WHEN WE CLOSE OUR EYES WE HOPE FOR DARKNESS, a sense of quiet. But what we usually end up with behind our eyelids is anything but restful: flickering streams of disjointed images pilfered from the cultural ephemera all around us, churned up by the chaotic roil of our disobedient monkey minds. The best paintings anchor our thoughts, urging us to focus our brainwaves on what’s right in front of us in…

EVERYONE WANTS TO BE PART OF SOMETHING COOL. And let’s face it — the coolest cats around are musicians. It’s a fact of life. This seems to be the principle behind Tony Nelson’s photo exhibit Hootenanny: A Community, showing through July 24 at the Fox Tax Gallery in Northeast Minneapolis. Through his images, the veteran music photographer welcomes the viewer into a local music phenomenon: Hootenanny, a…

A DETOUR TAKES ME DOWN DIVISION STREET — that gleaming, steaming strip of mainstream consumer claptrap that, indeed, runs like a division through the center of St Cloud. The nondescript cityscape is a fair representation of musical tastes here too, I think, as I turn off to meet my interview subject: commodified, familiar, and generally bland. The music scene here revolves around tribute bands that, while…

IT’S ALMOST SEVEN IN THE EVENING ON MAY 28, and people are gathering in the fourth floor rotunda of the library at the University of Minnesota Duluth for a publication event: Ellie Schoenfeld will read from her new book, The Dark Honey: New and Used Poems. Even the title tells us that the poems will feature the Schoenfeld trademark humor. What is a “used” poem? Previously published, yes…but I have no…

STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE. A lesbian saxophone player and Chinese-American libertarian mime walk into a bar… “Allegra Lingo and I were [out] drinking, following the 2007 Minnesota Fringe Festival,” says phillip andrew bennett low (the lowercase is intentional). Both low (the head of the theater troupe Maximum Verbosity) and Lingo (who tours with the band Buckets & Tap Shoes) had hit solo shows at…

AT LONG LAST, A COUPLE OF LOCAL ARTISTS HAVE CREATED A MOVEMENT PIECE incorporating the theramin. Dance artist Justin Jones and performance/sound artist Elliott Durko Lynch brought this early 20 century, space-age-sounding, electronic instrument to kinetic life in their playful, enjoyable geek-fest, RadioBrain, last weekend at the Southern Theater. The theremin is only one of many “instruments” played…

EXHIBITIONS OF WORK BY FELLOWSHIP ARTISTS CAN BE ROUGH ON THE EYES. Rather than being curated for style, content or cultural point of view, such shows are simply the result of an award system by an outside jury, an exhibition of various aesthetic practices rife with potential to create one visual, cacophonous clash. Not so with Northern Clay Center’s Six McKnight Artists, though. In fact, the show at…

“COOL.” THAT WAS MY FIRST, SPONTANEOUS REACTION as I turned the corner in the Walker Art Center’s Medtronic Gallery and saw Tomás Saraceno’s 32SW Stay Green/Flying Garden/Air-Port-City. Next, I wanted to touch it. The work, tethered to the floor and ceiling by black elastic bands, is a giant globule of 30 plastic elliptical pillows — some clear, some covered with black felt from which long, fine hairs of…

I HAVE NOT ALWAYS APPRECIATED ALL OF TOM ARNDT’S PHOTOGRAPHS. At times, I found certain of his images to be too emotionally blank and, ultimately, too ordinary to be compelling. Viewing the work, it was as if a clock began to tick in the back of my mind, reminding me it was time to get on with it, to find something more exciting to observe - wishing, for heaven’s sake, that he’d find more dynamic people…