AFTER I FINISHED MY ESSAY SERIES, JAZZ IS A BASTARD, in February, mnartists.org asked me to continue writing for them regularly about music in the Twin Cities and nationally. I am very happy about this — I like to play music most of all, but as a close second, I like to thinkabout it. And given the forum, I like to talk and write about it, too. The Walker and mnartists.org commissioned the previous essay…

THINK SERIOUSLY FOR A MOMENT ABOUT HOW MUCH CULTURE YOU CONSUME every day. This morning you likely started your day by choosing some clothing to wear, a pair of shoes, maybe some glasses-all of which have been meticulously designed by someone, somewhere. Perhaps as you were getting dressed, you tuned into your favorite music or TV station, or popped over to a social media platform to see what your…

CLAIMS THAT THE LITERARY NOVEL IS DEAD APPEAR TO BE PREMATURE. Even though the pronouncement has been popular for almost a century (“Death of the Novel” even has its own Wikipedia page), and literature sales continue to plummet — at least in print — droves of authors continue to write and publish long works of literary fiction and find people to read them. Among them are two local novelists who will have…

IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF DECEMBER 12, 2010, artist Martin Woodrich was asleep in his small, modestly furnished one-bedroom apartment in downtown Minneapolis. He’d been home all evening, working in his adjoining studio in preparation for an upcoming retrospective show. Like most Minneapolitans, he was glad to be indoors, sheltered from the blizzard that had dumped over three feet of snow on the…

THE TABLE COULD BE MY GRANDMA’S: little, round, and cheap, hewn in a factory from thin metal and a buckling wood veneer. The candles might very well be hers, too: cracking pillars and tapers and smiling animal figurines, the kind you imagine sitting atop lace doilies, aside fading family portraits. And that young girl — the one running her fingers over the candles with an air of familiarity — she might be…

THIS IS MY SECOND TO LAST ARTICLE IN THIS SERIES ON JAZZ for the Walker and mnartists.org, and I think I am more unsettled in these essays’ central point now than I was at the beginning. The motivating purpose of the series is to get more people listening to jazz, particularly younger listeners. I can tell you all about artists to check out, places to go, and give you some kind of picture of the…

I ATTENDED COLLEGE ASSEMBLIES AT THE MINNEAPOLIS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN (MCAD) where, for exactly thirty years, I sat next to Kinji Akagawa. In my first year, we were bad boys: We would joke, too much and in a less-than-silent fashion. That was insufficiently “Minnesota nice,” so the next year I moved over a couple seats from Kinji and sat next to an equally warm-hearted — but better behaved — colleague…

A NEW DOCUMENTARY TITLED INTO ETERNITY,  directed by the Danish conceptual artist Michael Madsen, ventures deep beneath the earth’s surface to examine one of humanity’s greatest feats of engineering, necessitated by one of our greatest follies — our own hubris. Our sense of self-importance and our perceived needs so great, that we’ve created nuclear power plants to generate the energy necessary to…

THE FIRST THING YOU SAW AS YOU ENTERED THE WEST BANK SOCIAL CENTER was the display case, in all its scrappy, jerry-rigged glory — gold paint peeling, glass panels cracked and duct-taped together, shelves piled high with stuff. The case was supposed to be a miniature gallery, a spot for tiny themed shows and collections of curiosities, but as time passed we began just to stash things there. Like a very…