Arts Orbit

Todd Rundgren brings the unexpected to the Varsity Theater. Read...

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:18:25 -0500

Todd Rundgren brings the unexpected to the Varsity Theater. Read Patrick Dunn’s review and view all the photos.

Surfer Blood at First Avenue. See all of Meredith Westin’s...

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:22:42 -0500

Surfer Blood at First Avenue. See all of Meredith Westin’s photos.

Chicago at the State Theatre: As perfect as they needed to be....

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:32:39 -0500

Chicago at the State Theatre: As perfect as they needed to be. Read Dwight Hobbes’ review.

Is Josh Hartnett the hottest heartthrob ever to come out of St....

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:15:38 -0500

Is Josh Hartnett the hottest heartthrob ever to come out of St. Paul?

"They use teenage boys for ushers [in Stratford] and I think that this is a far better idea than..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 10:16:27 -0500

“They use teenage boys for ushers [in Stratford] and I think that this is a far better idea than girls. They are less noisy and giggly. Having 15-20 lovely girls corralled in one place creates a continual problem with not only boyfriends hanging around, but also lookers. I know this is a sacrifice for all red blooded males connected with the theatre, but I know well worth it in orderliness and efficiency.”

- Oliver Rea, co-founder of the Guthrie Theater, making a recommendation to the company’s board of directors in 1962.

Rob Delaney, Neko Case and Kelly Hogan combine forces for a very...

Sat, 11 May 2013 12:01:22 -0500

Rob Delaney, Neko Case and Kelly Hogan combine forces for a very musical Wits at the Fitzgerald Theater. Read Kelsey McDonough’s review.

See all of Chad Rieder’s photos of Nicholas David at First...

Sat, 11 May 2013 10:40:00 -0500

See all of Chad Rieder’s photos of Nicholas David at First Avenue.

"The Great Gatsby" and the Great Pumpkin: Writers who wrestled with their Minnesota pasts

Fri, 10 May 2013 10:59:00 -0500

It was my friend Eric Bennett who drew my attention to a reference made by Bob Dylan to his fellow Minnesota escapee, F. Scott Fitzgerald. In Dylan’s song “Summer Days,” from 2001’s Love and Theft, a woman looking into the narrator’s eyes and holding his hand tells him he can’t repeat the past. “You can’t?” he replies. “What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can.”

It’s a sentiment expressed late in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (1925). The eponymous millionaire is standing in the aftermath of one of his epic parties, speaking of his desire for his lost love Daisy to renounce her current husband and take up with Gatsby as, in their youth, she had longed to do. “I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” warns Gatsby’s friend Nick. “You can’t repeat the past.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” cries Gatsby defiantly. “Why of course you can!”

Dylan and Fitzgerald were both Minnesotans who ran off to the east—and so was I. Eric and I were grad students at Harvard, where I’d matriculated following my undergraduate education at Boston University, following my high school education in Frogtown. In 2003, when I met Eric, I’d been living primarily in Massachusetts for ten years, and I wasn’t sure whether I’d ever return to live in my home state.

Getting away had been at the top of my list of college selection criteria, and by the time I met Eric I was living in a place called Pforzheimer House, where I snacked on salmon with the likes of the Smithsonian museum director who shook his head dismissively and informed me that my home town of St. Paul was “a defeated city.” Since when? “Since when?! Since the Panic of 1893!”

Minnesotans prefer to ignore the resentful relationship F. Scott Fitzgerald had with his home state—he called St. Paul a “hell-hole of life and time”—but Gatsby is a Fitzgerald book Minnesotans can love, since its title character renounces his humble Middle Western origins to adopt a glamorous new identity that ultimately crumbles around him, while his unpretentious neighbor Nick contents himself with a serviceable bungalow and holds steady. Nick becomes fascinated with Gatsby, but never aspires to be him—which is generally understood in Minnesota to be the proper relationship between a Midwesterner and an East Coaster.

Minnesota looks great in Baz Luhrmann’s new Gatsby adaptation—even though the state appears in only one scene, where the young Gatsby rescues a stranded tycoon from a Lake Superior storm while Split Rock Lighthouse towers above in 3D splendor. (The novel suggests that the rescue occurred on the south shore of Superior, but never mind that.)

For that matter, the entire film looks great, and Luhrmann somehow, miraculously, manages to retain the subtlety and contradictions of Fitzgerald’s characters despite the fact that his general approach is the opposite of subtle. Things that are offhandedly mentioned in the novel are brought vividly alive and thrown in the viewer’s face; many of the novel’s classic lines are not only dramatized but literally dripped across the screen in sparkling cascades of Courier. Luhrmann’s Gatsby celebrates the book itself in a way that few literary adaptations do—celebrates it to an almost (many would drop the almost) awkward extent.

To Luhrmann, Gatsby is a tragic hero. Gatsby’s dreams may have been larger than his means, but to Luhrmann, the self-made man deserves to be celebrated for having the heart to dream them—in contrast to Gatsby’s “careless” neighbors, who take their success for granted and are bored by it. Without Gatsby, the Nick of the novel is wistful; by contrast, without Gatsby the Nick of the movie is bereft and wasted, his salvation coming only in his ability to capture his flamboyant friend in (Fitzgerald’s) prose.

The irony is that for Fitzgerald, the worst of the carelessly wealthy fools were found not in New York (though he ultimately met plenty of them there) but in Minnesota. Fitzgerald spent his adolescence on and near Summit Avenue—the West Egg of St. Paul—and he detested the shallow pretense of the local elites he encountered there. When he returned after college and military service, he found things little changed. Finding success with his debut novel This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald married Zelda and got the hell out of Minnesota—again.

Bob Dylan never really came back to Minnesota, except to drift occasionally through—but Charles Schulz did. The cartoonist, another of the towering 20th century cultural figures to emerge from Minnesota, had a distinctly bittersweet relationship with his St. Paul youth. As has been widely reported he was bullied, yes, and rejected by his hometown paper (the Pioneer Press, which passed on its first crack at Peanuts and to this day has never been given the opportunity to reconsider); but Schulz also had many local triumphs and developed a deep, abiding love of the little universe centering on his dad’s barber shop at Selby and Snelling.

Like Fitzgerald, Schulz moved out of state—to Colorado—when he married, but the move was in part to allow his new wife to escape the opprobrium she faced in Minnesota for being a divorcée. The couple later moved back to Minnesota, wreathed in Schulz’s fame and fortune, but they never really fit in; biographer David Michaelis describes the Schulzes in their lavish Lake Harriet home as “painfully misplaced.” Schulz said that he would nonetheless have been happy staying in Minnesota, but his wife was sick of the snow, and the family decamped to California—where Schulz, even after the couple’s divorce, would remain for the rest of his life.

For my part, I was bestowed a doctoral hood in June 2007, and that very week I climbed into my dad’s Camry to be driven from Harvard back to St. Paul. I’m still here in Minnesota, and planning to stay. I’m more of a Schulz than a Fitzgerald, and if I want to assume Gatsby-esque airs, there’s the Internet for that. My high school class holds occasional reunions at O’Gara’s Bar & Grill—where Schulz used to sit and watch his dad cut hair before the bar expanded to occupy that space—and when we play volleyball, if I miss a point the class bully still crows, “Ha ha! Some things never change, do they, Gabler?”

Can you repeat the past? Of course you can—but whether you really want to may depend on whether your route from past to present runs down Summit Avenue, Selby Avenue, or Highway 61.

- Jay Gabler

Jesse Cook makes it a double at the Pantages Theatre. Read the...

Fri, 10 May 2013 10:34:58 -0500

Jesse Cook makes it a double at the Pantages Theatre. Read the review and see all the photos by Patrick Dunn.

Charles Bradley and His Extraordinaires at the Cedar Cultural...

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:40:29 -0500

Charles Bradley and His Extraordinaires at the Cedar Cultural Center. See all of Alexa Jones’ photos.

jaygabler: One of the reasons he chose to adapt Ivan Turgenev’s...

Mon, 06 May 2013 14:57:18 -0500

jaygabler:

One of the reasons he chose to adapt Ivan Turgenev’s 1859 novel Home of the Gentry, playwright Crispin Whittell says in a program note, was that the story has “all these wonderful parts for women.” Such as? The part of the shallow and pretentious mother who wants to marry her daughter into high society! The part of the wisecracking single Woman of a Certain Age who’s not afraid to get real! The part of the sex-crazed maid! The part of the vain and manipulative married woman who can’t keep her hands on her own husband! And then of course, the part of the virginal and (natch) “intelligent” young girl who can’t marry the sketchy-but-philosophical older man she loves instead of the cocky young ass her mother would prefer!

Here’s the rest of my Vita.mn review.

southtwelfth: publiccollectors: An anti-New Wave t-shirt...

Mon, 06 May 2013 10:38:17 -0500

southtwelfth:

publiccollectors:

An anti-New Wave t-shirt offered by the entrepreneurs at Barbaric Enterprises. From the August 1984 issue of Hit Parader.

Sick of wimpy display typefaces? Support Windsor!

"Iron Man 3" punches the clock

Fri, 03 May 2013 09:08:00 -0500

You can see what they were thinking with Iron Man 3. After the escalating robotic carnage of the first two films in the franchise, followed by the grand fracas of The Avengers—in which Iron Man went through a wormhole to another part of the universe, then plopped back down to the pavement just in time for happy hour at Guy Fieri’s—it must have seemed like it was time for a relatively low-key outing, getting Robert Downey Jr. out of the suit and going back to basics. Maybe a subplot involving a cute kid.

This Iron Man, though, is all too earthbound—both literally and in the sense of the action-movie clichés that it wearily rehashes. The villain is a zero, the romance is a snooze, the cute kid is a paper doll. To paraphrase a much more entertaining action-movie kid, there’s no time for love, Mr. Stark.

Except that there is, because the forces of evil here are so meandering that not only are they vulnerable to some personal-security gadgets Tony Stark buys at Home Depot, the bad guys wait around for Stark to buy the gadgets and rig ‘em up. (Guess whose idea the jury-rigged contraptions are, and if you don’t guess “the cute kid,” then Iron Man 3 will surprise and delight you.)

The face of evil in this film is “the Mandarin,” a classic Iron Man villain whose original incarnation was about as racist as it sounds, but who’s been cleverly updated in a manner that will please most—though it left some (coincidentally white) trufans at a preview screening howling. I could have used a lot more of the Mandarin, played by a Ben Kingsley who’s been outfitted to resemble a vaguely Asian extremist but who delivers his lines like Johnny Cash trying to imitate William S. Burroughs.

Unfortunately, instead of letting the Sexy Beast have it out in a fistfight with Iron Man, screenwriters Drew Pearce and Shane Black give the heavy lifting to a second villain, played by Guy Pearce looking like a skinny Val Kilmer but making us wish Black (who directs) had just gone ahead and cast the fat Val Kilmer. Speaking of actors of wildly variable weight, Jon Favreau is onscreen here reprising the character he originated in the previous films—but his flair behind the camera is sorely missed.

Though it’s a disappointment, Iron Man 3 isn’t a bad film. It has more than its share of sharp moments, and Downey (who, like Ali McGraw in Love Story, looks younger and haler the closer his character gets to death) is still the best super-antihero since Christopher Reeve blew out the Olympic Flame. As his love interest, recently-anointed Most Beautiful Woman in the World Gwyneth Paltrow has no memorable scenes except a climactic trapped-in-the-wreckage moment that does for her abs what The Loves of Hercules did for Jayne Mansfield’s breasts, demonstrating once again that the sports bra is the new Wonder Bra.

The series’ refreshingly sardonic snap has simply become less refreshing—and less snappy. Like Green Lantern (a much, much, much worse movie), this is a superhero film that contains a metaphor for its own failure. As the compulsively constructing Tony Stark well knows, when you keep trying to replicate and improve an invention, no matter how wonderful the original model was and no matter how many cool features you add, you’re bound to eventually turn out a clinker.

- Jay Gabler

NEEDTOBREATHE at the Orpheum Theatre: Christian music, but not...

Thu, 02 May 2013 12:06:35 -0500

NEEDTOBREATHE at the Orpheum Theatre: Christian music, but not really. Read Patrick Dunn’s review and view all of his photos.

James Blake at First Avenue. See all of Jeff Rutherford’s...

Thu, 02 May 2013 10:03:00 -0500

James Blake at First Avenue. See all of Jeff Rutherford’s pictures.

Jason Isbell and Todd Snider at the Fitzgerald Theater. See all...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:51:21 -0500

Jason Isbell and Todd Snider at the Fitzgerald Theater. See all of Ryan Cutler’s photos.

Fleetwood Mac at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul: photos by...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 11:27:46 -0500

Fleetwood Mac at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul: photos by Jeff Rutherford

jaygabler: “Previewing the return to Minneapolis of the 2006...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 09:43:55 -0500

jaygabler:

“Previewing the return to Minneapolis of the 2006 Broadway adaptation of Disney’s Mary Poppins, Rohan Preston of the Star Tribune wrote a feature about the enduring myth of the British Supernanny.

“That’s only one of the cultural tropes on display through April 28 at the Orpheum Theatre. Others include the Happy Poor, the Burdened Rich and the Abused Toys. There’s some Sigmund Freud (Mr. Banks was symbolically castrated by his overbearing nanny), some Adam Smith (Mr. Banks holds firmly to the labor theory of value) and some Michel Foucault (I’ll let you conduct your own post-colonial analysis of the Caribbean immigrant who sells - literally sells - the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious to Mary and her charges).

“With all that theory to chew on, adapter Julian Fellowes seems to have concluded that leaving feminism in the mix would be a bit much. In contrast to the 1964 Disney film, in which Mrs. Banks was a spunky suffragette, this Mrs. Banks spends the entire show trying to convince her distant husband that she’s worthy of his attention. By the end, she decides to abandon her acting career because, she declares without a whiff of irony, she’s found her favorite role: Mrs. Banks. I guess Fellowes decided the Friedan-era movie was just too progressive for a story centered on a magical woman who solves everyone’s problems and refuses any pay.”

my review in Vita.mn

The Proclaimers at the Varsity Theater. See all of David...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:28:36 -0500

The Proclaimers at the Varsity Theater. See all of David McCrindle’s photos.

Trampled by Turtles at First Avenue. See Chad Rieder’s...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:54:10 -0500

Trampled by Turtles at First Avenue. See Chad Rieder’s photos.