Arts and Culture : Buzz

On KPCNews.com, which serves northeastern Indiana, writer Lou Ann Homan-Saylor describes her recent Twin Cities trip.

Her itinerary included catching Garrison Keillor’s live radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion,” at the Fitzgerald Theater, the St. Paul Winter Carnival, and in Minneapolis, Bryant Lake Bowl and the Mary Tyler Moore statue, among other things.

“A Prairie Home Companion” is a highlight: “The show lived up to all my expectations and I did not stop smiling for the entire two hours. Keillor received a standing ovation,” she writes.

On a quick tour of Minneapolis, she finds that “The city is breathtaking with arts facilities everywhere … home to this ballet, that musical company…The lights and sounds of a big city draw me in and certainly make me wonder how I can capture this energy to bring home to my own small town.”

The Knight Blog features a couple of its local grantees who were recently profiled by Minnesota Monthly. 

Dana Nelson of GiveMN and Laura Zabel of Springboard for the Arts are Minnesotans who are “changing the way we think about the world--and its future," according to the magazine story.

Nelson is giving philanthropy a new twist while Zabel is empowering artists, it states.

Stonehenge recreated in miniature with Rice Krispies. A bearskin rug made from a single Gummi Bear. A treehouse built into a single stalk of broccoli.
 
These charming, diminutive creations are the work of Minneapolis-based artist Brock Davis, who captured the attention of LA Weekly recently. In a blog posting, the newspaper featured photos of Davis' work, along with an appreciation of his style.
 
"In some pieces, Davis elevates a humble product, often iconic out of ubiquity in its own right, by manipulating it to resemble an iconic image," the writer noted, pointing to a work that recreates a Pink Floyd album cover out of Dorito bags.
 
The blog states that in Davis' world, junk food can be medium, muse, and, perhaps even a message.

A recent posting from The Atlantic highlights an interesting crime-fighting strategy at work in Minneapolis.

Classical music is being played at various light rail stations to “dissuade criminal behavior,” it states.

The strategy, which the city began using last summer, is based on the idea that “potential criminals find classical music so detestable that they won’t hang around the station long enough to realize their criminal potential: 'If it encourages some people to wander away because it's not their favorite type of music, I guess that's okay,'" said Acting Transit Police Chief A.J. Olson.”  

Minneapolis took inspiration from Portland. “Oregon lawmakers liked the tactic so much." says the Atlantic, "that they proposed a bill that would require light rail stations in high-crime areas to play classical music as long as they remain open.”

The recent premiere of the Travel Channel’s new show, “Bizarre Foods America,” hosted by local chef Andrew Zimmern, featured a number of outstanding local delicacies.

In his column in Mpls. St. Paul Magazine, Zimmern lists some of the distinctive places to which the new show goes, including area farms, streams, and lakes and a Hmong market.

The Minneapolis restaurant Piccolo offers a “lesson in meat glue 101” from Doug Flicker; a local VFW hall has a hot-dish cook-off, and at Haute Dish in Minneapolis, Zimmern pitches in with offal hot dish. St. Paul's The Blue Door Pub also makes it into the show.

Zimmern adds, “I couldn’t be prouder of the show, our local crew, the fans who came out to watch, and the local stars [who] opened up their farms and restaurants to us. “  

A January posting from Publishers Weekly praises Minneapolis' Coffee House Press for its recent accomplishments amid a change in leadership.

Two of its fall 2011 releases, Leaving the Atocha Station, a first novel by Ben Lerner and Song I Sing, a debut poetry collection from Bao Phi, “have been published to critical acclaim in major media publications," it states.

“Leaving the Atocha Station,” PW writes, “landed with the sort of bang that most book publishers can only dream of,” with a lengthy and positive review in the New Yorker.

It’s also been talked about in the New York Review of Books, National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” show, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Foreign Policy.

Minneapolis is the third most literate city in the United States, according to a survey done annually by Central Connecticut State University.
 
The university looks at each city's newspaper and magazine circulation as well as library and Internet resources. The study compared data in cities with populations of 250,000 and larger. Minneapolis has ranked in the top three since the study's start in 2005, and came in in first place in 2007.
 
This year, Washington, D.C. was ranked first on the list, followed by Seattle. Others in the top five were Atlanta and Boston. The bottom five included Fresno, El Paso and Corpus Christi.

In a regular column in USA Today called, The Pop Traveler, local writer Amanda Fretheim Gates makes a list of top 10 reasons to visit the Twin Cities.

The iconic First Avenue, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Chain of Lakes, skyways, Hennepin Theatre District, local brews, public art, and Jucy Lucy hamburgers are just some of the things that she enjoys about the area.

From her home, “I'm never more than 15 minutes from a play, museum, park, lake, farm-fresh dining, and tax-free shopping,” she says.

In general, “The people are friendly, the cultural offerings stellar, the sports exciting (if not depressing at times) and the outdoors flourishing all year round,” she writes.

The Atlantic magazine features Kopplin’s Coffee in St. Paul in a compilation of 35 top-notch neighborhood coffeehouses around the country.

The article starts out with a point about coffee trends in the U.S.: “Despite, or perhaps because of, the rapid expansion of Starbucks and other standardized chains, small coffeehouses are flourishing,” and Americans are getting more sophisticated in their coffee tastes.

Kopplin’s Coffee in St. Paul stands out in part because it’s “truly about supporting the local community,” with milk from locally raised grass-fed cows and Fair Trade and organic coffee.

The magazine also suggests stopping by Rustica Bakery in Minneapolis for a pastry.

For National Geographic Traveler, the St. Paul Winter Carnival takes fourth-place in the world when it comes to wintry festivals. 

Anchorage's  Fur Rendezvous topped the list.

The Traveler's writeup of the event explains how Winter Carnival began when a reporter wrote that St. Paul was "another Siberia, unfit for human habitation in the winter." Beginning in 1886, St. Paulites asserted their local pride with the winter festivities.

The web-based Education News, which covers various national and international education topics, recently highlighted the comic degree that’s available through the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.  

It’s one of only three such programs around the country, the story states, citing information from MPR and the Star Tribune.

Local author Britt Aamodt, who profiled over 20 area artists in a book called, “Superheroes, Strip Artists & Talking Animals: Minnesota’s Contemporary Cartoonists,” is quoted saying that a “recent crop of artists is taking Minnesota’s scene to new heights.”

Aamodt goes on to say that the local comic artists have "really spread their wings,” and, “They can tell any kind of story. And they just don’t have to be about men in tights.”

 

A photo from Jen Ritt, who is a student at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, is featured in a gallery of fireworks images from the BBC.

Ritt’s dramatic picture shows a figure poised with a sparkler atop a boat. The sparkler illuminates the otherwise dimly-lit lake.

The BBC photo gallery, which exhibits photos weekly according to a theme, presents images from England, Scotland, France, Spain, and other places around the world.

About 500 unique and formidable mansions have vanished from the Twin Cities, and now many of them can be "visited" thanks to a new book by architectural historian Larry Millett.
 
Showcased in The Downtown Journal, Millett's work, Once There Were Castles, tells fascinating tales about the wealthy individuals who lived in these often-massive homes. A notable example is a mansion on Lake of the Isles Parkway East that became the largest private residence ever built in Minneapolis. Yet the owner died before he could move into the behemoth.
 
As noted by The Journal, Millett will talk about his book on Nov. 7 at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul.