he's a great editor, and I've worked with plenty. He never touched my stuff except to make it better. That's basically what he does: he makes stuff better. Here's to infinite good vibrations for what comes next.

Where's Robert Stack when you need him? A compilation CD titled Live in Town has been showing up in the mailboxes of musicians, DJs, rock critics, and record store owners throughout the Twin Cities. The mix, comprised of bootlegs from various local venues, ranges from the Dead Boys recorded at a Longhorn gig in 1980 to the Arcade Fire at First Avenue last September. So what's the mystery? Nobody knows where the thing came from. The discs arrived in envelopes bearing no return address, and in some cases, no postage. The cover art, a frame of an old comic featuring a bald kid with a slingshot, is of no apparent help. Any young Nancy Drews out there able to crack this one? Continue reading for the full track listing.

No, it's not Tom from MySpace, though we know you spend hours a day staring at his smiling and oddly puerile little face. This new best friend smokes, drinks, possibly suffers from cold feet, and could be anything you want him to be, even a dude living in the former crafting/wrapping-paper room of his mom's basement. Meet Steve, a guy with an affinity for monochrome clothing and the drinky-drink who, unlike your finger-wagging mom upstairs, will never judge you or force you to clean up your ceiling-high beeramid.

Released by City Pages webmaster Brian Perry, Drinking with Steve is a DVD of a beer-swilling guy named Steve (what else?) who inexplicably wears slippers and never talks. Best of all, Steve makes you feel good about drinking solo. You simply pop in the DVD and your new drinking buddy appears on screen, allowing you to gulp back your burning loneliness like it's a tall shot of Jack. In the last week, Howard Stern, Gawker, and USA Today's pop culture blog have all picked up on the Drinking with Steve phenomenon, an idea that Brian Perry says Steve came up with about 10 years ago.

"It's been really funny," Perry says. "There's nothing to the video. It's got shitty lighting and Steve just hit record and that's that. I made it have a funky intro so you can select how many beers you feel like having." And chances are Steve could be more than your drinking buddy in the near future. "I've got tons of Steve stories," Perry says. "I just don't know what to do with them."

Born-again country music Valentino Josh Turner is so clean-cut he makes future U.S. president Tim McGraw look like Ratso Rizzo. There's a future for him as a Great Clips model, or as vice president (though maybe not with Democrat McGraw). Or as a sex therapist. His rubbery baritone, a compromise between Randy Travis and Conway Twitty, is the sort of instrument that breaks up (or sustains) suburban marriages. Listening to the lovey-dovey highlights from his latest album, Your Man, this fanciful reviewer is reminded of the time he trained a secret camera on the marital bed of an especially charming Baptist youth minister. In an era larded with stripping anthems, the beautiful "No Rush" is music by which to slowly remove ribbed turtlenecks, and the R&B-aware title track succeeds at being both tasteful and horny.

The rest of the album peaks at pretty good and bottoms out at sort of yucky. "Baby's Gone Home to Mama" rhymes "mama" with "Nostradamus," and could be called "funky" without doing severe violence to the word's pedigree. But "Me and God," featuring bluegrass Methuselah Ralph Stanley, reduces 2000 years of good and bad Christian theology to a two-star buddy movie. And then there's "White Noise," a duet with the sometimes-great John Anderson. I had assumed that the tune would be country's first response to Don DeLillo's like-titled novel, but it turns out to be a celebration of the Anglo-Saxon man's C&W hegemony. The tune (sample lyric: "Take me where those honkies are a tonkin'") intends to be playful more than exclusionary (the pair name-checks Charley Pride and alludes to Hispanic [correction: Irish-Filipino--see comment below] country singer Neal McCoy, both of whom are apparently honorary white boys), but that doesn't mean that David Duke won't get a kick out of it. Plus, it ain't even all that tonkin'. --Dylan Hicks

Karl Raschke's homemade pin collection is nothing if not eclectic. Run into the local photographer/musician and he may hand you a button featuring a picture of Marshall stacks, vegetables, his dad--really any simple image that strikes his fancy. Now Raschke's making his one-inch beauties available to a slightly larger audience: thelatchhook.com is selling limited edition four-pin sets. This week's theme: communication.

Mike Isabella, manager/co-owner/designer of the FantaSuite Hotel in Burnsville, runs down their most requested theme rooms just in time for a Valentine's Day getaway. Even he's baffled by the popularity of number one: "I don't know. It's a cave."

1. Le Cave
2. Caesar's Court
3. The Grecian
4. Casino Royal
5. Arabian Nights

Is it me, or is Prince looking more and more like artist Scott Seekins? During his first Saturday Night Live performance in 16 years (video here), Prince wore the trademark Seekins pencil 'stache, headband, and suit, but in dark red and black rather than all-white (what Seekins wears in summer) or all-black (what he wears in winter). If you think you're up on your Minneapolis icon trivia, here's a quick quiz that asks the question: "Seekins or Prince?" 1.) Local rock band Jerungdu has performed dressed as him. 2.) For a while he owned the web site www.madonna.com 3.) He's obsessed with Britney Spears. 4.) He used to own a store across from Calhoun Square. 5.) He enjoys fly fishing. 6.) According to unsubstantiated rumor, he was banned from the last place that showed him. 7.) He once served everyone Mint Julips at a show. 8.) He and Larry Graham once proselytized as Jehovah's Witnesses during a Sunday Vikings game. 9.) He makes model train-set miniatures on the side. 10.) He is his own greatest subject. And the answers are...

Okay, not exactly on ice, more like near ice. The cast and crew of Minnesota Public Radio's popular program will set sail Friday, July 14, from Seattle on Prairie Home Cruise II, a week-long journey to Alaska with stops in Juneau, Glacier Bay, and Ketchikan, among others. An announcement from host Garrison Keillor on the PHC website entices would-be travellers with "all the things that people said they enjoyed about Cruise I--the group singing, the plethora of intimate musical performances, the workshops, the naturalists, the star-gazing, the late-night carousing in the Crow's Nest, the Amateur Night..." Guy's All-Star Shoe Band, the Royal Academy of Radio Actors, and Robin and Linda Williams are confirmed, with other entertainers to be announced. No word on whether Guy Noir will coordinate the shuffleboard tournament. Any particular radio show you'd go cruising for?

...which isn't saying much this year. A few flashes of excitement and trickery, between dubious calls by the officials, and the decrepit Rolling Stones going through the motions during their half-time show meant the commercials really had to come through this year. Sadly, most were misfires and retreads (enough with the Clydesdales, Bud!). Check out a few Super Bowl commercial highlights after the jump and let us know what you thought...

Petra Haden, former That Dog violinist and current member of the Decemberists clan, drew national attention last year with her a cappella cover album Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out. Now she's taking on "God Only Knows." No word yet on whether she plans to record the whole album, but the track is worth checking out--sweet as the original and playful as a grown woman imitating castanets with her mouth. Still, it's not quite as much fun as the more rockin' Who project.

As rave reviews go, they don't get much more ravier than this, about Jungle Theater grad Craig Wright's latest play Grace. Writes Chicago Sun-Times critic Heidi Weiss: First question: "Why isn't Craig Wright the talk of Broadway, with his name right up there in bright lights alongside those of, say, Edward Albee, David Mamet, Martin McDonagh, John Patrick Shanley, Richard Greenberg and the rest? By any measure his plays are as sharp and provocative as theirs. Yet at least until now, his work has been consigned to the regional circuit -- by no means a lesser place, but somewhat less noticed.

"Second question: Will 'Grace,' the sublimely acted, hypnotically directed drama that opened Wednesday night at Northlight Theatre, be his big commercial breakthrough? It certainly deserves to be.

"This is a darkly comic, eerily tragic, wholly timely play. It dives headfirst into questions of faith and religion (not necessarily the same thing at all). It explores the nature of those often deeply painful partners: love and change. And it leads us into the realms of time and space through the use of purely poetic language. What's more, Wright does all this in ways that are at once profound and dangerous, epic and personal. And, as he demonstrated in an earlier work, 'Orange Flower Water' (seen at the Steppenwolf Garage), he is one of most searing and incisive observers of male-female relationships, faithfulness and broken faith."

Tuesday might have been just another day for you and me, but at the Minnesota Fringe office they were dealing with almost a hundred last-minute applications for slots in this year's festival. In all, 283 shows will have to be pared down for 150 available slots--an unenviable task and one, for the second year, that will be left to the (sometimes cruel) hand of fate. Next Monday the Fringe will hold a lottery at the Minneapolis Theatre Garage at 7 p.m., and guests and audience members will pluck numbered ping-pong balls from a spinning bingo cage. The total of 283 performance applications falls just shy of the Fringe's record of 287 in 2004.

One of the best pieces on the much-discussed Brokeback Mountain comes from Minneapolis-based writer Erik Lundegaard, who writes, "I have to admit that 'Brokeback' didn't look particularly appealing to me from that September trailer. A hopeless, doomed romance. Yay. I also admit to some straight-guy trepidation -- but of the general rather than the Larry David 'it might make me gay' variety. If the number of times I got screwed over by women in my youth didn't lead me to consider an alternative, there's nothing Heath Ledger can do now.

"But when I finally saw 'Brokeback' I found it nearly perfect. It's more than a love story; it's really about loneliness, which is a more universal emotion anyway. Some of us haven't been in love; some of us don't believe in love. Everyone's been lonely."

Read the rest of the piece here.

I just listened to Sun, Sun, Sun, the new album by Sub Pop recording artists the Elected, led by Blake Sennett, the mustachioed, suede-vest-wearing lead guitar player and occasional breathy, phony, full-of-himself second-string singer from Rilo Kiley. And then the spirit of Gene Shalit came over me:

Sun, Sun, Sun? Well, that's one compact disc I won't want to take home and burn, burn, burn onto my personal computer's music-playing device.

The Elected? They must have stuffed the ballots, because here's one rock combo that this critic votes "no" on.

Blake Sennett? More like "Take Sennett," as in "take this confounded platter off the hi fi and throw it in the ol' cylindrical filing cabinet."

Sun, Sun, Sun by the Elected? Can someone call Bonnie Tyler and see if we can't arrange for a total eclipse...of their art?

R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe has created the In The Sun Foundation to benefit Gulf Coast residents still suffering the effects of last year's hurricanes. This Sunday, February 5, iTunes will make available an EP including six versions of the Joseph Arthur ballad "In The Sun," featuring Stipe with guest singers and remixers, including Coldplay's Chris Martin, ex-Smashing Pumpkin James Iha, Black Eyed Peas's will.i.am, Arthur himself, and for some reason Justin Timberlake. Profits will go toward The Mercy Corps, whose relief programs currently reach 7 million people in more than 35 countries.