July 2011
Danny Schmidt: A latter-day Dan Fogelberg
Damn if I understand what all the excitement over singer-songwriter-guitarist Danny Schmidt is about. He’s highly touted from here to there and back, including love-letter reviews at major publications, as an artist of singular consequence. Can’t prove it by me. Not with his album Man of Many Moons (Red House Records) as evidence. Man of Many Moons, woefully pedestrian fare, comes across as...
What your favorite Twin Cities radio station says...
KDWB. You love to party! In fact, one of your main interests is partying. Another is likely “shopping,” or “running,” or maybe even “going out.” You update your Facebook status a lot. Your favorite musical artists change every three months. So do your boyfriends, best friends, and hairstyle.
96.3 Now. You used to like B96 and now you’re kind of just stuck...
FLOW Northside Arts Crawl 2011: Bouncing back and...
It’s been an exciting summer for the arts in Minneapolis. Self-guided tours like Art-a-Whirl and the brand new Northern Spark festival brought out huge crowds who enjoyed a “create your own adventure” experience. Twin Cities residents who missed out on one or both of these events have another chance to enjoy the art community and the waning summer season with the FLOW Northside Arts Crawl,...
MNcest (or, dating in the Twin Cities)
I grew up in a small town in North Carolina, and when I moved to Minnesota to go to college in St. Paul it was an exciting transition to city life. Living in the college bubble made it a really easy change, and when I moved to Minneapolis it only took me 5 years before I stopped telling people that I “don’t drive downtown, like, at all.”
Minneapolis is no small town, so you’d think I’d...
At the Entry, the Rosebuds and Other Lives warm up...
On July 19th, Other Lives and the Rosebuds played a boisterous show to a near capacity crowd at the 7th Street Entry. Oklahoma’s Other Lives kicked off the night with a moving set of their orchestral and lush pop songs. The five-piece band had nearly 30 different instruments at their disposal, making for quite an exciting performance visually. Sticking mostly to material off of their...
“God didn’t make plastic surgeons so they could starve.”
– Dolly Parton, onstage tonight as quoted by @theBitchelor
Dream casting makes Walking Shadow's "reasons to...
I usually just skim casting announcement press releases and chuck them in the virtual trash, but this one made my eyes pop: the cast for Walking Shadow Theatre Company’s production of Neil LaBute’s reasons to be pretty—coming to the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio in September—will be Joseph Bombard, Rachel Finch, Andrew Sass, and Anna Sundberg.
I’ve never seen Bombard, but...
Yuck don't suck: Londoners deliver a scorching...
Perhaps it was the record-breaking levels of humidity on July 19 that kept fans and bands alike practically stark still throughout Yuck’s first headlining show at the Varsity Theater, but there appeared to be discord between the London-based band’s sound and their physical presence (imagine the scene where the Smashing Pumpkins are playing in the “Homerpalooza” episode of The...
Fringe Bloggers →
Our seven bloggers are ready to blog the living daylights out of the Minnesota Fringe Festival. Up now: Fringe-for-All preview reviews (got that?) by Matthew Everett and Phillip Andrew Bennett Low.
Arts Orbit Radar 7/28/11
What’s happening this week
On the radar
It’s been a long time coming, but the new Cowles Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Minneapolis is finally ready to officially open its doors—which it’s doing with a groundbreaker dance battle on Saturday. Can’t we all just get along?
After being absent last summer, the Walker Art Center’s Music & Movies...
Ben Westhoff's "Dirty South" looks at hip-hop's...
In the 1990s, it was nearly impossible to be tuned in to popular culture and not know that a deadly war was going on between east and west coast rappers. This feud led directly to the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. Now, when it seems like all is right in the world of hip-hop (short of your standard boasts and disses), Ben Westhoff’s new book The Dirty South: Outkast, Lil...
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Azazel Jacobs and Jacob Wysocki talk "Terri"
PARK CITY, UTAH—Azazel Jacobs wrote and directed one of the best American independent films in past few years, 2008’s Momma’s Man. Jacobs’s latest film, Terri, premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and was part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition. In Minneapolis, it opens this Friday at the Uptown Theatre.
Jacobs, who is the son of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, is a born...
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On GIFs
In the latest example of how people never use technology the way you expect them to, animated GIFs are back. GIFs were prized on Web 0.5 for their low resolution (these were dialup days) and zing. Look! It’s not just a page—it’s a screen! We can make things move! And sparkle! We’re not sure what the hell else we’re supposed to do with this “World Wide Web,”...
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“I saw Miley’s cover of ‘Teen Spirit’ in South America. The...”
– In the August issue of Spin, Billy Ray Cyrus—apparently without irony—discusses his close personal friendship with Kurt Cobain (they met twice).
Restaurant team kvells over upcoming Rye Deli in...
Let’s talk some Yiddish. You start. Whaddaya got? “Oy vey?” “Shlep?” “Chutzpah” (or, as a certain shikse would have it, “choot spa”)? Don’t kid me, I know you got bupkes. This town swings goyish, which is maybe why you can’t get a decent knaidl around here: people hear the word “knaidl” and think it’s a Jewish joke that they don’t really get and probably isn’t that funny anyway....
