February 2012
“Now I prefer the worlds of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Dr....”
– Twin Cities teens review The Lion King musical. Their opinions may surprise you, but not as much as the Neil Peart reference will.
Win Cities: 13TH MOST LESBIANISH →
We should get bumped up to 12th if only because of all those exclamation points.
wincities:
Jezebel ranks Minneapolis as its 13th Most Lesbianish City in a recent review of national lesbian hot-spots. LINK
We’ve got a lot to be proud of in the Minnesota Lynx women’s basketball team — they won the championship last year. Evidently their games are also a great place for chicks to pick up...
January 2012
A satisfying end to the Walker's "Out There"...
The Walker Art Center saved the best for last in this year’s Out There Series, presenting Mariano Pensotti’s El Pasado Es Un Animal Grotesco (The Past is a Grotesque Animal) from January 26-29 at the McGuire Theater. The play, which had a successful year-long run in Argentina and is now on tour, is a riveting study of the lives of characters in four different stories that interconnect in...
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AMC Theatres to showcase all nine Oscar Best...
If you haven’t seen the nominees in the Best Picture category for this year’s Oscar race, don’t despair. AMC Theatres is hosting its sixth annual “Best Picture Showcase.”
The Showcase gives movie lovers the opportunity to experience every movie nominated for Best Picture in the 84th Academy Awards over two Saturdays in February.
“This is our sixth year running the Best Picture Showcase, and...
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SUNDAY PICK | Sierra DeMulder's "New Shoes on a...
Acclaimed slam poet Sierra DeMulder’s got a new book of poems: New Shoes on a Dead Horse (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). And although the official release date isn’t until mid-March, the book launch is tonight at Honey, where you can get your hands on a signed copy and enjoy bonus author readings and performances—including John Jodzio, who called this “a book you will hold to...
Books and women: St. Catherine University hosts...
For this blog I do my best to attend literary events that don’t exactly fall within the mainstream of what people expect when they hear the term “literary scene.” (Although, during a recent shopping trip, I was explaining this blog to a young shopgirl and she asked me, “Minneapolis has a literary scene?”) This week, I found myself slightly off the beaten path, among 450 St. Catherine’s alumni...
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Sunset on St. Planet: St. Paul Arts & Culture...
In 2008 I told a cautionary tale in mnartists.org: the tale of “St. Planet,” an incredibly elaborate website that had visitors piloting animated “culturenauts” over an eerie blue-and-mustard landscape in which St. Paul landmarks floated. The website was a project of the St. Paul Arts and Culture Partnership (ACP), a group of Capital City cultural institutions—except it...
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Nominations for the 84th Academy Awards announced
Nominations for the 84th Academy Awards were announced by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Tom Sherak and 2010 Oscar nominee Jennifer Lawrence. (Click here to see the complete list.)
Academy members from each of the branches vote to determine the nominees in their respective categories—actors nominate actors, film editors nominate film editors, etc. In the Animated Feature...
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Voltage: Fashion Amplified to take hiatus in 2012
MNfashion, the organization behind MNfashion Week, is set to make some changes to their programming this year. MNfashion Week will now be known as Minneapolis-St. Paul Fashion Week, the organization announced last month on its blog, and will next take place from February 19-26 rather than in April as was previously the case.
“By aligning ourselves with the cadence of the rest of the...
TUESDAY PICK | All My Relations spotlights...
One of the most underrated aspects of the Twin Cities arts scene is our large and dynamic Native arts community, anchored by institutions like Birchbark Books and All My Relations Gallery. Eight emerging visual artists of Native descent are featured in the current show at All My Relations, Making New Traditions—organized in partnership with the Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School in South...
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“Courtney McLean brought her signature naughty humor in both story and song...”
– Matthew Everett reviews the cabaret Dirty Girls Come Clean, now being presented by Freshwater Theatre Company at Nimbus Theatre.
MONDAY PICK | St. Kate's hosts a reading-optional...
The inconvenient thing about book clubs is that you have to read the books—and these days, who has time for that? Actually, never mind these days—who had time for that even in 1965? That’s when St. Kate’s inaugurated its annual Conversation with Books series, convening “a lively panel of book lovers that highlight recent books of literary merit.” The discussion is meant...
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"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" sizzles at the Guthrie...
The character Brick spends much of Tennesee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof seeking “that click” in his head: that moment when he’s finally drunk enough to be able to ignore his yowling inner demons. There’s a click of sorts in theater as well: when a production is working so well that as an audience member you become totally absorbed in its universe. That click...
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Acting Company and Guthrie Theater bring "Julius...
I knew we were in trouble with the new Acting Company/Guthrie Theater staging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, brought into the present day via costumes and set design, when one of Caesar’s advisors walked onstage and the two exchanged one of those shake-it/grasp-it/pound-it handshakes typically encountered in made-for-TV movies about urban youth and in your uncle’s living room...
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FRIDAY PICK | "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at the...
Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning play (that was also adapted into a movie starring the late Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman) is the first play this year on the Guthrie’s Wurtele Thrust Stage. Greed, sexual desire, and death—the usual trademark goodies in a Williams classic—run rampant throughout the play, all from within the setting of a bedroom where the magic is known...
THURSDAY PICK | Blogfight! Paper Darts and The...
Sometimes it’s the ones you love most who you hurt the most severely, and that will definitely be the case tonight at the Nomad as writers associated the the local literary publication/organization Paper Darts face off against their friends at the creative writing blog The Tangential. I’m among The Tangential’s proprietors, and I’ll be among the readers trying to wow the...
Happy birthday, Boneshaker Books!
This past weekend marked the one-year anniversary for Boneshaker Books, an organization that, to my mind, should be hailed as Minneapolis’s greatest champion of the written word. With a business model based on the likes of The Wooden Shoe in Philadelphia and Bluestockings in New York, the all-volunteer collective behind Boneshaker are showing Minneapolis what it really means to love books.
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WEDNESDAY PICK | "Julius Caesar": Et tu, Guthrie?
The Acting Company/Guthrie Theater collaboration has had hits and misses, but we can be thankful that it supplies the Twin Cities with a steady stream of top-notch, freshly conceived Shakespeare productions. At a time when comparisons between the United States and Rome in decline are increasingly commonplace, director Rob Melrose should have fertile ground to till in his new Julius Caesar,...
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Slamdance Film Festival preview: Neil Young, Stan...
Started in 1995 by filmmakers tired of getting their films rejected, the Slamdance Film Festival takes place from January 20-26 on the busiest street in Park City, Main Street (across the street and only a few hundred feet away from Sundance’s Egyptian Theater), at the top of the hill in the Treasure Mountain Inn, with two screening rooms, a filmmaker lounge, and a small restaurant/bar at the end...
TUESDAY PICK | Books & Bars discusses Patti...
Books & Bars, says Courtney Algeo, “is something that those who like a free show, enjoy discovering new books, and who need a reason to go out and have a few drinks should experience at least once.” Today the popular open book club meets at St. Paul’s hottest new venue, the Amsterdam Bar & Hall, to discuss Just Kids (2010), Patti Smith’s acclaimed memoir of her...
