The 2006 Best of the Twin Cities ballot is now online. Set aside those TPS Reports and focus on something really productive: voting for your favorite restaurants, rock bands, bars, sports stars, bike shops, bookstores, and villains. April 26 is the day that City Pages publishes our annual Best of the Twin Cities issue. It is a day when City Pages staffers and contributors shower local restaurants and theaters, blues belters and martini mixers with words of praise and commemorative certificates. Like Administrative Professionals Day, the Best of the Twin Cities is a people's holiday of sorts. You can use the annual readers' poll to pronounce who rolls the best unagi maki and who croons the best karaoke versions of Stone Temple Pilots--all without collecting a sign-off from your senior manager. You make the picks; we tabulate the results. That's all there is to it.

Click here to start voting!

After the 2004 Whitney Biennial, New York art dealers went crazy for local photographer Alec Soth. (Check out Soth's stunning and most recent project, Niagara.) At every Biennial, art dealers and collectors stumble over their Bruno Maglis in a desperate search for the next big thing, and in the last few years, they're willing to prove they found it by forking over more than the average Minnesotan's one-year salary. This year, another Minneapolis photographer, Angela Strassheim, is quickly garnering the attention of critics and collectors.

The 2006 Whitney Biennial, which runs at New York's Whitney Museum through May 28, includes three up-and-coming Minneapolis-based artists: Thirty-year-old multi-media artist Jay Heikes, 39-year-old painter Todd Norsten, and 36-year-old Strassheim are among the Biennial's 100 or so select artists. And the show has another connection to the Twin Cities art scene: Philippe Vergne, the Walker Art Center's chief curator and deputy director, was the exhibit's co-curator.

New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman says the fashion-tied show lacks beauty, among other things, and dismisses some of the pieces as "ad-hoc," "cantankerous," and "insular." But Kimmelman found the images by Strassheim to be "painstaking, surreal, and strangely loving." The Village Voice also said Strassheim's photographs stood out, calling her images of people living more in the next life than this one "penetrating;" and the New York Sun also was taken with the works by the Minneapolis artist.

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Gordon Parks "once took a ride tailed by the cops with some young L.A. [Black] Panthers with guns in their laps," writes Greg Tate in today's Village Voice obituary. "One asked him if he would still choose the camera over the gun, as he'd declared in his 1967 memoir, A Choice of Weapons. Parks reiterated his belief. Two weeks later the Panther was dead." Parks, who was the first black staff photographer at Life in the '50s and the first ever to direct a studio film (The Learning Tree, in 1969), lived life alongside his subjects, from blacks in the Twin Cities to Malcolm X. Born in Kansas in 1912, the future writer, jazz musician, poet, painter, choreographer, and composer moved to St. Paul as a stunned teenager after the death of his mother, according to his autobiography Voices in the Mirror, and was promptly thrown out into the subzero weather by his brother-in-law. He spent a week homeless, "bouncing between Jim Williams's pool hall during the day and the trolley cars at night," writes Michael Tortorello in a 1998 City Pages appreciation. "One morning, hungry and broke, Parks drew a knife on one of the conductors, and then, in shame, offered to sell it to him in exchange for breakfast"...More >>

Isaac Hayes, a Scientologist, announces he will leave "South Park" because of recent episodes that have embarked upon what he calls "inappropriate ridicule of religious communities." Press release after the jump:More >>

Stenciled black bunnies have been popping up around Minneapolis for a little more than a year now. Last spring, we spotted their one-dimensional spray-painted bodies on public trash cans along Cedar Avenue and on the outside of electrical boxes on Washington Avenue. The little rabbits always are in mid-leap, and the stenciled images seem to disappear as quickly as they came, as if overflowing trash cans of gravel can't contain these little bunnies on the run. Until now, the rabbits have appeared alone and without any clues about their purpose. Recently, however, a flier featuring the sprinting bunny sprung up at Washington and Third Street with the claim that the rabbit "is the new black."

Public art of this kind is hardly new in Minneapolis: Shepard Fairey's Obey still stares back at drivers along Hiawatha almost 17 years after his birth as one of the original grafitti icons, and who can forget local tattoo artist Brian Kelly who created his own little army and whose face was plastered all over the Twin Cities?

The rabbits can't help but remind us of some of the work by Bristol stencil artist Banksy, who's famous for the rats he painted all over London. Still, Banksy's images always were subversive, forcing viewers to question their surroundings. His most moving graffiti art is of a pig-tailed little girl holding a handful of balloons to sail herself over a segregation wall in Palestine. The meaning of the rabbits around Minneapolis isn't quite so clear: They're either running from or toward something, and we haven't determined what that is. Or maybe it's neither, and the black bunny is simply nothing more than the new Blackberry.

What do you think the rabbit means? And what is your favorite piece of public art?

When it comes to podcasting in the land of 10,000 lakes, the first name that comes to mind is Garrick Van Buren. Garrick has produced over 70 podcasts since debuting The First Crack Podcast back in October 2004, featuring episodes on wine tasting, exotic peanut butter, and pontooning. Van Buren has expanded his empire to include Podcast Minnesota, MNInteractive, and the WorkBetter Weblog. I decided to see if he could still type, so I sent him 5 Silly Questions and this is what he wrote...

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Wired has news about the new trend in video recording: revamping old computers to replace TiVo and its subscription fee. For about $200, an out-of-date PC can be turned into a state-of-the-art digital recorder that will also turn any television into a media center with music, video, and games. The unfunny punchline to the piece: the record and movie industries are pushing hard to have the cables used in home installations changed so that the signal can only be recorded by TiVo. (In other digital news of the day, an anime site is reporting that Sony's Blu-Ray hi-def video discs will be region-coded like DVDs, preventing cheaper discs from Asia from being sold elsewhere.)

Spending night after night in darkened bars and coming home with ears ringing is hard work. We tracked down some local venue bookers and asked what they're reading to unwind.

Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer
I just finished it because the Mormon religion is fascinating to me. It was really good in that it gave a lot of background history on how it all started and what the basic fundamentals of their religion are. I'm still reading Companeros, about Che Guevara's journeys through South America and when he hooked up with Fidel. It's kind of a hard read so I've been in the process of that one for quite awhile. And then I just got On Michael Jackson, which I hadn't heard of until a friend loaned it to me today. He said it tells a lot about why he's the way he is. --Kim King, Fine Line Music Cafe

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This week's women-in-MN-music cover and the June 8, 2005 summer issue share cover model April Lindner, of the rock band Bounce...

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