NEWS TO ME: ADVENTURES OF AN ACCIDENTAL JOURNALIST IS A CAREER MEMOIR BY Star Tribune books editor Laurie Hertzel, mostly about her life at the Duluth News Tribune. It’s an amusing and enlightening window into a beautifully drawn, very particular world. The title’s a little misleading: it’s true that Hertzel didn’t go to J-school (journalism school, in the lingo-loving jargon of newspaper staff), but…

WHILE SIFTING THROUGH WORDS TO DESCRIBE STEFAN KAC (pronounced “cats”), I opened an email from trumpeter Dan Frankowski to find that he had already done the work for me. Frankowski called Kac “an intense, brooding, mercurial, funny, and passionate composer, tuba player, and thinker.” At 27, Kac has one foot in jazz and the other in classical music. In 2005, he was accepted to the Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead…

WHEN I FIRST STARTED WRITING ABOUT DANCE, everything was new and exciting. I saw every piece as one of a kind and wrote about each one as a universe unto to itself, with its own rules. Then, after a year or so, I started figuring things out. Then, the pieces I saw were no longer entirely new, but they were still exciting because they were links in a larger chain, pieces of the little world of dance here…

1964IS AN EXHIBITION COMPOSED OF ARTWORKS from the Walker Art Center’s permanent collection that were — for the most part — created in the year 1964, and the show features many of the “big” names associated with art at the time, working in Fluxus, Minimalism, Pop, and Arte Povera. The specific chronological motif that unites these works, although easy for audiences to comprehend, makes for a complex…

DURING THE INTERMISSION OF LAST FRIDAY’S PERFORMANCE of Ten Thousand Things’ (TTT) My Fair Lady, an audience member offered up an enthusiastic endorsement of the production’s intensity and emotional power. The odd part was that, after a bit of prodding, he admitted to never having seen a TTT show before. The lack of a set, the queasy fluorescent lighting: weren’t these elements jarring? His reply was a…

CAITLIN KAROLCZAK IS NOT AFRAID OF CONTROVERSIAL subject matter. Taking on taboo subjects such as physical deformity, violence, and death, Karolczak’s work provokes a visceral reaction in viewers that has led to both praise and hate mail. Her exquisite yet grotesque paintings (and one sculpture) are currently on view, along with Michael Thomsen’s sculptures in Science & Wonder at Rogue Buddha Gallery…

“THE EXECUTIVE WHO FINDS A WELL-TRAINED FEMALE can count himself lucky indeed.” As I peered into the glass case housing magazine spreads from the 1950s about the “new working woman” — the secretary — the above quote stopped me cold. The sentiment’s forthright sexism (executive = man; well-trained female = woman? Or monkey?) was not only disturbing, it was bone-chilling. As a prelude to the Goldstein Museum of…

THIS IS HOW BROOKLYN-BASED ARTIST OLIVER HERRING’S TASK PARTIES WORK: first, everyone shows up at an appointed time and place. Many times the parties are held at a college, but they’ve also been at libraries, parks, and other public venues. Next, there is typically a box, and this box will be filled with slips of paper with open-ended tasks written on them by the participants. After the slips of paper…

SO PERCUSSION’S APRIL 29 PERFORMANCE at the Southern Theater was remarkable for the sonic palette the four-piece ensemble created using, (almost) exclusively, instruments struck by the human hand. Additionally, their program evoked a palpable sense of excitement for new music, as well as giving a virtuosic nod to the roots of these abstract soundscapes. The opening composition, Steve Reich’s Music for…