This is the second of two articles exploring ideas from around the world that might inform and inspire us in tackling issues in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region. They are adapted from a report [PDF] for the McKnight Foundation’s Food for Thought series by local author Jay Walljasper. The first story appeared Wednesday.

How suburban D.C., suburban Denver & Vancouver reinvent modern living

 1.  Rediscover low-rise density
 2. Legalize economical housing
 3. Build better high-rises
 4. Reinvent malls for the 21^st century

Battle lines are shaping up across the MSP region. On one side stand developers and neighbors who believe that convenient transit, walkable communities, big city amenities, environmental protection and continuing economic growth depend on welcoming more people-per-acre to our communities. On the other side stand developers and neighbors who plead that everything we cherish about our communities is about to vanish in the wake of unsightly mega-projects.

But there’s a middle ground in this conflict — which turns out to be quite a nice place to live. Think of Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Park Slope in Brooklyn, the Victorian Fan District in Richmond, the brand newPearl District in Portland, and all of historic Savannah. These are low- to mid-rise neighborhoods with high levels of density but a charming and convivial feel.

Density has become a dirty word in these parts because we associate it with ugly large-scale projects that seem to spawn social blight. But Edward McMahon, senior fellow at Urban Land Institute, believes “we can achieve tremendous density without high rises” by utilizing traditional designs such as two-to-four story walk ups that were once common in towns throughout America.”

Unfortunately the best methods of achieving low-rise, neighborhood-scale density are illegal under many current zoning codes — attic or carriage house apartments; granny flats or garden cottages at the back of a lot; unrelated adults sharing a house; small homes on small lots; houses without attached garages; housing above shops, business districts around the corner. 

Making such practices legal again would not only be good for urban vitality but also promote social justice, says Alan Durning, author of"Unlocking Home: Three Keys to Affordable Housing."

“We have effectively banned what used to be the bottom end of the housing market,” he writes.

CC/Flickr/Stewart Butterfield

Vancouver's West End neighborhood sports a population density approaching Manhattan but still retains a neighborly feel thanks to strong pedestrian amenities and a policy of locating garage doors and drop-off points at the back of high-rises, rather than the front.

A visit to Vancouver may convince you there’s even a place for high-rises in the livable communities of tomorrow.  The West End neighborhood near Stanley Park sports a population density approaching Manhattan but still retains a neighborly feel thanks to strong pedestrian amenities and a policy of locating garage doors and drop-off points at the back of high-rises, rather than the front — which is what destroys the curb appeal of so many high rises here. Close attention is also paid to tapering tall structures so they don’t block neighbors’ sunlight.

MSP suburbs could enjoy even richer rewards than the central cities by embracing density. Towns in suburban Washington, D.C, are thriving by creating a walkable, lively downtowns around transit stops, says Christopher Leinberger, an expert on real estate forecasting at George Washington University.

Declining malls offer another opportunity for building attractive urban-feeling neighborhoods from scratch, like the former Villa Italia mall in suburban Lakewood, Colorado, which was transformed into Belmar, a neighborhood covering 22 city blocks that sports 14 restaurants, 70 shops, movie theaters, a bowling alley, a museum of 20^th-century lifestyles, condos, apartments and townhomes.

How New York, Detroit & Oslo create beloved public places

5. Bring back the town square
6. Reclaim streets for people
7. Cover highways with parks

One of the greatest moments in MSP’s history also revealed one of our glaring deficits.  When the Twins won their first ever World Series in 1987, a massive crowd assembled outside the Metrodome in Minneapolis — all whooped up with nowhere to go. They milled around the streets looking in vain for a place to congregate. But downtown Minneapolis and too many other neighborhoods in our region lack central gathering spots where we can come together as neighbors, friends, citizens and celebrators.

The last place in the world we would think of looking for inspiration on community connectedness is Detroit.  But the city’s downtown is home to one of the world’s top town squares.  Campus Martius— a charming a 2.5-acre park created out of a former traffic island to celebrate the city’s 300th birthday — hosts gardens, concerts, ice skating, a café, an alluring fountain, an historic war memorial, lawns and lots of spots for people to hang out. Campus Martius has attracted more than $500 million investment on neighboring properties.  The software firm Compuware brought 4,000 employees in from the suburbs to a new headquarters right across the street.

CC/Flickr/Frank Nemecek

Campus Martius is a 2.5-acre park created out of a former traffic island to celebrate the Detroit's 300th birthday.

But how do you create new public spaces in existing communities without knocking down someone’s home or business. Look no farther than packed New York City, where a series of popular public plazas have been created by closing a lane of traffic here and there on Broadway and 20 other streets around town. Or take a cue from equally crowded San Francisco, where on-street parking spaces have been transformed into more than 35 “parklets” for neighbors to enjoy.

San Francisco also tore down the Embarcadero Freeway in 1991 to reconnect the city to its waterfront, liberating public space and sparking a development boom. Milwaukee, Portland and Seoul, Korea,also dismantled sections of highways to create thriving new neighborhoods or parkland.

Roads can be transformed into public spaces even when you can’t reclaim the pavement. One of the most romantic spots in New York, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade with its famous view of the Manhattan skyline, sits on a deck atop the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Chicago built its world-famous Millennium Park atop a rail yard. Seattle, Dallas and Duluth have covered stretches of freeways with green “land bridges” to reconnect neighborhoods. Osloburied a busy highway in a tunnel to open up the harborfront, which is now one of the city’s beloved destinations. Madridrecently covered many sections of its ring road to develop parks, trails and housing.

How Ottawa, Edinburgh & Harbin, China enjoy winter

8. Make cold weather cheery at holiday markets
9. Brighten long nights with artistic light displays
10. Construct ice castles & ice-skating trails

Most of us agree that winter is the biggest liability of living in MSP.

But is that really true?

Minneapolis ranked 14^th among 100 major U.S. cities in a happiness survey conducted by Men’s Health magazine and St. Paul landed at #8 with a grin. The seven cities ahead of us are all wintery spots (including Fargo, Sioux Falls and Madison), with the sole exception of Honolulu. 

Who ranked last?  Balmy St. Petersburg, Florida — with Tampa, Miami, Las Vegas, Birmingham and Memphis all in the bottom 10. In last year’s Gallup Healthways Well-being Index of the happiest states, nine of the top ten feature long stretches of real winter weather, including Minnesota at #3.

So let’s be glad we’re not stuck in the gloomy sun belt and discover ways to better appreciate winter. As the days of December shorten across Germany, Austria and France, people look forward to Christmas markets where they can find a festive atmosphere along with holiday decorations, gift selections and warm food and drink.  New York City imported this tradition with gala holiday markets in Union Square, Bryant Park and Columbus Circle that light up the season. 

CC/Flickr/AJ Batac

Ice skaters in Winnipeg enjoy trails that save them from going around in circles.

Our winter celebrations should not end abruptly Jan. 2. Keep the good cheer going as they do in Edinburgh, where artistic lighting displays brighten dark skies; Ottawa and Winnipeg, where ice skating trails are maintained so skaters don’t always have to go round in circles; and Harbin, China, (located near the border with Siberia) where dozens of massive snow sculptures and ice castles arise during January’s month-long International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival.

How Indianapolis enjoys a shining reputation by highlighting its strengths

 11.  Stand out as America’s best bike town

Indianapolis was once was the most overlooked big city in America, except for one day each May when the Indy 500 ran. That’s why local leaders embarked on a campaign to transform the city into an amateur sports capital, building on Indiana’s reputation for enthusiastic high school basketball fans.

Launched to boost economic development as well as solidify the city’s identity, the project soon attracted Olympic organizations like USA Track & Field and USA Gymnastics followed by the National Federation of State High School Associations, the American College of Sports Medicine and — biggest of all — the NCAA.  Today everyone knows Indianapolis as a sports town. 

CC/Flickr/Serge Melki

Indianapolis has cemented its reputation as a sports town with the NCAA headquarters and Hall of Champions.

Our biggest publicity bonanza in recent years was Bicycling Magazine ranking Minneapolis America’s No. 1 Bike City, beating out Portland, Ore. The truth is Portland won back the title two years later, but no one here (or anywhere else) seems to know that.  Let’s keep it that way by making sure we really deserve the honor — not just in Minneapolis, but also St. Paul and the suburbs. 

Bicycling, like amateur sports, bestows us with some very positive associations. Bikes are seen as youthful, healthy, fun, green, family-friendly and economical. Even people who haven’t pedaled over the past 30 years will notice economic and social benefits from living in a place admired as America’s bike capital.

Indianapolis again can provide us with inspiration on how to do it. The just-opened Indy Cultural Trail is an 8-mile bike-and-walk path cutting through the heart of the city that connects cultural attractions, business districts, shopping areas, parks, universities and neighborhoods.

Much of the Cultural Trail physically separates walkers and bicyclists from speeding vehicles — the latest trend in two-wheel transportation called Green Lanes, which encourages more people to ride because they are not shoulder-to-shoulder with automobiles on busy streets. The number of protected bike lanes across American rose from 62 in 2011 to 102 last year, and is projected to double this year.

Further investment in bike lanes would pay off sooner than you think. We are already a leader in the bike industry as home to Quality Bike Parts (QPB), Park Tool, Dero bike racks, and Surly bikes, so establishing MSP as the top city for biking will bring other employers in this fast-growing field to town, just as amateur sports did in Indianapolis. 

How Canada and Slovenia make people happy

12. Add a three-day weekend in August
13. Celebrate our cultural treasures with a winter holiday
14.  Explore new arrangements in working hours

Folks in New York, Chicago, D.C. and Silicon Valley like to boast about how many hours they log at the office. Our comparative advantage in competing with other regions could be a healthy work-life balance, which would attract young people, young families, entrepreneurs and everyone else. We can proclaim ourselves as America’s “Work Hard/Play Hard capital,” highlighting MSP’s high worker productivity and the highest workforce participation in the country alongside prime opportunities for biking, skiing or boating after work; seeing a dance performance, gallery opening and blues band over the weekend; taking the family to a museum, food festival or water park. 

To become noted as a place where people “work to live” rather than “live to work” will take more than a clever branding campaign. It means taking real steps to give folks a break. Most of Canada, which shares our euphoria about summertime fun, takes the first Monday of August off as a public holiday. Minnesota should do the same.  Whatever inconvenience and lost productivity felt by businesses would be more than made up for by the national attention we’d earn as a fun, generous, great place to live.

CC/Flickr/byronv2

Visitors tour Tron Kirk in Edinburgh on Open Doors Day.

A wintertime holiday worth adopting comes from Slovenia, where Feb. 8 has been declared Slovenian Culture Day. Numerous prizes for arts and scientific research are awarded amid a festive round of cultural activities. Milwaukee, Toronto and Denver do something similar they call Doors Open Day, an opportunity to tour historical and architectural landmarks otherwise not open to the public. Some combination of these events would make a grand occasion to highlight the essential role of arts and culture in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Obviously, the most important element in gaining attention for our Work Hard/Play Hard ethic is a serious commitment by employers, workers, unions, civic organizations and public officials to explore new possibilities for balancing careers with family and free time. We have a head start with the tradition of “summer hours” in many workplaces, where flexible arrangements make it possible to take Friday afternoons off. 

Our key to prosperity in a region many people dismiss as too cold or too remote has always been doing things better than other metropolitan regions. Our thriving arts community and celebrated recreational opportunities are cherished outcomes of this strategy.But to stay competitive in the future, it’s criticial that we provide people with more time to enjoy all that’s good around here.

There’s no doubt that the Minnesota Orchestral Association has been on a money-losing, unsustainable path for years, leaders of Save Our Symphony Minnesota said at a public meeting Wednesday night.

But, in the next breath, those same speakers accused MOA management and leaders of the board of directors of either incompetence and deceit, or both. 

In a graph-filled presentation (PDF), Save Our Symphony Vice Chairman Jonathan Eisenberg and Treasurer Mariellen Jacobson called on MOA leadership to be replaced and called for the governor, state auditor, the state’s attorney general, as well as Minneapolis officials, to investigate financial operations of the MOA.

This was heavy-duty stuff, delivered coolly to an audience of about 100 people at a hall at the Open Book store on the edge of downtown Minneapolis.

 It should be noted that the MOA was left in a dicey spot late last night and early this morning. It was asked to respond to a wide range of SOS claims and charges in a very short time.

New info or ho-hum old news?

The MOA  did dispute — or ho-hum as old news — many of the SOS points. 

Of course, in the end, only one thing is clear: Orchestra Hall remains  empty.

Most of what was discussed  at the Wednesday evening meeting has been published at various times by various media outlets. But much of the information had come out in bits and pieces. This was a compilation of data — mostly using MOA numbers — combined with a call for the political leaders to get involved.

(Despite the SOS hope of political action, Sen. John Marty was the only pol in the crowd. After watching the whole presentation, he became convinced that the MOA is blinded by the ideology that unions are bad and therefore must be “crushed.”)

Save Our Symphony is one of the groups that has sprung up in the wake of the MOA’s lockout of Minnesota Orchestra musicians, a lockout that has gone on for 14 months with no end in sight.

Yes, SOS says, the MOA has been “excessively” relying on its endowment for years.  But that’s just a small part of a larger problem, SOS leaders say.

Certainly, they don’t believe this lockout — and the negative public-relations campaign toward musicians — will solve any problems.  

SOS leaders believe that as long as Michael Henson is the MOA’s  chief executive officer and Jon Campbell and Richard Davis have key leadership spots on the board, there’s virtually no chance of a settlement.

The MOA continues to say that it’s the musicians who have refused to negotiate and that its management is ready and willing to bargain.

“The Board remains the party that is willing to talk and is clearly open to compromise, having already significantly altered its original negotiating position,” the MOA said in a statement issued this morning.

But, of course, just who is willing to compromise is  disputed. SOS says it’s necessary to end the lockout now and that both sides should agree to meet with a mediator, either George Mitchell or someone else. (The MOA rejected a temporary settlement suggested by Mitchell, a resolution musicians were willing to accept.) 

If there’s restlessness among classical music lovers in the region about this unending matter, that restlessness does not seem to carry over to the MOA’s board. It appears there’s been no pressure from within the MOA’s massive board  to demand a shakeup at the top.

Board seems loyal to leaders

The board members seem to support the MOA’s leadership position — that the only way to save the orchestra is to get large paycuts from the musicians now, even if that means losing  the “world class” status the orchestra had achieved.

SOS Minnesota leaders, however, believe that there are more productive ways to balance the budget, which has been out of whack for more than a decade.

Yes, musicians may have to take cuts.

But SOS contends that management has created many of the financial problems. It has cut the number of concert performances from 85 in 2002 to just 49 that were scheduled for the 2013 season. The steady decline of classical concerts has meant, not surprising, a steady decline in concert revenue.

MOA says there’s a simple reason for the reduction in concerts. There’s been a reduction in demand from the ticket-buying public.

“In recent years, the Orchestra has deliberately and strategically reduced its number of classical concerts to better match supply with demand,” the MOA said in a statement. “Our aim is to find the right balance of concerts to increase our total capacity sold and overall net returns and we’ve been successful in doing this.”

Additionally, in the name of saving money, current management cut marketing staff and its advertising budget, which SOS believes led to attendance declines. Under Henson, it appears the donor pool, so crucial to the survival of any arts organization, has shrunk from more than 20,000 donors to about 2,800, according to SOS.

The MOA disputes the SOS donor base numbers. Management says the donor base actually increased slightly since Henson's arrival in 2008 and now stands at about 7,800.

But the MOA says that Henson is actually in the process of rebuidling the donor pool.

Source: Save Our Symphony Minnesota

Using a study compiled by another citizen group that has formed around the lockout, Orchestrate Excellence, the money-raising performance of MOA leadership has been woeful, compared with fundraising done in Cleveland on behalf of the Cleveland Orchestra.

Donors in Cleveland have given at almost double the rate of Twin Cities donors. Performances by the Cleveland Orchestra have generated  2.5 times the revenue generated by performances of the Minnesota Orchestra. Advertising dollars, the group says, have been spent more effectively.

Again, SOS’s Eisenberg doesn’t deny that the Minnesota Orchestra may have a $6 million hole in its  annual budget.

“We can solve that problem,” Eisenberg said. “In this market, $6 million is not that much money.”

Beyond finances, trust is big issue

Of all the issues, the big issue that must be resolved, Eisenberg said, is trust. He believes current MOA leadership has lost any claim to trust.

It is the belief of SOS that public officials should feel compelled to step into this mess because they were “deceived” by MOA leadership.

When the MOA wanted the state — and indirectly the city of Minneapolis — to come up with $14 million in bond money for the renovation of Orchestra Hall, the MOA had a set of numbers that showed a balanced budget. Two years later, when it wanted to justify its lockout, the MOA suddenly was claiming it was bleeding red ink.

“Financial statement manipulation,” said Eisenberg of the MOA’s easy switch from black ink to red. They had “good numbers when they need to look good and bad when they needed to look bad.”

It is the public on the hook for the bonds. But it is the pols who accepted the MOA’s rosy financial promises.

This charge, of course, brings strong denials from the MOA, and it says that the legislative auditor already has studied, and given a nod of approval,  to the numbers used when the MOA was at the Capitol in search of bond funding.

It is Eisenberg’s belief that the whole concept of a $50-plus-million renovation of the Hall was an effort that has undercut the orchestra and set the stage, perhaps intentionally, for the lockout. Energy was spent hitting up that small donor base for the capital fund at a time when the focus needed to be on building the donor base and the endowment fund.

Not surprisingly, the MOA disputes that theory. Its view: The $50 million capital drive was only part of a $110 million drive: $50 million for the renovation, $30 million for the endowment, another $30 million for “artistic iniatives,” money to be used for such reputation-building things as European tours.

In fact, the MOA says, the capital fund drive inspired a wide-range of giving in which $98 million of the $110 million has been raised. Of that, $31 million has come from board members.

But the Hall remains empty.

The University of Minnesota uses the word “revitalization” to describe the massive makeover Northrop Memorial Auditorium (now simply “Northrop”) has undergone in the past three years. It fits, because seldom has a building been so radically changed and made so ready for a brand-new, active and colorful life. What used to be the aging beast people passed on the way to somewhere else, unless they were attending a dance performance or a high school graduation, has literally been reborn. Everything on the other side of Memorial Hall at the front of the building was gutted and re-imagined. A building that once stood nearly empty 300 days a year will buzz and hum with arts and academic programs.

We’ve taken a couple of tours, and trust us when we say the new Northrop will be jaw-dropping. The redo is a beauty. Plaster walls, terrazzo floors, sweeping staircases. Pleasing symmetry, attention to detail, and respect for the past. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to see it when it reopens in April, but you might want to start planning now. On Thursday, Northrop announced an ambitious and dazzling schedule of opening events. Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10 a.m.

A Grand Reopening Gala on April 4 will feature American Ballet Theatre performing “Giselle” with live orchestra. Other programming highlights include an evening with novelist David Mitchell (“Cloud Atlas”),a live broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion” with Garrison Keillor, a multi-day performance installation by Emily Johnson/Catalyst, and a concert by Osmo Vänskä and the Musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra, who will re-create the first concert performed by the Minneapolis Symphony at Northrop more than 80 years ago. Not all events are ticketed; some are free to the public, some to U students. Here’s the list of events scheduled so far. By Saturday, it should include ticketing links.

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We are deeply saddened to report that Sage Cowles has died. She was 88, at home and surrounded by her family, having lived a life of generosity, community service and affection for the Twin Cities arts and culture scene, which she and her late husband, John Jr., actively supported through their participation and philanthropy. Sage was a dancer, and the annual Sage Awards for Dance are named for her. She and John, who died in March 2012, were among the founding donors of MinnPost. 

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For the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, Minnesota bluesman Paul Metsa has released a new video for his song “Jack Ruby,” about the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald on national television on Nov. 24, 1963. Metsa wrote the strong, provocative tune in 1991, and the video tells the tale in black-and-white, including historical television footage. Did Oswald act alone? A lot of people still don’t think so, including Metsa, who sings, “Jack Ruby, Jack Ruby in a Cavanagh hat. Whoever taught you to shoot a pistol like that?” Metsa will perform the song live at the Sue McLean benefit on Saturday (see the picks below).

Mary Szybist

Graywolf Press is having a very good run. In the past five years, its authors have won the Pulitzer, the Nobel, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and a second IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. After Tuesday night, it can also claim the National Book Award, its first. Poet Mary Szybist, who lives in Oregon, won for her second book, “Incarnadine,” which Graywolf gave a glorious cover. You can read five poems from “Incarnadine” here. Go ahead; it will only take a few moments, unless you linger over lines about houseboats’ distant lights and blue velvet shoes. Twin Cities poet Matt Rasmussen was a finalist for the prize. His book, “Black Aperture,” was published by Louisiana State University Press and won the Walt Whitman Award. Here’s a list of the other winners and finalists.

On Thursday, Walker Art Center Executive Director Olga Viso was confirmed by the Senate and appointed by President Obama to the National Council of the Arts, the advisory body of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). That makes three members of the Council with Minnesota connections. Ranee Ramaswamy, founder and co-artistic director of the Ragamala Dance Company, was also confirmed. Already on the council: Irvin Mayfield, who served as artistic director of Jazz at Orchestra Hall until the lockout. Mayfield lives in New Orleans and heads the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra but made many appearances here in jazz concerts at Orchestra Hall.

How hip is St. Paul’s Lowertown? Hip enough to be designated America’s top hipster ZIP code by RealtyTrac, a real estate information company that analyzes hipster markets. Mayor Coleman’s office immediately had some fun with this. “I couldn’t be more proud that our efforts to create a cool, but not too outwardly cool, vibrant but not too showy, and modern but also retro-feeling culture in our Lowertown area has really worked,” he said in a statement that could have been written by Garrison Keillor. “I might even buy some oversized chunky eye glasses and a fixed-gear bike.”

Photo by John Whiting

The photography gallery at MCAD's art sale.

Need art? There’s a ton of it for sale this weekend at the 16th annual MCAD Art Sale, including paintings, drawings, illustrations, digital prints, original prints, photographs, fine art and comic art. The opening Thursday night drew hundreds of art lovers and collectors. Thousands more are expected today (6-9 p.m., $24 at the door) and tomorrow (9 a.m. – 5 p.m. free). All proceeds go directly to the individual artists or to MCAD Art Sale Scholarship funds.

We know two good reasons to head for the Mall of America during the next several days, besides the shopping. On Saturday, Nina Garcia, fashion director at Marie Claire magazine and the notoriously no-nonsense “Project Runway” judge, will be at the new Verizon Destination Store to help customers “personalize and find new and interesting accessories for their wireless devices.” We just want to see what she looks like in person. 1:30-3:30 p.m., 60 E. Broadway (Level 2, East 264). On Black Friday (Nov. 29), the Italian trio Il Volo will perform and sign copies of their new Christmas album. The teen pop-opera trio toured with Barbra Streisand in 2012, so they’re pretty good. 2 p.m. in the Rotunda.

Our picks for the weekend and Monday

Bob Newhart

Tonight: Bob Newhart at the State Theatre. “I am a minimalist,” Bob Newhart once said. “I like saying the most with the least.” The deadpan comedian might be the funniest man on the planet. Incredibly, he won his first-ever Emmy this year, for his guest appearance on “The Big Bang Theory.” Area jazz vocalist Patty Peterson and her big band will open. 8 p.m. FMI and tickets ($48.50-$58.50).

Opens tonight: Zenon Dance Company at the Cowles. Zenon is one enduring reason Minnesota is nationally known for dance. Its rare blend of modern and jazz, its work with masters and emerging choreographers, and its openness to change have kept it fresh and exciting for three decades. The Twin Cities company launches its 31st season with the world premiere of Stephanie Batten Bland’s “Caught,” the Zenon premiere of Danny Buraczeski’s “Ezekiel’s Wheel,” and a reprise of luciana achugar’s “Molten Substance,” in which four dancers put on blue jeans without using their hands, with live percussion performed on stage by JT Bates. Continues tomorrow and next weekend, Nov. 29-30. 7 p.m. FMI and tickets ($34).

Saturday: A Tribute to Sue McLean at First Avenue. A night to honor the great concert promoter who did so much for music in the Twin Cities, and for musicians everywhere; to hear the live music she loved; and to help the young daughter she left behind when she died earlier this year at age 63. Proceeds benefit the Lilly McLean Trust. The line-up includes Eric Hutchinson, Soul Asylum, the BoDeans, X-Boys, two members of the Jayhawks, Rogue Valley, Haley Bonar, Molly Maher and Her Disbelievers – and Paul Metsa, who’ll perform “Jack Ruby.” Expect scads of guests. Online and live auctions will include items from McLean’s personal music memorabilia collection. FMI and tickets ($50/$150 VIP).

Saturday: “Fathom Lane” record release at Icehouse. Michael Ferrier’s band has been all over the airwaves with their cover of Lou Reed’s “A Perfect Day.” It was coincidence, not an attempt to cash in, that the track came out online shortly before Reed died on Oct. 27, but it hasn’t hurt the visibility of the group Ferrier started two years ago. He’s writing exquisite original tunes, but if he wants to dip a bit more into the Lou Reed catalog, and then maybe think about some Leonard Cohen, that would be perfectly fine. Actually, he and co-vocalist Ashleigh Still can sing whatever they want. Fathom Lane (the name of the band as well as the album) makes lush, layered, spacious and woozy music that borrows from pop, rock, country, roots and jazz, taking only what it needs. As you may know if you’re a regular Artscape reader, we don’t spend a lot of time away from classical and jazz, but we love Fathom Lane. Batteryboy opens. Doors open at 10:30 p.m., show at 11. FMI and tickets ($8).

Monday: “Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special: The Day of the Doctor.” All of reality is at stake as the Doctor’s own dangerous past comes back to haunt him. Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith and Tenth Doctor David Tennant star. A behind-the-scenes featurette follows the RealD 3D screening. FMI, times and tickets

Photo by Mathieu Zazzo

Rokia Traoré

Monday: Rokia Traoré at the Cedar. Shannon Neeser of Theoroi, a group of arts ambassadors ages 21-35 sponsored by the Schubert Club, contributed this preview of the concert: “I’m curious and excited about this show. I emailed Michael Rossetto, the Cedar’s marketing director, and asked him to tell me about it. ‘Her 2009 concert ranks among my favorite all-time Cedar concerts,’ he wrote back. ‘I truly feel that an artist like Rokia is the embodiment of what The Cedar’s mission is. With recent turmoil in Mali and the persecution of musicians, it is of the utmost importance that venues across the globe continue to present artists from that region.’ I listened to some of her music on Spotify, the Cedar’s website and Youtube. She has a beautiful voice, and I love what she does with it. A song turns into spoken word and back again to song. Her passion for her music and her homeland flows out in a tumble of syllables and sounds. I read that her new album, ‘Beautiful Africa,’ is inspired by Western rock music but remains uniquely Malian. I’m not quite sure what it means, but I can’t wait to hear it.” Shannon also wrote, “The Cedar knows great music.” They certainly do, which has brought us to their doors on many occasions, not knowing exactly what we would hear but trusting that it would be worth hearing. Doors open at 7, music at 7:30. Standing show. FMI and tickets ($30-$35).

Heather and John McDougall, who are siblings, work in different fields and live in separate cities. He’s an industrial designer in Detroit, who helped design the Chevy Volt for General Motors. Heather, a law-school graduate, lives in St. Paul and has experience working on lobbying and fundraising campaigns, business plan analysis, and investor research. They do have two important things in common: Their father was a dentist and they share a passion for social entrepreneurship.

A few years ago, brother and sister merged their backgrounds with their passion and founded Bogobrush. Named for “bogo,” the “buy one, get one” acronym used by retailers across the country as a sales promotion, Bogobrush is a "buy one, give one" toothbrush. When someone buys a Bogobrush, the “give” is a free toothbrush sent to someone in need via a handful of community partners: Sharing and Caring Hands in Minneapolis; Apple Tree Dental throughout Minnesota; Family Health Care in Fargo; Covenant Community Care in Detroit; and Good Samaritan Health Center in Atlanta.

A single toothbrush is $10. A yearlong subscription is $40 and the buyer automatically receives a fresh toothbrush every few months. Over the past year, the McDougalls have been promoting Bogobrush and presold enough units to justify a large order with their manufacturer. They’re currently waiting for an initial shipment of 10,000 brushes to arrive next month.

“This is a toothbrush you’ll care about, that feels good to use,” both from a tactile and an ideological standpoint, says Heather. In addition to its charitable component, Bogobrush is constructed from biodegradable bamboo. It’s also thoughtfully designed, a covetable objet d’art.

Courtesy of Bogobrush

Bogobrush is constructed from biodegradable bamboo.

Bogo and social entrepreneurship

Dental care, which many people take for granted, isn't always a given. In the U.S. alone, the statistics are daunting: More than 80 million people don’t have access to adequate dental care. But the problem doesn't end there. Hundreds of thousands of plastic toothbrushes wind up in landfills around the country every year. Bogobrush is the McDougall’s solution.

The bogo strategy for social good isn’t new. The online retailer Toms helped pioneer the approach with its “One for One” program: When a shopper buys a pair of shoes or eyeglasses, the company donates a second pair to someone in need via its partners around the world. Toms recently expanded its online store to include Toms Marketplace, through which other social entrepreneurs and like-minded retailers can sell their goods.

While John was in college and Heather in law school, the siblings became interested in creating a business "to solve a community’s problems, not just for the business’s sake but the community’s sake,” Heather explains. They started by creating a company called Share Project, which provided the framework for Bogobrush. They also met with professionals and friends from varied backgrounds to brainstorm ideas around social entrepreneurship.

In part because of their dad's influence, the concept of a socio-eco toothbrush "seemed like it was most in our wheelhouse," Heather says, adding that the toothbrush is “something that people use every morning and night." At the same time, the siblings realized most people don't put too much thought into the design or purchase of toothbrushes.

“We wanted to create a new brand and bring awareness to an industry that there’s not a lot of excitement around,” she says. As a part of their research, the pair tested just about every toothbrush they could get their hands on — including existing bamboo toothbrushes. “We realized that innovation is pretty stagnant,” John says.

A revolution in bamboo brushes

An ecological, aesthetically pleasing, and functional toothbrush was hard to find. The gimmicky grips and handles currently common in toothbrush design “force your hand into one position,” John says. The siblings wanted an instrument that was easy to rotate in-hand to clean all the teeth, and would fit in anyone's palm.

Courtesy of Bogobrush

For design inspiration, they looked to professional dental tools and artist paintbrushes.

For design inspiration, they looked to professional dental tools and artist paintbrushes. They analyzed potential materials using a software program that calculates the environmental and social life cycle of a product. “If you’re just looking at whether something is recyclable or made out of natural materials, you’re missing a lot” of variables, he says.

Bamboo turned out to be the most eco-friendly material. Bamboo grows quickly and is easy to replenish; is naturally anti-microbial; and is extremely hard and durable, Heather says. John designed a sleek, cylinder bamboo form, with a head of soft bristles made of high-quality nylon.

In doing so, Heather says, “We stumbled on a small revolution in the way bamboo brushes are made.” Unlike other bamboo brushes, the Bogobrush requires precision CNC machining to produce its minimalist form. A watchmaker created the high-precision drilling template for the bristles. “Most bamboo toothbrushes have poor bristling, so we needed to work hard to improve that process and functionality,” Heather says.

'Change that starts with a toothbrush'

While Heather and John have been eagerly anticipating their first toothbrush shipment, Bogobrush has received plenty of publicity in publications ranging from the Huffington Post to Uncrate, a digital magazine “for guys who love stuff.” Last week, the company competed on “Dream Big America,” a live radio show featuring startups. The episode also re-aired on Doug Stephan’s "Good Day Show."

“We had fun pitching and the voting came down to the wire,” Heather says. “We did not capture enough votes to move on, but that's okay. It was a good experience and good exposure.”

In addition to providing people with an eco toothbrush, John sees Bogobrush as a tool for “implementing a lot of the ideas we wanted to explore,” including disparities in obtaining proper oral care, social responsibility built into a product from the get-go, and creating products that “take care of society and the environment,” John says.

“Hopefully, we can create big change in the world,” Heather adds, "by starting with a toothbrush."

 This article is reprinted in partnership with The Line, an online chronicle of Twin Cities creativity in entrepreneurship, culture, retail, placemaking, the arts, and other elements of the new creative economy. 

Photo by B FRESH Photography and MediaHeid Erdrich

Confession: I was skeptical when I saw that Heid Erdrich had written a cookbook. After all, she’s a poet! Was this an escape-route career, an alternative to the starvation diet of poetry book sales?

Then again, not many people get rich writing cookbooks either, and Erdrich doesn’t even have a chatty food blog or a hot restaurant to drive sales. As it turns out, Erdrich remains very emphatically a poet, and became a cookbook author only by default; Minnesota Historical Society press was considering putting a book out to highlight the region’s indigenous food heritage, asked Erdrich for advice, and suddenly, she says, it was a “tag — you’re it situation,” and she was talking with elders, pondering food origins, and in the kitchen testing recipes.

In “Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories, and Recipes from the Upper Midwest” (Minnesota Historical Society Press) Erdrich sets a modern, adventuresome, even global table that highlights Native ingredients, such as wild rice (manoomin), game and foraged plants, nuts and berries.

But her treatment of these ingredients is expansive, as she reaches beyond Minnesota to include Native harvests from across North America, and incorporates the Native traditions of recent immigrants. (She is a member of the Turtle Mountain band of Ojibwe — and half German-American.)

Curries work beautifully with indigenous staples like squash, and Manoomin Porridge with Coconut Milk is a perfect cross-cultural comfort food. She’s less friendly to that prairie-killing import, wheat, however, and discusses the impact climate change is having on the Native diet.

The recipes here are intriguing, accessible and downright delicious, but Erdrich pairs them with fascinating and sometimes amusing little histories, family stories, jokes and insights into the ingredients that shaped Native culture in Minnesota. As it turns out, there’s poetry here after all.

MinnPost: There are other Native cookbooks out there. What does your book do that those others don't?

Heid Erdrich: Mine tells stories. Mine happens now and tells the stories of our current food situation, along with family stories and cultural stories and the stories of the foods that sustained people in this region for millennia. A recipe is a story, I learned. The ingredients are the cast of characters.  

MP: What part of the writing process used your "poet's brain"?

HE: Each recipe has a little "headnote" at the top, and that was my place to concentrate language, be lyrical and imagistic and evoke emotion. Those are little poems at times. It was my favorite part. But there are about 125 of those notes, plus several essays and longer, more journalistic parts to the book, so it was a cross-genre workout. 

MP: You include numerous anecdotes about your sisters [the novelist Louise Erdrich and physician Angela Erdrich] here. Do you cook together often? Did they have opinions on what this book should include?

HE: We eat together more often than we cook together, but over a lifetime we are pretty familiar with each other's cooking. They did have opinions about the book's contents, and they all made contributions, but mostly they were supportive and kind while I labored with the project. Cookbooks are really hard work and I had no idea. Cookbook authors, I salute you!

MP: You write about how climate change is affecting the Upper Midwest Native diet. It's happening very quickly. How are people adapting?

HE: To be clear, the biggest change to the Native diet is colonization. We are struggling now with climate change and threats from mining and genetic modifications to foods. People are fighting very hard to keep from having to adapt — that's where we are now. Because there's no adaptation when your food is just decimated by contamination and weather. It is simply another loss looming where we have suffered cultural apocalypse. But the people I profile fight with a good spirit and I am so proud of our food warriors.

This book is my little way of joining that fight. We should all be concerned about these threats to the foods around us — they are our canaries and the region cannot become a coal mine or any other kind of mine for that matter.

MP:Let's talk about Thanksgiving. Do you "keep" this day? If so, what are you serving? Any specific table rituals you care to share?

HE: My favorite holiday — but I like to refer to it as Indigenous Foods Day, rather than the myth of happy Indian-Pilgrim relations. Really, it is a celebration of harvest and thanksgiving and family. The main foods of the holiday are indigenous to the region: turkey, pumpkin, corn, beans, cranberries and so on. I wish the whole country would agree to recommit the holiday to indigenous food preservation, food justice, and make it a time to learn about food sovereignty and the peoples who developed corn and beans, which now feed the world.

MP: OK, speaking of colonialism, you seem to really wrestle with the frybread issue here. Other non-native, adopted and adapted foods are included, and other recipes include flour, but it sounds like frybread was originally off the table for this book. I wonder, was there a pro-frybread lobby pressuring you to include the bangs recipe [a frybread variation beloved by the Erdrich children], or did nostalgia just win out?

HE: Shhh, the pro-frybread lobby is powerful and I fear retribution! 

Frybread is almost stereotypical of Native cooking, and I always resist stereotype, even positive ones. But there are also so many health issues related to diet in Indian Country that I have been really anti-frybread for a long time. But yes, nostalgia won out and I included a new recipe for "Pumpkin Bangs" a kind of frybread that incorporates an indigenous ingredient, pumpkin. My hope is that it makes people think a little about our food traditions.

MP: You make a bit of fun of yourself for being a vegetarian Indian [a joke, from the book: What do you call a vegetarian Indian? A bad hunter], but you also make the case that the indigenous diet is far less meat-centric than people might think. Is this a Native Diet for a Small Planet?

HE: [Laughs] No. But wait, yes.

Originally the diet of indigenous people balanced need with want the way “Diet for a Small Planet” suggests. As far as I can learn, most diets were not overly focused on red meat until relatively recently. Certainly there was no domestic production of meat animals.

But I hope my readers understand that our diets were micro-local, meaning that even within a culture, one group might have a lot of deer and another a lot of fish and so on. One of the folks I talked to from Grand Portage reservation said that the main foods up there long ago were turkey and seed grains, even though they were right on Lake Superior. In other places, the main foods were beans, squash and corn, with rabbit or manoomin and fish. These are sustainable foods, even today.

MP: In the end, this feels like a very Minnesota cookbook, with local ingredients but influences from all the cultures that have come here since. Is including things like Southeast Asian-inspired dishes controversial?

HE: I wanted to make a cookbook a lot of folks can use in a lot of places — in the cities and in rural areas, rich and poor and just in a hurry to eat. It may yet be controversial to include any ingredients that are not indigenous — I am sure I will get some criticism, especially from people who just read the recipes and not the essays.

However, not all the recipes are mine alone and I found myself adapting contributor's recipes to use more indigenous ingredients, so we have a varied way of cooking out there even among the Ojibwe, Dakota and several other tribes I took care to include.

I know from contributors' recipes that whether we notice it or not, we love the recent immigrant influences in our regional cuisine, as much the same way as we have incorporated German influences from previous generations and French before that and so on. There's no reason to pretend at some kind of cultural or culinary purity when we have all been friends and family for so long.

Events

• Nov. 22, 7 p.m. Book launch event, Birchbark Books, Minneapolis.

• Nov. 29, noon. Common Good Books, St. Paul.

David reaches out to his B.E.F. (Best Estimator in the Family) to guess the number of Earth-like planets in our galaxy.

I had no idea what I was going to say to Sarah Palin when I got in line to get an autographed copy of her new book for my dad at the Mall of America rotunda Friday. I was an embedded journalist in the culture wars, interviewing her fans and followers; she was on the last stop of a book tour promoting “Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting The Heart of Christmas,” a 238–page mission statement (complete with recipes!) on how to preserve “Merry Christmas” as the world’s go-to holiday greeting.

I was near the end of the line, about a thousand deep, and as my face-to-face time with the one-time vice presidential candidate drew near, I realized I was at a loss for words. Turns out there would be no personalized autographs, so I was left with a dilemma: What to say to one of the most pilloried and polarizing figures in modern-day politics while simultaneously preserving my own soul?

As I stood in line perusing the steady stream of mall-goers who were gawking, snapping photos, and snickering at Palin and her flock, I flipped open my copy of “Good Tidings” to find, on the first page I turned to, one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

Then and there I decided to give Palin the most open-hearted greeting I know. It happened fast, on a stage flanked by a massive screen bearing Palin’s image, huge silver Christmas trees, and the glittery ornament-stuffed windows of Callister’s Christmas store.

It happened just after I took this photo of Palin waving to fans in the upper concourse, just after the mall worker in an elf’s hat took my jacket and put it in a blue carrying bin, TSA-style, to be retrieved after my audience with the former governor of Alaska.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

“Well, hello! What’s your name?” said Palin, the sing-songiness of which reminded me of my days on the Santa Claus circuit and that Palin’s visit coincided with opening day of Santaland at the mall.

“I’m Jim,” I said, and shook her hand. Christmas music played brightly, surreally, over the mall’s massive sound system.

“Well, nice to meetcha, Jim.”

I took a step back from the desk, clasped my hands in prayer, bowed to her, and said, "I just wanted to say, ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘Namaste.'" 

“’Namaste?!’ ” she hooted. “Well, ‘Namaste’ to you, too! I gotta get back to it. The downward dog, the locking the knee, camel pose … it’s been two weeks.”

“Yoga?” I stammered, a little flustered at hearing “downward dog” in her famously folksy accent. “What yoga do you practice?”

“Bikram,” she said, obviously surprised to find herself talking about yoga in the middle of a war on Christmas.

“Of course that’s what you do. That’s intense,” I said.

“But I gotta get back to it. It’s been two weeks!” she said, flashed two fingers, and I was outta there.

Photo courtesy of Shealah Craighead Photography

“Go get it, baby,” I said, pounding my heart and flashing her the peace sign as I walked away. She grinned and stared, and as I headed out I entertained a fantasy of Palin’s next book taking on “namaste” and her next act as a soldier of yoga, mindfulness, Eastern spirituality, and Fox News’s correspondent from Burning Man.

Which is unlikely to happen anytime soon, given the fact that the one time the word “namaste” appears in “Good Tidings” is sarcastically, on page 17, uttered by Palin’s fictitious “angry atheist” character, Joe McScrooge. Nope, for the moment and for all eternity, she’s all about “Merry Christmas,” as are the rest of the fans, shoppers, and fellow Christmas preservationists I waited in line with:

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Nancy Watson, Brainerd; Laura Watson, Brainerd; Karen Wold, Park Rapids. “I like Sarah Palin. I think she’s a strong woman and a good role model, and she stands up to people for her beliefs,” said Laura. “I think it shouldn’t be offensive to say ‘Merry Christmas’ versus ‘Happy holidays.’ In school, they change things so they’re more correct, but I believe that if you celebrate Christmas you should be able to say, ‘Merry Christmas.’”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Zach Pilarski and Sarah Watzky, St. Cloud. “I’m a machinist at a factory in St. Cloud,” said Zach. “I came to see Sarah Palin because she’s awesome. She has great politics, great values, and everything she believes in I agree with. I think she’s standing up for what’s right. I’m supposed to accept everything else – everything else – but I have to stop saying, ‘Merry Christmas?’ I don’t accept that.”

“I’m a senior at St. Cloud State, studying international business and management,” said Sarah. “Going to a public state university, we know what it’s like not to be able to talk about Christmas or advertise it on campus, and that really bothers us because we really do like the religious aspect of it. Why do we have to say ‘holiday tree’ instead of ‘Christmas tree?’ It’s building up. Nobody should be prohibited from saying ‘Christmas,’ just because somebody might be offended. I’m from Germany, and it’s not that big of an issue there. I mean, our leading party is called the Christian Democratic Union, and nobody seems to have a problem with that.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Carolyn Messer, Janesville, Wis. “I’m the former librarian for [former Wisconsin presidential candidate] Paul Ryan, now I’m a tour director with a bus company, and that’s how I’m here. I’m with 43 other people I brought with me on my bus today. I agree with her book, that’s why I’m wearing my button that says, ‘It’s OK to wish me a ‘Merry Christmas.’ ”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Callie Marohn, Elk River; and Nicole Bastyr, Osceola, Wis. “You see a lot of things like ‘holiday trees’ and ‘holiday cards,’” said Marohn; “and everybody’s afraid to say ‘Christmas.’ But I just say it no matter what: ‘Merry Christmas!’ And people just smile and say it back.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Eric Amidon, Elko. “I think it’s funny that people get offended when you say ‘Merry Christmas,’ because that’s a holiday. I work with people from other countries – India, to be exact – because I’m a computer programmer and I’ve been in the Air Force reserves for 26 years, and they enjoy saying ‘Merry Christmas’ because it makes them sound inherently American.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Linda Johnson, New Brighton; Chris Stang, Paynesville, Minn.; Courtney Engelmeyer, Munich, Minn.; Nikki Leko, Sauk Center.

Leko: “It’s good to bring back the simple things, like Christmas, and to not forget about it.”

Engelmeyer: “She shows you what being a normal family, a traditional family, should be and she keeps tradition in life. We should be able to talk about Christ in politics, because it’s how everybody was raised.”

Stang: “She’s bringing back the values that we all have in our hearts. It’s our right as Americans to believe in Christmas and the meaning behind Christmas.”

Johnson: “Our country was founded on Christian values and Sarah Palin is trying to make sure we stay that way as a country.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Jamie Trenbeath, Hoople, N.D. “I drove six hours to see Sarah Palin. She’s a very inspirational woman to me and her beliefs are much like what I believe, like Christmas is about Jesus and Jesus’s birth, and he came to save us from our sins. I wouldn’t be offended if someone said ‘Happy Hannukah’ to me. I’d just say, ‘Merry Christmas’ and go on.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Nate and Trish Freeman, Northfield. “We both believe that Jesus Christ came to save us all, and that is the true meaning about what Christmas is,” said Trish. “So the fact that she’s celebrating this and making it so vocal in her book makes us feel really excited and happy with all of it.”

First Avenue on Saturday night was a once-in-a-lifetime scene of celebration and generosity. A parade of bands and a big crowd came to honor Twin Cities concert promoter Sue McLean and benefit her 12-year-old daughter, Lilly. “American Idol” winner Phillip Phillips, who opened later that night for John Mayer at the Target Center, stopped by the VIP room just long enough to get his picture taken a zillion times. On the main stage, Molly Maher, Marc Perlman and Tim O’Reagan of the Jayhawks, Eric Hutchinson, Paul Metsa, Mick Sterling, the BoDeans, Soul Asylum, Rogue Valley, Haley Bonar and more made it a night to remember. If you’ve never heard Metsa and Patty Peterson sing “I Shall Be Released,” that was probably your only chance. Running over five hours, the whole affair was a heartfelt and rocking tribute to McLean, who died of cancer in May after a long career of bringing exceptional music to the Twin Cities. The silent auction remains open through Dec. 2. Here’s a photo set on Flickr, if you want to take a look.

MinnPost photo by Pamela Espeland

The crowd enjoyed a heartfelt and rocking tribute to McLean.

The Birchwood Café in Minneapolis will expand and remodel, upgrade its refrigeration and HVAC, and buy and serve more food from local farmers, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign that exceeded its funding goal. The much-lauded, crushingly popular yet casual Birchwood was an early leader in the local food movement in the Twin Cities, and one reason we’ve become such foodie towns. At the third annual Charlie Awards earlier this month, the Birchwood was named Outstanding Neighbor and its owner, Tracy Singleton, was awarded Community Hero. Birchwood’s Kickstarter goal was $100,000; with 980 backers, it raised $112,126. One of the perks offered for pledging at the $150 level was something we looked at longingly: Thanksgiving dinner for 8-12 delivered to your home. Two days before TG, that tops our Wish-We-Had-Done-That-But-We’re-Dumb-And-We-Didn’t list.

Lilly Schwartz

Lilly Schwartz is leaving the Minnesota Orchestra for a new position as associate producer at SFJAZZ in San Francisco. Schwartz has been the Orchestra’s director of pops and special projects since September 2006. She started the Jazz at Orchestra Hall series, brought in New Orleans trumpeter and bandleader Irvin Mayfield as the artistic director, formed a relationship with the Dakota Jazz Club and Restaurant a block away (often, after shows at Orchestra Hall, jazz headliners walked down Nicollet Mall for a late-night set at the Dakota), produced shows with Sarah Hicks, the orchestra’s principal conductor of pops, and worked closely with Pulitzer Prize winner Aaron Jay Kernis on the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. Kernis resigned the same day as music director Osmo Vänskä. Schwartz starts her new job Dec. 16. Orchestra president and CEO Michael Henson praised Schwartz’s tenure here. “Over the last seven years,” he said in a statement Monday, “Lilly Schwartz has done a brilliant job in engaging new artists and producing new programming to broaden the Minnesota Orchestra’s pops and presentations series for audiences and to raise it to new levels of visibility … We will miss Lilly’s contributions greatly.”

Louise Erdrich has won an American Book Award for “The Round House,” her novel abut a vicious crime and a boy’s coming of age on a North Dakota reservation. Last November, “The Round House” won the National Book Award, and in April the Minnesota Book Award. A program of the Before Columbus Foundation, founded by author-poet-playwright Ishmael Reed, the American Book Awards honor diversity and promote multicultural literature.

Is mass government surveillance harming freedom of expression in the United States? According to a recent survey by PEN America, one in six writers has avoided writing or speaking on a topic they thought would subject them to surveillance, and another one in six has seriously considered doing so. Worried that the NSA is listening in – which we now know is not as paranoid or crazy as it once might have seemed – writers are self-censoring. Twenty-eight percent have curtailed or avoided social media activities; 24 percent have deliberately avoided certain topics in phone or email conversations. Writers are reluctant to research certain subjects and to communicate with sources or friends abroad for fear they will endanger their counterparts by doing so. These results and more are found in “Chilling Effects,” a report released by PEN American Center on Nov. 12 and based on a survey of 520 writers conducted by The FDR Group. One writer noted, “Even taking this survey makes me feel somewhat nervous.” Here’s the whole report. Read it and weep.

Chanhassen Dinner Theatres’ new owners (as of spring 2010) have bought the land under its sprawling complex from the theatres’ founding family, Bloomberg Companies. The financial details were not made public, but the purchase “reflects the increased levels of success we’re having at the theatre,” investor Jim Jensen said in a prepared statement. “Most importantly, it puts us in control of our future.” Meanwhile, MPR reported that the Capri Theater in north Minneapolis will expand into three neighboring properties, provided the Minneapolis City Council approves the sale of city land to the Plymouth Christian Youth Center, the Capri’s owner and operator, for $161,650. The former movie theater on West Broadway, where Prince played one of his first big concerts, was renovated in 2007 and has since become an anchor in the North Minneapolis community and draws audiences from around the metro. Next up at the Capri: “A Christmas Gift Concert” featuring Greta Oglesby, Thomasina Petrus, Regina Marie Williams and Sanford Moore. FMI and tickets ($20).

Courtesy of Brave New Workshop

“I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus” at Brave New Workshop

Brave New Workshop has mounted a mostly hilarious holiday show. Full of the topical references we love (a Comcast mention got one of the night’s biggest laughs), “I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus” begins with a jolly song about Santa’s two “beards” (one is Mrs. Claus) and gallops on through a series of sketches, loosely linked by cast member Andy Hilbrands as Morgan Freeman, who acts (sometimes) as narrator and also reads bits from “Fifty Shades of Grey.” There’s a bit about Santa’s reindeer and the reason Rudolph’s nose is red, a bit about OSD (Online Shopping Disorder), a bit about a creepy neighbor with a collection of Christmas trees, a bit about a nursing home, a bit about the NSA. The small, hard-working, fast-moving cast also includes Taj Ruler, Matt Erkel, Tom Reed, and Lauren Anderson, who could easily be one of the funniest people on the planet. The finale, a reprise of the BNW fave “12 Days of Christmas,” is a howler. Through Feb. 1. FMI and tickets ($26-$36, discounts available).

Our picks for the week, including Black Friday

Artscape is taking Friday off to clean up after the Thanksgiving dinner we could have let Birchwood Café prepare for us, if we weren’t such dunderheads.

Wednesday at the American Swedish Institute: After Work Wednesday. Stop by Party Central – sorry, we mean the American Swedish Institute, the venerable arts & cultural center and museum – for happy-hour drinks and food specials from FIKA, a tour of its decorated holiday rooms including Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, and Mexico (yes, Mexico, that little-known Scandinavian country), and “The Dinner Party,” an original short play by Minneapolis playwright Lily Crooks that imagines a dinner table conversation among Ingrid Bergman, Edvard Munch, Carl Larsson (Sweden’s Norman Rockwell) and Icelandic poet Snorri Sturlusun. Showings at 6 and 7 p.m. in the ballroom of the Turnblad Mansion. It’s all included with museum admission. The ASI is open until 8 p.m. on Wednesdays. Can’t make it this Wednesday? There’s also Dec. 4, 11 and 18.

Courtesy of the American Swedish Institute

The Swedish Christmas room at the American Swedish Institute.

Black Friday: We would rather be keelhauled than go to a mall on Black Friday. But these alternatives sound like fun. 1) Head for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which open four hours earlier than usual – at the astonishingly non-museumish hour of 6 a.m. From 6 until 7, the newly redesigned Museum Shop will give away boxed note sets, posters, and other surprises while supplies last. Enjoy free coffee and a treat from Dogwood and Rustica until 10 a.m. Check out the Northern Grade pop-up market. Visit “The Audacious Eye” exhibition for free. Stay longer if you want; regular hours start at 10. 2) Visit the Mill City Museum or Minnesota History Center, both of which also open at 6 a.m. Both are offering themed giveaways to the first 200 adults and History Hound giveaways to the first 300 kids, plus live music, and all galleries are open. FMI. 3) If you must shop, consider your friendly neighborhood record store, which celebrates “Back to Black Friday” with limited-edition vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, box sets and trading cards.  Here’s a list of exclusive and first releases. (“Linus and Lucy” by the Vince Guaraldi Trio on 7" vinyl? Hmmmm…) And here’s where you can find a list of participating stores.

Friday at the St. Anthony Main Theatre: “The Girls in the Band.” If you missed this award-winning documentary when it came to the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival in 2012, here’s another chance. Judy Chaikin’s eye-opening, entertaining film tells the story of women trying to make it as jazz musicians, which is still pretty much a man’s world. Except for a brief, shining moment called the Swing Era, jazz has never been about stardom or celebrity, so even if you’re successful it’s an uphill battle. Chaikin travels chronologically from the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an interracial all-female band that traveled the South during Jim Crow, to pioneering jazz pianist and longtime NPR radio host Marian McPartland, who smiled when a clueless TV host called her “decorative,” and today’s accomplished women artists including Maria Schneider, Terri Lyne Carrington and Esperanza Spalding. Here’s the trailer. FMI and tickets. Through Dec. 5.

Friday and Saturday at the Artists’ Quarter: Pat Mallinger and the Bill Carrothers Trio. As the clock ticks down to the AQ’s closing January 1, owner Kenny Horst is bringing in some of his favorite headliners. Pianist Carrothers is one of the exceptional artists who play at the AQ (when he’s not in Europe) and nowhere else in the Twin Cities. In September, he spent a week at the Village Vanguard with the Dave King Trio. Saxophonist and Chicago resident Mallinger has shared the stage with Herbie Hancock, Ramsey Lewis, and other greats. 9 p.m., $15 at the door.

Friday through Sunday: “Denk Plays Mozart and Brahms.” Acclaimed pianist and newly minted MacArthur fellow Jeremy Denk is back for more music with the SPCO, performing Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F minor and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25. (He played the Mozart two weeks ago at Carnegie Hall.) Denk recently recorded Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” and talked about them with NPR, if you want to read an interesting interview. We’ve been listening to his “Goldbergs” nonstop for the past week. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Ordway, 3 p.m. Sunday at St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church in Mahtomedi. FMI and tickets.

Friday through Sunday at the Fitz:“Gulliver Unravels.” Master storyteller Kevin Kling and singer/songwriter Chastity Brown put their own spin on the classic tale by Jonathan Swift. Weaving in stories from Kevin’s life and songs from Chastity’s repertoire, directed by Theater Latte Da’s Peter Rothstein, this program is aimed at ages 9-99, so it’s a good family event for TG weekend. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday afternoon. FMI and link to tickets (Ticketmaster).

All day Saturday at indie bookstores everywhere. Authors will become booksellers on Indies First day, a.k.a. Small Business Saturday. They’ll sign their own books, if you want, and try to hand-sell you other books they love. Nancy Carlson will be at Red Balloon in St. Paul, Andy Sturdevant at Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis, Benjamin Percy at Monkey See, Monkey Read in Northfield, Erin Hart at Valley Bookseller in Stillwater – you get the idea. You can check the map here or just show up at your favorite indie bookstore and be surprised.

Sunday: KFAI’s Brass Bash at the Amsterdam. Trumpets and trombones and tubas, oh my. Get brassed with three Twin Cities ensembles at this fundraising benefit for KFAI, Fresh Air Radio. The Jana Nyberg Group (with trumpeter Adam Meckler) starts, followed by the quintet Parham, Anderson, Schimke, Boettcher and Washington (which needs a shorter, snappier name pronto). The mighty Jack Brass Band closes out the night. 6 – 10 p.m., $10 suggested donation.

Next Tuesday (Dec. 3) at the Ritz:“Tastemakers.” Stephanie March and Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl of Mpls. St. Paul magazine co-host what’s sure to be a lively discussion of the local food biz. The panelists are Jacquie Berglund of Finnegans, Zoe Francois (“Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day”), and sheep milk cheese crafter Jodi Ohlsen Read. Apparently they’re all steamed that a recent “Gods of Food” article in Time magazine didn’t list a single female chef, so expect a few comments on that. 6 p.m. FMI and tickets ($10). Includes appetizers, cocktail samplers and a cash bar. 

“I think open mic nights are the best thing in the world,” says singer/songwriter Doug Collins, sitting at a table in front of the stage at Plum’s Neighborhood Bar and Grill in St. Paul last Sunday night. “How else are you supposed to get your stuff out there?”

Collins, a recently divorced dad from Eldridge, Iowa, works as “a receptionist” at the University of Minnesota during the day, and at night, he’s found something of a church in the myriad singer/songwriter open mic nights that burble underground all across the Twin Cities. Whether it’s performing to a full room of other songwriters and careful listeners at the highly regarded and well-organized Plum’s open mic in St. Paul, or singing to an audience of, exactly, two other songwriters on a Monday night at O’Donovan’s Irish Pub in downtown Minneapolis, Collins believes in the power of song and in his worth as an up-and coming tunesmith.

His look and voice suggest Buddy Holly and Marshall Crenshaw’s long-lost brother, and while he’s too much of a wide-eyed wise guy to come out and say it, he’s living the dream. His dream.

“Stephen Sondheim said, ‘Dreams don’t die, so keep an eye on your dreams,’ ” says the 47-year-old Collins, who received a degree in English from the University of Minnesota in 1996 and spent most of the past two decades working as a stay-at-home dad and published and produced playwright. He quit making music to raise his son, but got back into it after he and his wife divorced in 2011. He also plays out a couple nights a month with his band, The Receptionists. 

“To me, that quote means that if you think if you stop [playing and pursuing music], that creative impulse will go away. It doesn’t. It stays in there, and I’ve tried writing, but I’m a ten times better songwriter than I am a writer. I love Hank Williams, the Beatles, the Replacements, Dylan and Springsteen, and I keep going back to them for inspiration. These guys took themselves seriously, and worked as hard as they could, and that’s all you can do.”

Part of Collins’ hard work ethic means hitting the open mic nights. He’s been doing so on a regular basis for the past two years, and he agreed to take me on a tour of the area’s best open mics, the schedules for which are neatly compiled and updated at Open Mic Minneapolis and OpenMikes.org. From the looks of it, songwriter-themed nights are becoming more popular across the state and country, in part because the overhead for presenting bars and coffee shops is low and the passion within the so-called “amateur” songwriter community is high.

No question, the singer/songwriter model never seems to fade, as illustrated by the ongoing fascination with the mythical Laurel Canyon, Calif., scene of the ‘70s and the anticipation for The Coen Brothers’ forthcoming (Dec. 20) film “Inside Llewyn Davis,” set in the storied Greenwich Village folk scene of the ‘60s.

“Songs hit in an emotional place that I don’t think anything else gets to,” gushes Collins. “I love great works of literature and all other works of art, but songs hit you like a kick in the heart, in the best possible way.”

These days, the Americana singer/songwriter scene has never been healthier, though the open mic night is no place for impatient listeners accustomed to spoon-fed hits or polished entertainment. Instead, it’s equal parts fishing expedition and high-wire act. Performers only play a couple tunes each, but for listeners, you never know when you might be blindsided by a great song or singer, or be driven out of the joint by a skin-crawling folk balladeer. Luckily, Collins is one of the good ones, and his tour of five gigs in four nights occasionally recalled Billy Joel’s immortal words, “Man, what are you doing here?”

Sunday: Plum’s Neighborhood Bar and Grill, St. Paul (9 p.m. to 1 a.m.).  The Minnesota Songwriter Showcase is the piece de resistance of the area’s open mic nights, as hosted by songwriters/musicians Nick Hensley and Nick Salisbury and backed by a two- and sometimes three-piece band. The talent level is always solid, tonight highlighted by sets from Collins, honey-voiced roots-rocker Peter Lochner, and acoustic roots crooner Ananda Bates, all of whom captivate the room and stop conversation in its tracks.

“James Loney’s [now defunct] open mic at Bullwinkle’s saved my life,” says Collins, nursing a Surly Furious after packing up his guitar, his short work done for the night. “If you would’ve told me two and a half years ago that I’d be playing as much as I am now and part of a community like this … . It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I think it’s all anyone wants: To have like-minded people like your stuff and you like their stuff.”

With proven songwriter-wrangling skills and attention to keeping the five-hour showcase moving, Hensley introduces the next act, a fresh-faced songstress making her Plum’s debut. She timidly straps on her guitar and approaches the microphone to the sound of exactly one man clapping: Collins.

“First-timers always need more love,” says Collins, who listens to one meandering love song, then heads home to rest up for his 7 a.m. wake-up call and bike ride to work. 

Monday: O’Donovan’s Irish Pub (9 p.m. to 2 a.m.) and Morrissey’s Irish Pub (9 p.m. to 1 a.m.), Minneapolis. Across the street from O’Donovan’s, a sold-out show at First Avenue by one of the most popular bands in the land, MGMT, is winding down. I get to O’Donovan’s at 8:30 and find Collins sitting alone at the main bar, drinking a beer and checking his cell phone. His guitar sits tuned and ready on stage, his name the only one to appear on the night’s sign-up sheet.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

We’ve got some time to kill before he takes the stage, so I turn on my digital recorder and, as Monday Night Football glares from above the bar and Death Cab For Cutie’s “Into the Dark” plays overhead, Collins cheerfully talks about his life and love of music with the unmistakable veneer of the well-rehearsed performer who has sung to his share of empty rooms. What does he get out of it?

“When you get to this age, it’s like, what else are you going to do? You have to do it,” he says. “It’s how we’re wired. I tried not to do it, and I was miserable. Even if it’s only a small connection, you always want people in the audience. If you have one person in the audience, you play to that person and try to make a connection. You’ve gotta be ready. Anytime I hit that stage, I’m ready.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Hitting the stage at O’Donovan’s

He plays his first song, to an audience of me and the open mic’s host, Alex Kent, and then the MGMT fans flood the place. Amped up after the big show, they sit, drink, and chat with their backs to the stage. No one in the room listens to Collins, but some clap absent-mindedly when they hear him say, “Thank you” and he leaves the stage after his second song. He packs up his guitar and we agree to meet at Morrissey’s in Uptown, where a similarly live music-indifferent crowd holds forth for the club’s recently launched Monday night song pull.

“It’s a song pull in the tradition of the old Nashville school where people would sit around the table and share songs, and when one person wanted to play a song, they’d reach over and pull the guitar from the other person,” explains singer/songwriter/guitarist/host Dean Maser, feasting on a plate of shepherd’s pie during his break. “That’s where the guitar pull name comes from, and this has been going good. I encourage original music, and we’re all about original singer/songwriters.” 

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Maser and Collins at Morrissey Irish Pub’s Monday night song pull

After Maser plays a couple tunes, Collins takes the stage and plays his wistful “Lesbian Wedding” and“Davenport, Iowa,” a love letter to his old stomping grounds, after which he stumps the Morrissey’s crowd with a test on the Quad Cities. Nobody bites, but someone mentions he looks like Greg Brady from “The Brady Bunch.”

Polite applause is about as much attention as Collins receives from the crowd, which could do just as well with Morrissey’s reliably killer music mixes that warm the joint from over the house sound system. No matter. He thanks the crowd, thanks Maser, packs up his guitar and heads out the door to his 2001 Toyota Camry and the 5-minute drive to his downtown Minneapolis apartment.

Tuesday: Moto I, Minneapolis (9 p.m. to 2 a.m.). “I’m twice as old as everyone here,” cracks Collins, at the boho S. Lyndale Avenue hideaway up the street from another (Wednesday nights) open mic hotbed, Galactic Pizza. 

He’s exaggerating, but tonight’s crowd consists mainly of 20- and 30-somethings, most of them songwriters spread out on barstools, couches, and pillows in front of the art-festooned stage.

An air of hushed happening permeates the scene, which could be a ‘60s time warp were it not for the back room, which overflows with a bunch of rowdy bros in black leather couches doing a good imitation of “The League.” Still, it’s a genuine snapshot of a genuine underground, where live music and listening is pared down to its basics. More than most, the Moto I milieu suggests a creative ground zero of yore, where everybody involved feels part of the fertilization and birth of a scene. 

“I love all of you! Why not?” chirps Collins to the crowd of 20 after he plays his well-received two-song set, to a smattering of applause. “It’s all about connection; we all want to form a community,” he says later, sitting in a downstairs booth with three other songwriters, including Peter Lochner. 

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Playing to the Tuesday night faithful at Moto I

“Tonight I got home from work and I almost passed out on the couch,” says Lochner. “But then I was like, ‘No, I’ve got to sing. I feel the need to sing,’ and I get down here and I get my second wind. It’s restored my faith in humanity. A while ago I got to the point where I was just like, ‘I hate everyone, I don’t ever want to talk to another person as long as I live.’ Then I come down here and everyone’s so nice, and supportive. 

“I’ve been having trouble booking gigs, and I get to come here and play a couple songs. I’ve been making paintings my whole life, and I started making music and I just feel like it’s something I have to keep making. But if I just make it in my living room, nobody gets to see it.”

Too many cover songs and a deafening p.a. that makes acoustic singers sound like Motorhead blows me out the place. The room and vibe is sweet, but great listening rooms are nurtured, guided, hard to come by, and therefore memorable when you find one. Despite it’s groovy atmospherics and potential for so much more, Moto I remains just another bar that sells food, and books music as an afterthought.

Wednesday: Gingko Coffeehouse, St. Paul (first and third Wednesdays of the month, sign-up at 6:30 p.m.)

After four open mic nights in five bars, the coffee shop setting presents Collins and the other singer/songwriters with the polar opposite of a boisterous watering hole: The Gingko is pin-drop quiet, the singers backed by the sight of foot and car traffic rushing by on Snelling Avenue out the picture windows. Footsteps, rustling papers, and clinking glasses sound positively amplified in the face of the cozy-slash-somnambulant party here that recalls “A Mighty Wind” more than Greenwich Village.

Collins’ turn at the mic is stellar, highlighted by a song he sings about his son, “Jackie,” delivered with real heart to an attentive audience of 27 that includes a sleeping woman and large man who lolls on a red velvet couch and reads the obituary page of the Pioneer Press. In that moment, Collins is the epitome of the earnest gut-spilling open mic warrior, living and singing in the moment while he can, and looking forward to whatever comes next.

“You need to play in front of people,” he concludes. “You’re not going to get better sitting at home. You need to practice all the time and work on your craft, and part of the craft is you’ve got to be as good as you can be in front of an audience at all times. Every gig is as important as the next gig, and there’s nothing like playing in front of live people.

“It’s a great scene. You come off stage and people say, ‘Good job.’ There’s nothing better.”

Kevin Kling

“Anyone in the arts knows it's famine or famine,” says Kevin Kling, who, as a professional storyteller, doesn’t even fall into one of the usual arts career categories. But operating outside of the boundaries has turned out just swell for him. He’s writing a play for the Children’s Theatre, performing at the Guthrie and the Fitzgerald this winter, and planning a month-long tour of Thailand with Interact Theater in January and a storytelling trip to Greece in May.

“I can't wait, between Dionysus and Epicurus, I should be fine,” he says. “The Greeks have played a large role in my development as an artist and person. The archetypal themes of the gods and heroes, the journeys, battles, loves, losses, it's all there.”

Kling also has two new books out, including a career retrospective on a career that he says is not even half over. “It's quite humbling and a challenge to make the last three quarters of my life as meaningful,” he says.

The partly autobiographical “Big Little Mother,” out on Minnesota Historical Society Press (MHS), is the companion to “Big Little Brother,” Kling’s first children’s book. In that one, the big brother is quickly surpassed in size by the little brother in a funny, sweet story illustrated by Duluth comic artist (“Violet Days”) Chris Monroe. Kling has a bona fide big little brother in his family; he also has a bossy big sister, so the new book pays tribute to her and bossy sisters everywhere. Monroe drew this one too, and her goofy, lavishly detailed visions nicely complement Kling’s storytelling.

“Now that we know each other, I can write a page without overwriting, knowing Chris will find the life — a look in the eye, a smile, she's the master of eyes betraying the soul,” says Kling. “I thank the lucky stars MHS put us together; her subversion subverts my subversion.”

This week, Kling will be celebrating Thanksgiving with his mother, brother and sister, “and all the big little nieces and nephews ... future topics for sure,” he says. So we may expect a third picture book. “Yes, it will be the one before the fourth.”

A retrospective look at career

For adults, MHS has just released the first retrospective look at Kling’s career,“On Stage With Kevin Kling.” He says he’s honored, although of course, he’s not done yet. The collection includes the full scripts of his plays, “21A,” “The Ice Fishing Play,” and “Scarecrow on Fire,” as well as remarkable photos from shows dating back to the 1970s.

If you never had the chance to see “21A” on stage, you can now read the script and see why people were so taken with this story about riding one of the Twin Cities’ strangest bus routes. (Kling played all the parts.) The play may still be on stage somewhere; Kling says 21A has been running in the Czech Republic since 1987. Although his work hinges on all the Minnesota landmarks, jokes, and stereotypes (heck, he may have started some of them), his storytelling plays well all over the world.

“I guess the ice fishing play was a huge hit in Siberia, not kidding,” he says. “I was telling ice fishing stories in the outback of Australia and they were laughing like a bunch of Minnesotans. These were folks that had never seen temperatures below 50 degrees. I asked them later how they got all the references and I was told, ‘Our weather can kill us too, mate, only from the other end of the thermometer.’"

Kling says he’s rejoicing the return of winter, true blue Minnesotan that he is, and hopes to spend some time in an icehouse this winter.

“I try and get north a couple times for those days when the nostrils slam shut,” he says. How a man with minimal use of his arms can reel in a lunker shall remain a mystery. (He says he is — barring technology breakthroughs — as repaired as he’s going to be, following a devastating motorcycle accident a dozen years ago. “There's a point where you can keep trying to regain who you were or live who you are.”) But, as the ice fishing play explains, ice fishing isn’t really about fishing, much.

Funny, with many sobering moments

It is a funny, funny, and surprisingly sad play. And there are many other sobering moments in this collection. Although Kling is often thought of as a one-man show, he’s collaborated with many of people who make the Twin Cities a great place to catch a show. A poem for Ethan Johnson of the Brass Messengers, who died in a car crash, is here; many photos by Ann Marsden, who passed away last summer, grace the pages; we see Kling performing with musician Steve Kramer, also gone too soon.

But Kling says he is looking forward to working with other heroes; Dan Chouinard, Simone Perrin, Prudence Johnson, Claudia Schmidt and Dane Stauffer are just a few of the folks who inspire him on stage. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Events

• Reading and signing, “Big Little Mother.” With Chris Monroe. Nov. 30, 1 p.m. Addendum Books, St. Paul.
• “Gulliver Unravels,” a storytelling event with music by Chastity Brown. Nov. 29, 8 p.m.; Nov. 30, 8 p.m.; Dec. 1, 2 p.m. Fitzgerald Theater, St. Paul.
• "An Evening with Kevin Kling." Dec. 4, 6:30 p.m. Carondelet Center, St. Paul.
• Reading and signing event, “Big Little Mother,” with Chris Monroe. Dec 7., 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Fitgers, Duluth.
• Reading and signing event, “On Stage With Kevin Kling,” with Tony Bol. Dec. 10, 5:30 p.m. Chapter 2 Books, Hudson, Wis.
• Reading and signing event, both books. Dec. 14, 1 p.m. Birchbark Books, Minneapolis.
• “Charred Underbelly of the Yule Log.” Dec. 16, 7 p.m. Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis.
• Reading and signing event, “Big Little Mother.” Dec. 21, 12 p.m. Magers & Quinn, Minneapolis.

In June 1868, Civil War hero, Army surgeon, and one-term Rep. A.A. “Doc” Ames — who would later become one of the most corrupt mayors in Minneapolis history — relocated from Minnesota to Northern California to try his hand in the newspaper business. In his first month in town, he sent the following dispatch back to the Minneapolis Tribune, breathlessly recounting his early impressions of the city of San Francisco: “… It is a magnificent metropolitan — and a wealthy city — having more inviting qualities than any other, reaching out arms of wealth and happiness to all persons, cities, and countries. Her streets are beautiful, churches elegant, hotels splendid, stores large and well-furnished. She has an industrious population — mills, factories, and machine shops in active operation, answering to the great demands of the city and country.”

Most of America shared Doc Ames’ high opinion of San Francisco in the 1850s and ’60s: a beautiful, prosperous, world-class city, growing by leaps and bounds every decade, attracting ambitious, talented strivers from all over the world. In 1854, a few years before Minnesota statehood, a man named William Foster, who’d just migrated from the west and shared this opinion, put his admiration into action. (Foster had an exceptionally interesting life himself before his arrival in Minnesota that's worth reading about.) He platted a village site very near the rapids on the Minnesota River, in what would later be Carver County, about 30 miles southwest of Minneapolis. Foster must have had big dreams of reaching out arms of wealth and happiness, because he named his village “San Francisco.” San Francisco, almost as hilly in places as its namesake, sat not on a bay but on the banks and bluffs of the Minnesota.

For a while, Foster’s ambitions for San Francisco seemed to be realized. The next year, in 1855, the village had its own post office, and, most critically, was designated the county seat of newly organized Carver County. Alas, this prominent position in the civic life of Carver County was not to be; two other larger villages downriver, Carver and Chaska, were expanding rapidly at this time and overtook San Francisco shortly. The largest of these villages, Chaska, became the county seat in 1856 by popular vote, and in a few years the population had swelled to over 2,000. Over the next few years, Foster’s original San Francisco town site would be abandoned after a series of debilitating spring floods, and reclaimed as farmland for the many tenant farmers in the area. Foster himself left to return to the Bay Area, where he lived the rest of his life. Most references note San Francisco after this time as a "ghost town."

MinnPost illustration by Andy Sturdevant

San Francisco is, as far as I can tell, one of the very few ghost towns in the seven county metropolitan area with extant infrastructure, and one of a few in Carver County. Greater Minnesota — especially the Iron Range — is littered with abandoned townships, many with evocative names like Radium, Enterprise, Bodum, and Shell City, and some of them complete with uninhabited structures and decaying main streets. “Ghost town” can be a fraught bit of terminology, and if you drive into San Francisco expecting a Wild West-style ghost town, with swinging doors opening up to abandoned saloons, you will be disappointed. Save one farmhouse, the remains of the original San Francisco and any original structures and roads now seem to be completely gone, absorbed into a farm that sits at Highway 40 and Homestead Road. I spent a lot of a recent Sunday morning driving around, asking around and hoping to locate it, to no avail.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

San Francisco Township is home to about 900 people and a great deal of farmland.

San Francisco is gone, but San Francisco Township, the community that sprang up around the same area, continues to this day, home to about 900 people and a great deal of farmland. The township sits mostly along a dirt road called Homestead Road that roughly follows the bend of the Minnesota River. Much of San Francisco today is farmland and federally protected parkland. It’s interesting for what parts of San Francisco’s past remain, and what parts are gone.

Gone, along with the post office and any other original structures, is the Swedish Methodist Church and cemetery; there seems to be some confusion about whether the cemetery was ever in use or not, but according to the Weekly Valley Herald, the church was disassembled and moved to the adjacent township of East Union around the turn of the century. East Union, an unincorporated township, is still home to a very stately, 150 year old Swedish Lutheran church and cemetery, and historically had a co-op creamery, a gas station, a feed mill, a grocery store, and other attractions that drew San Franciscans for business and trade. The community of Belle Plaine, nearby, was easily accessible, and beginning in 1895, a ferry crossed the river into Jordan and Scott County. Any aspiring prairie Levi Strausses or Domingo Ghirardellis made their livings in those places, not San Francisco.

What little commercial activity there may have been in town seems to be gone. San Francisco shared one major similarity with its West Coast namesake: Most of the clapboard wooden structures were easily susceptible to fire. Newspaper accounts from the late 19th century are full of references to fires claiming houses, farms and other buildings. The land — beautiful, varied natural features ranging from bluffs and hills to woods and wetlands — was most useful to the people of this part of the county as high-quality farmland.

San Francisco Township is home to at least two very interesting historic structures, located about a half-mile from each other. One is abandoned, one is not.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

The Gehl-Mittelsted farmhouse was built by a wealthy German butcher well after the end of San Francisco.

Right on the river — so close in fact that the toilets inside the brick outhouse hover right over the water — is the Gehl-Mittelsted farmhouse. It’s boarded up, with a tarp thrown over the roof. Built by a wealthy German butcher well after the end of San Francisco but in the prosperous farming years of the late 19th century (and occupied by the Mittelsted family as recently as 1995), the farmhouse is now located in the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Nearby, there are foundational remains of a stone barn that once housed hundreds of hogs and cows. The Gehl-Mittelsted farmhouse is a beautiful and solid piece of craftsmanship, and tucked away in an impossibly picturesque part of the area. It’s the sort of place you’d imagine a yeoman farmer living in quiet, rustic contentment, looking out over livestock and crops to one side and the river valley to the other. The problem is, the house is itself in a terrible state of disrepair — in 2006 it made the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota’s list of most endangered sites — and there doesn’t seem to be any money locally to undertake the extension renovation it’d require. So it sits in a state of suspended animation, looking out of time, the most ghostly site in this township.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

The farmhouse is so close to the Minnesota River that the toilets inside the brick outhouse hover right over the water.

On Homestead Road, however, past the farmsteads and midcentury ramblers that line it, San Francisco Town Hall, built as a schoolhouse in 1917, still stands. It’s still used as the town hall and has been since the ’30s, where the board meets to discuss zoning, roads, building permits, and other local matters. It’s made with the sort of pale yellow Chaska brick that made the area famous, with a white cupola and brown tiled roof. Jerry Scott, who has served on the town’s board for 40 years, lives a few doors away. His number was on the township website, so I gave him a call to see if he wanted to talk about San Francisco. Jerry and his wife, Lois, invited me over to their house to talk a bit about the area; both have lived nearby for their entire lives. They tell me about the town, about flooding in the spring and taking the ferry (“it was 10 cents, which was a lot of money,” said Jerry. “I’d just go to Belle Plaine, we could do that for nothing”), about picking fresh strawberries and farming 160 acres.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

On Homestead Road, however, past the farmsteads and midcentury ramblers that line it, San Francisco Town Hall, built as a schoolhouse in 1917, still stands.

It’s the optimism of the “San Francisco” name that attracted me; it joins the ranks of Minnesota cities and towns like Cambridge, Stockholm, Athens, Hastings, Manchester, New Prague, New Ulm, New London, Rochester, New York Mills, and many others that took their names for other famous, distant cities. But in America, time marches westward, and it seems like a rare thing for a place in the Midwest to bear the name of a Western city, a city that is very nearly one of its contemporaries. Ten years before Foster founded San Francisco, Minn., its western namesake had fewer than a 1,000 residents, a sleepy seaside former Spanish colonial outpost that hadn’t yet made its name; by the time Foster had named his settlement for it, the population had increased tenfold. He undoubtedly hoped his Baghdad by the Bluffs might capture some of that magic. It didn’t, in quite that way, but the name lives on all the same, imparting a strange and wonderful cosmopolitan air to a friendly, quiet farming community.

Thanks to Jerry and Lois Scott for their hospitality, as well as Maidie Felton of the township board and Marlene Magnuson of the Carver County Historical Society for their assistance.

More photos of the Gelb-Mittelsted Farmhouse and San Francisco Town Hall are here.

Hugh Jackman is slapped, Kevin Bacon is connected, Kiefer Sutherland makes cupcakes, and nothing is sacred in the British Arrows Awards at the Walker. This 27-year-old Walker tradition (formerly the British Television Advertising Awards) brings out the crowds to laugh, gasp, and invariably conclude that British commercials are way better than ours. This year’s show is the usual blend of hilarity and dead seriousness, with ads for mobile phones, condoms, shower gel, cancer research, tyres [sic], Volkswagen, IKEA, Nike, the Paralympics, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, women’s emergency shelters, Lipton ice tea, and lots more.

Some make you go awww, some make you go ewww (shark fin soup? No fun for sharks), others catch you completely off guard (a man beats cancer, but then… sorry, that would be a spoiler). A few are puzzling; you probably have to be a Brit to get them. Almost all tell stories, beautifully and economically; some are mini-movies, with jaw-dropping special effects. The 75-minute reel airs multiple times starting this Friday and ending Jan. 5, but don’t delay, because screenings always sell out. FMI and tickets.

Thanksgiving weekend was a feast of arts events. At the Artists’ Quarter, the St. Paul basement jazz club that will close Jan. 1, Chicago saxophonist Pat Mallinger and globe-trotting pianist Bill Carrothers, both Minnesota natives who met during high school, played two nights of exceptional music– standards by Monk, Coltrane and Charlie Parker, originals by Mallinger – for standing-room crowds. Although some of the same tunes were played both nights, they couldn’t have sounded more different. Coming up in the storied club’s final month: Happy Apple Dec. 6-7, Eric Alexander and David Hazeltine Dec. 20-21, a Final Weekend Jam Dec. 27-28, and a parade of area artists on the week nights. See the complete calendar online.

At the Walker on Saturday, the 41st annual Choreographer’s Evening featured 10 dances (chosen from 60 auditioned over three days in August) by Jes Nelson, Juan Manual Adalpe, Otto Ramstad, Angharad Davies, Morgan Thorson, and other Twin Cities “bad asses,” in the words of curators Chris Yon and Taryn Griggs. The program, which Yon and Griggs described as a "mix-tape" for  their longtime friend and supporter Nicky Paraiso, bore their idiosyncratic, screwball stamp; the selections were smart, witty, humorous, deadpan, and occasionally devastating. Local musician/essayist/poet Dessa was in the house; choreographer Joanne Spencer set her work, “Still Too Long,” to her music. Especially if you don’t know a lot about dance, this annual event is a rare and fascinating opportunity to experience it in small bits, like short films; you might want to make a note in your calendar for next November. After seeing the powerful, elastic Otto Ramstad dance “Untitled (working title),” we plan to follow him around like puppies. We’d like to see a lot more of Angharad Davies’ work after her thoroughly engrossing “THROB,” and also Jes Nelson’s, whose “Sugar Babies” was a surprising and illuminating send-up of traditional tap dance. And anything by Yon and Griggs, of course, anytime and anywhere.

On Sunday, the splendid pianist, MacArthur fellow, writer on music for the New Yorker, and bloggerJeremy Denk played his third concert of the weekend with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. The first two, on Friday and Saturday, were at the Ordway, but Sunday’s was at St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church in Mahtomedi, where the sun poured in through giant windows, illuminating the stage, the pipes of the church’s organ, and all that blonde Lutheran wood. The haunting and beautiful Brahms piano quintet in F minor, featuring a quartet drawn from the orchestra (Steven Copes and Ruggero Allifranchini on violin, Maiya Papach on viola, Peter Wiley on cello), was followed by Mozart’s Concerto No. 25 for piano and orchestra. For the Mozart, the top of the piano was removed and the piano turned so Denk faced the musicians, not the audience. He explained that the arrangement was one Mozart would have used, and it allowed him to have a conversation with the musicians, as if they were all at Thanksgiving dinner. The Mozart, a piece Denk especially loves, was a work of light and darkness, certainty and uncertainty that unfolded as the day’s light waned in the sanctuary. If you have only heard the SPCO at the Ordway, consider attending one of the neighborhood performances, which are special in their own ways. We asked the SPCO if the neighborhood series will continue once the new Concert Hall at the Ordway opens in spring 2015. We’re happy to report that yes, it will.

Courtesy of the Guthrie

Jonatha Brooke in “My Mother Has Four Noses”

After playing to sold-out houses at the Playwrights’ Center in August, Jonatha Brooke’s “My Mother Has Four Noses” moves to the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio for two nights starting Dec. 16. The play with music draws on Brooke’s experiences caring for her mother as she declined into the final stages of Alzheimer’s. An acclaimed singer/songwriter, Brooke has made two albums with her band, The Story, and eight solo recordings including, most recently, “The Works,” which combines previously unheard and unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics with her own music and arrangements. Jeremy Cohen of the Playwrights’ Center directs. 7:30 p.m. Monday-Tuesday, Dec. 16-17. FMI and tickets.

What’s happening with the Minnesota African American Museum (MAAM)? According to a story published at InsightNews.com the Friday before Thanksgiving, the main building – the historic Coe Mansion at 1700 3rd Ave. S. in Minneapolis – remains vacant and its condition worsens by the day. “The building [is] in disrepair and far from being visitor ready … when a dispute with the contractor arose midway through renovations the work stalled and left the building in near shambles … the property sits with exposed electrical, unfinished plumbing and vulnerable to the elements … rodents such as squirrels and others are becoming a problem and money that could have been used elsewhere has to be used for extermination.” MAAM was originally scheduled to open in Summer 2011; that was pushed to May 2012, then Sept. 2012, the month the contractor “jumped ship and walked off the job,” said Roxanne Givens, one of the museum’s founders. A promised $1 million bond from the state has been denied. What’s next? “The museum is in talks with the county and the state … it is hopeful to reach some resolution with the contractor to get the workers back on the project … Givens said what is clear is that she and others will not rest until they see the completion of MAAM.”

The Minnesota Historical Society has announced a new Legacy Research Fellowship. Post-college Minnesota scholars may apply for a stipend of $1,000-$5,000 to research Minnesota history and cultural heritage at the Society’s Gale Family Library. Of special interest, according to Jennifer Jones, director of the Society’s Library and Collections, are “areas where there is a scholarly gap.” So – what would you like to know about Minnesota history? The call for applicants is open until Monday, Feb. 3. FMI.

The Minnesota State Arts Boardis looking for an accountant. You’ll reconcile grantees’ financial records, manage day-to-day administrative expenditures, and perform other duties assigned by the finance director. Go here and enter job posting number 13ARTB000006.

What are Santa’s reindeer doing as they await the Big Night? See for yourself at Animal Planet’s Reindeer Cam, which this year stars the reindeer at St. Paul’s Como Park Zoo and Conservatory.

Our picks for the week

Charlie Quimby

Wednesday: Charlie Quimby reads from his new novel, “Monument Road.” Leonard Self has spent the last year paying down debts, unwinding from his marginal ranch, and fending off depression. Just one obligation remains: taking his wife’s ashes to his favorite overlook, where he plans to step off the cliff with her. A Publishers Weekly “Big Indie Book” of Fall 2013, “Monument Road” is getting the kind of reviews first-time novelists rarely earn. MinnPost readers know Quimby from his frequent appearances in our Minnesota Blog Cabin column. A Carleton graduate, he’s extending a special invitation to fellow Carls for this evening’s event at SubText: A Bookstore. Oles are welcome, too. 7 p.m., 165 Western Ave. N., St. Paul. Free.

Thursday: First Thursday in the Arts District. The painters, sculptors, printmakers, photographers, ceramists, textile and fiber artists, jewelers, and furniture makers of the Northrop King Building open their doors to visitors and shoppers from 5 to 9 p.m. 1500 Jackson St. NE, Minneapolis. Free.

Thursday: Cookie House Press: A Cookie Potluck and Book Sale. Each year, Coffee House Press hosts a holiday party and cookie potluck in its northeast Minneapolis offices. Heather Hartman of the Mill City Farmers Market and Nourish Catering is this year’s chef-in-residence. Bring your own homemade cookies to share and swap; buy books and have them signed by local authors. A bookish holiday sing-along is also planned. The event is part of Coffee House’s Writers and Readers Library Residency Program. 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.; presentation at 6 p.m. 79 Thirteenth Ave. NE, Suite 110, Minneapolis. Free.

Courtesy of Rifftrax

“Rifftrax Live: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians": It's going to be silly.

Thursday: “Rifftrax Live: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.” For fans of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” (which started in the Twin Cities, so their numbers are legion). Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett mock the 1964 classic (we use that term very loosely) in which the Martians kidnap Santa. Pia Zadora plays someone called “Girmar.” It’s going to be silly. 7 p.m. Go here and enter your ZIP to find the theater near you and buy tickets.

A few years ago, my friend Kurt and I were discussing a plumbing or hardware issue of one kind or another, and he made an off-hand reference to checking for something at a local “city desk.”

I asked why the local newspaper would have plumbing supplies.

No, no, no, Kurt said. Not that sort of city desk. He meant the city desk you find at lumberyards, small manufacturers, and electrical and plumbing supply houses. It’s like the will-call window, he said, the place where you order or pick up your stuff. 

“City desk” was a phrase I’d never heard before — or not in the context of lumberyards and plumbing suppliers, anyway. The definition of “city desk” that I knew about was the one you find in the dictionary, which is “the newspaper department that handles local news.” That’s a somewhat antiquated term in journalism these days – the city desk now handles news for the “metro section” – but it’s still one that you hear in a newspaper context once in a while. Even in the largest dictionaries, like the OED, it’s the only given definition for the term.

After my conversation with Kurt, though, I’d start seeing the phrase all over the Twin Cities. Mostly, it’d turn up on what James Lileks has called “ghost signs,” those faded advertisements hand-painted on the sides of commercial brick buildings in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries that remain long after the associated businesses have disappeared: former warehouses, small manufacturers, building supply companies. But I’d also see it in small letters on signs for currently existing companies and around warehouses, usually on a non-public door or the bottom of a sign, in industrial parks.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

City desks mostly appear on "ghost signs."

And of course, in the phonebook. It’s all over the phonebooks. City desks are listed at Drywall Supplies Co. in St. Michael and Advance Shoring in St. Paul. There’s one at each location of the Pipeline Supply Company in Hopkins, Ham Lake, Grand Rapids, Monticello and Oakdale. There’s another at the Dakota Supply Group. Western Steel and Plumbing of Bismarck and Minot both have city desks. Viking Electric Supply of Minneapolis has at least three city desk employees. Says Border State Enterprises of Fargo on its website: “No matter where we serve our customers, our City Desks and Will Call locations are always staffed with employee-owners willing to go the extra mile.”

It’s a phrase that’s out there, but seems only to be used by people in the know. For example, on one unreasonably crabby online review, a guy said this of a local supplier: “Their voice response system listed a bunch of names and one extension called ‘City Desk.’ ” He then adds, with a touch of irritated bewilderment: “I don't know what that means.”

I began to wonder if this was a regionalism. It’s easy to find references to city desks in the Twin Cities, Greater Minnesota, and in the Dakotas. Look beyond that, though, and anything you might find in reference to city desks elsewhere in the rest of the U.S. has to do with journalism. No references to non-newspaper city desks anywhere in the New York Times, from 1858 to present. A look through the Yellow Pages in New York City, Houston, and Seattle don’t turn up anything approaching a city desk as a supplier will-call counter. Same with web searches: city desks in industrial suppliers and warehouses all over the western Great Lakes and northern Great Plains, but not much anywhere else.

To test this theory, I called large plumbing supply warehouses on opposite sides of the country: one in Portland, Maine, and another in Portland, Ore. I asked if I could be connected to the city desk. Both of the people that picked up the phone said almost the exact thing: “City … what?” Then a baffled pause. Then: “Uh, this is a plumbing-supply place.”

I told the person in Maine I thought the “city desk” was what the will-call counter was called. “Uh-huh,” she said skeptically, clearly believing I was a misinformed rube. “Yeah, we don’t sell to the public.” I realize this isn’t a very scientific approach, but it seemed to confirm my suspicions. 

To find out, I talked to a few plumbers, electricians, and city desk employees around the Twin Cities, and visited a few city desks to find out if this is in fact a regionalism, or an industry-wide term.

Erik Nelson, master plumber at Erik Nelson Plumbing in south Minneapolis, isn’t so sure about the regionally specific aspect: “I started my plumbing career in San Francisco, California, and the term ‘city desk’ is used there, too. It is also used in Rochester, New York. So maybe it's national.”

Nelson makes a distinction, describing the city desk as a public pickup desk, versus one meant only for contractors: “The city desk is the counter you go to for parts and common fixtures. Some supply houses might have showrooms with upscale fixtures and things like carpet. The city desk is usually very separate from these areas.

“It's not a hard and fast rule, but if a place has a city desk, you probably don't belong there or aren't really welcome there unless you are a licensed member of the given trade.” Maybe the best information of all: “Another common characteristic of a good city desk is the presence of popcorn, doughnuts, hot dogs and coffee.”

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

"People ask for what they want, and you get it for them."

Ethan Rakow, at Gopher Plumbing Supply in St. Paul, confirms the ambiguity of the phrase. “I tell people I work at the city desk at a warehouse, and they say, ‘What is that?’ I tell them it’s like a bartender’s job. People ask for what they want, and you get it for them. People come in for onesie, twosie stuff, or some contractors come in with a few pages worth.” Gopher Plumbing Supply’s city desk sells to both the public and to contractors.

“I’ve never figured it out,” says Brian Hill at Air Engineering and Supply in Seward, when asked about the term’s origins. He jokes that they used to call it “the sitting desk,” then goes to check with some of the older employees in the back to see if they know anything about the term’s origins. He comes out a moment later and shakes his head. “Nope, none of them know, either."

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

Air Engineering and Supply has been in the location since the early 1950s, and Hill says the term "city desk" is probably a holdover from that time and before.

“I imagine it’s because that’s just the way it was,” he says. “We did it because grandma said to do it, and she did it because her grandma said that’s the way to do it.” Air Engineering and Supply has been in the location since the early 1950s, and Hill says it’s probably a holdover from that time and before. Out front, the door is labeled “City desk / Will call,” as if it’s an Upper Midwestern-to-Standard American English translation.

I asked Ethan at Gopher Supply where he thought the term came from, and he said this: “It might have referred to any retail originally, where anyone could come in and pick up what they needed, and maybe it just became a contractor sort of thing over time.”

Courtesy of Hennepin County Library

A Minneapolis Morning Tribune advertisement from 1919 refers to a city desk.

The historic record seems to confirm Ethan’s theory. The phrase starts showing up in advertisements in the Minneapolis newspapers around 1907, in relation to hardware stores and dry-goods houses, seemingly as a synonym for customer-service desk. Perhaps it did pick up more specificity over time. The term still turns up occasionally in the local papers, primarily in obituaries for men and women who’d worked at the city desk at various local warehouses and suppliers.

I can’t definitively confirm that “city desk” is a bona fide a regionalism, but if it is, it seems to me at least as interesting as our region’s much-ballyhooed “duck duck gray duck” or “bubbler” variations. Next time you need a spigot or compressor, call up your local supplier and ask for the city desk with pride. They’ll know what you mean. 

The Minnesota Orchestral Association has filed a report with the city of Minneapolis that can best be described as artistic.

The report is required in the MOA's lease arrangement with the city to operate Orchestra Hall. Under terms of that lease, the MOA is required to show how the facility is being used — and will be used — to promote the arts in Minneapolis.

Given that the entertainment centerpiece of the Hall, the Minnesota Orchestra, has been locked out for 14 months, there has been curiosity about how the MOA would file the report.

But the MOA seemed to have no problem.  The report to the city consists of a letter from Michael Henson [PDF], the MOA’s chief executive officer, and a letter from a lawyer, explaining that the MOA didn’t really have to file a report at all [PDF].

The report, and accompanying letter, were filled with legalese, finger-pointing and vague promises of bringing any number of concerts to Orchestra Hall even if the lockout continues.

The city, under the terms of the lease, now has 45 days to ponder the MOA report.

If it finds that the MOA is fulfilling both its financial and artistic obligations, the state will be notified of city approval. (The state is involved because $14 million in public bonds were for renovation of the Hall. The money was channeled from the state to the city, which owns the Hall.)

If the city decides the MOA is not fulfilling lease agreements, a legal mess would follow.

First would come “cure” time, in which the MOA would have time to resolve any problems. If that failed, the city would need to get state permission to sell its lease with the MOA or find a new operator for the building.

All of this suggests that it would be difficult for the musicians to re-organize under a different management structure and end up with a lease to Orchestra Hall. 

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, who once upon a time tried to bring the MOA and the musicians together, issued a statement that was more like a dance in regard to all that is happening around the Hall, if not in the Hall.

“Orchestra Hall is a gem of a building and it’s in everyone’s interest to see it live up to its potential as one of the premier concert halls in the country,’’ the mayor said in the statement. “The city will take the next few weeks to do our due diligence, however, our end goal is the same as it’s been all along: We want the Minnesota Orchestra back home making music. No one likes the other long-term options, and none of them are simple. It’s time for Minnesotans to start enjoying the music at Orchestra Hall again.’’

But agreement never has seemed so far away.

In his letter, Henson talks about a schedule of events assuming that agreement with the musicians can’t be reached.

“MOA’s primary goal for the past many months has been to reach a contract settlement with the musicians that allows us to present the already-programmed 2013-14 season. ... But as negotiations have continued and a mutual settlement has not been forthcoming, MOA has begun to create a new series of concerts designed to keep music  alive in Orchestra Hall.’’

What isn’t clear is just who would walk onto the Orchestra Hall stage as long as the musicians are locked out.

Musicians say they have the support of virtually ever entertainment union in the land and that no union entertainer or orchestra will perform at the Hall until there is a settlement.

Henson is vague in his “report” about the groups that might perform in Orchestra Hall.

In the letter to the city, he writes: “MOA is in discussions for a prominent music group to perform a five-concert series during F2014. It is also making arrangements for the Hall to be available for performances by other music groups, including professional, community and school orchestras and youth groups.’’ 

But in the side letter, attorney John Herman writes that even bringing in school choirs might prove difficult.

“Actions by musicians and other third parties have also interfered with MOA’s efforts to present arts programming in the Hall,’’ Herman wrote.

(It should be noted that orchestra musicians would be unlikely to picket a high school orchestra if it opted to play at Orchestra Hall.)

It appears to be Herman’s contention that the MOA isn’t obligated to fulfill lease obligations because of clauses in the lease regarding “unavoidable delays.”

The lease says that “strikes and other similar labor troubles’’ are unavoidable delays. Henson argues that there is really no difference between a strike and a lockout.

“Although the term 'lockout' is not specifically used in the Lease, strikes and lockouts are parallel rights of parties to a labor negotiation and are undoubtedly ‘similar labor troubles,’ ’’ Henson wrote.

While Henson seems to be talking about bringing high school orchestras to the renovated Hall, orchestra musicians next week are going to unveil their plans for the future “with or without the MOA.’’

More and more, there are indications that the orchestra musicians are at least taking steps toward creating a new management structure.

Musicians have not only played a sold-out series of concerts at various venues but they also say they have formed a 501-3C, which has raised more than $300,000 since August.

Every area jazz musician who doesn’t have a gig will likely show up Sunday at the Artists’ Quarter in St. Paul, where owner Kenny Horst is grudgingly allowing a benefit to be held for himself. He announced in October that the jazz club he has run for nearly 20 years – first at Fifth and Jackson in Lowertown, then in the basement of the Hamm Bldg. – will close Jan. 1. His rent has doubled, audiences have dwindled, and Horst, who always ran the place on a shoestring, hasn’t taken a salary for more than a year. The goal of Sunday’s benefit is to raise enough money for closing and transitioning costs that Horst doesn’t have to turn his pockets inside-out. Donors will match up to $10,000 in contributions. There’s a $10 minimum donation requested at the door, the AQ’s usual exorbitant cover.

Here’s a partial list of the dozens of musicians set to perform: Debbie Duncan, Dave King, Connie Evingson, Patty Peterson, Bill Carrothers, Dean Magraw, Bryan Nichols, JT Bates. See the complete list on the AQ’s website. The music starts at 5 p.m. and continues until whenever. 480 St. Peter St., St. Paul, downstairs from Meritage. If you want to know how musicians feel about the end of the AQ, we’re running a series on our blog called “Pleased and flipped: Memories of the Artists’ Quarter.”

Who – or what – is Dungan Levee? Think Blind Faith or Cream, the Traveling Wilburys or the Highwaymen. Dungan Levee is the Minneapolis version of a supergroup, formed to benefit Mike Olk, a former KARE11 and WCCO-TV news producer and videographer who was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Adam and Noah Levy (the Honeydogs), honky-tonk hero Nate Dungan (Trailer Trash) and Tommy Vee of the Vees will join together at Lee’s Liquor Lounge on Saturday to raise funds for Olk’s treatment and expenses. Other musical acts scheduled to appear include the WCCO Blues Band (featuring Don Shelby), the CharterKats, the Eagles tribute band Motel California, Tin Can Gin, and Olk’s former band the Oarsmen. 2-6 p.m. Suggested donation $15. Here’s the Facebook event page FMI.

Other arts-related news will have to wait as we devote the rest of today’s Artscape to helping you with your holiday plans.

Our Christmas stocking of holiday events

You know about “A Christmas Carol” at the Guthrie, and you have your pick of Nutcrackers and Messiahs. So here’s something different (and not, we hasten to add, in that bad Minnesota meaning of the word). Like Santa himself, several of these holiday shows fly under the radar.

Courtesy of Hardcover Theater

Hardcover Theater presents: “God Rest Ye Scary Gentlemen 2.”

Hardcover Theater:“God Rest Ye Scary Gentlemen 2” at the Bryant Lake Bowl. When all that holiday sweetness makes your teeth hurt, do this. Four fully-staged stories include “The Inexperienced Ghost” by H.G. Wells, “Mr. Tilly’s Séance” by E.F. Benson, “The Black Poodle” by F. Anstey” and “Teig O’Kane and the Corpse,” an Irish folk tale. Dead bodies abound. Now through Dec. 22. FMI and tickets ($15 door, $12 advance or with Fringe button, $6 kids 12 and under).

Dangerboat Productions: “An Unscripted Minnesota Holiday” at the Bryant Lake Bowl. The broad-brush story line: a small town is planning its annual holiday festival, a rich meanie has something up his or her sleeve, and a hero saves the day. The details? Up to the audience, who’ll provide the town’s name and the festival’s theme and decide which cast member plays the hero. Everything is improvised, even the songs, and the villain is played by a different guest improviser each night. Dangerboat is Tane Danger and Brandon Boat of The Theater of Public Policy, a group famous for thinking on its feet. Danger directs. Tonight (Dec. 6), continuing Dec. 12-14, 19-21. FMI and tickets ($15/$13).

Courtesy of Dangerboat Productions

“An Unscripted Minnesota Holiday”

One Voice Mixed Chorus: “A Midnight Queer” at First Universalist Church of Minneapolis. Founded in 1988, the nation’s largest LBGTA chorus is giving its first-ever holiday concert – music from Chanukah, Kwanza, Solstice, the Hindu festival of lights, Christmas, and Mawlid an-Nabi (Sufi birth of Mohammed), plus spoken word, poetry, and sing-alongs. Tonight at 7:30 p.m., tomorrow (Dec. 7) at 3 and 7:30 p.m. FMI and tickets ($15-$25).

Oh, all right, we’ll include one 'Messiah.' Among the many local businesses and organizations badly hurt by the endless Minnesota Orchestra lockout is the Minnesota Chorale, which has served as the Orchestra’s principal chorus since 2004. It was originally scheduled to sing the “Messiah” twice with the orchestra in the newly renovated hall. Instead, the Chorale will join players from the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra for a concert performance tonight (Friday, Dec. 6) at Roseville Lutheran Church. Soprano Maria Jette will appear as guest soloist, and artistic director Kathy Saltzman Romey will lead the 1743 version of the work, which includes alternative versions of a few well-known arias and a seldom-performed chorus or two. 7:30 p.m. Free-will offering; no tickets, no reservations.

Wendy Lehr reads aloud at the Jungle. Take the kids or grandkids to hear a local treasure read favorite holiday books in the persona of “Mrs. Peterson.” Plus prizes, cookies, and cider. Three Saturdays: Dec. 7, 14, 21. Ages 4 and up. FMI and tickets ($6).

The Singers: “What Sweeter Music: Christmas Under the North Star.” A 42-voice professional choir now in its 10th season, The Singers has commissioned more than 60 new works from local composers. This year’s holiday concert features a new memorial commission by conductor Matthew Culloton and works by Stephen Paulus, Dale Warland, F. Melius Christiansen, Leland Sateren, and David Cherwien. 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 7 at St. Olaf Catholic Church in Minneapolis (come at 7 for a 30-min. organ prelude), 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 8 at Wayzata Community Church, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 15 at Nativity of Our Lord Catholic Church in St. Paul. Order tickets here ($10-$30).

Courtesy of VocalEssence

Mariachi Mi Tierra

“VocalEssence Sings Tidings of … Jazz and Mariachi.” Now in its 45th season, the internationally known VocalEssence is hardly under the radar, but this year’s Christmas concert is one you won't hear anywhere else. The centerpiece is Dave Brubeck’s charming Christmas cantata “La Fiesta de la Posada,” featuring the Twin Cities’ own Mariachi Mi Tierra. With pianist Dan Chouinard, the 100-voice VocalEssence Chorus and 32-voice Ensemble Singers, other holiday delights and the winning carols from the 16th annual Welcome Christmas Carol contest, this will be a winner. Five performances: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 7 at Trinity Lutheran Church in Stillwater; 4 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 8 at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis; 7:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 13 at Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church in Apple Valley; 7:30 Saturday, Dec. 14 at Colonial Church of Edina; and 4 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 15 back at Plymouth. FMI and tickets. 

Frank Theatre: David Sedaris’ “The Santaland Diaries” at the Cowles Center. One of the funniest Christmas stories ever is Sedaris’s tale of working as a Christmas elf in Macy’s “SantaLand” in the Herald Square, New York, store. The stage adaptation of this merrily subversive classic stars Joe Leary as Crumpet the Elf. Directed by Wendy Knox. Dec. 13-23. FMI and tickets ($29). A video gives you a peek at the show. Note: Mature subject matter, so maybe get a sitter.

Flying Forms:“A Baroque Christmas” in the Baroque Room. Traditional carols, fiddle tunes, and lute songs performed on period instruments including baroque violin, recorder, baroque cello and harpsichord. With violinist Marc Levine, baroque vocalist and McKnight Artist Fellow Carrie Henneman Shaw, and lutenist Phillip Rukavina. The Baroque Room is on the second floor of the Northwestern Building in St. Paul’s Lowertown (275 East 4th St.). Go through the street-level doors, up the elevator or stairs to the second floor, and find suite 280, an intimate music salon with a resonant acoustic perfect for early music. 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 14. Tickets at the door ($15 adults, $10 seniors and students).

Free holiday movies at Union Depot. You’ve seen “A Muppet Christmas Carol” a zillion times … but you’ve never seen it in the fabulously renovated Union Depot, which is fast becoming a place you go to, not just rush through. Two nights, three free movies each. Saturday, Dec. 14: “A Muppet Christmas Carol” (4 p.m.), “A Miracle on 34th Street” (7 p.m.), and “Love Actually” (rated R; 9:30 p.m.). Saturday, Dec. 21: “Home Alone” (4 p.m.), “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” (PG-14, 7 p.m.), and the original “Die Hard” (the Christmas action movie! Rated R, 9:30 p.m.). Refreshments are available for purchase during the films, but there’s no reason you can’t bring your own popcorn or snacks (but leave the alcoholic beverages at home).

Flying Pig Theater: “Martini and Olive’s Takin’ Care of Christmas” on the Minnesota Centennial Showboat. Silly songs, tacky costumes, and serious ’70s flashbacks. What’s not to love? Especially on the Showboat, docked at Harriet Island in St. Paul. Dec. 14-29. If you insist on having your heart warmed, “Martini and Olive” alternates with“The Christmas Foundling.” FMI and tickets ($16-$24).

Butch Thompson's “Yulestride” at Hamline’s Sundin Music Hall. The stride piano master and host of KBEM’s “Jazz Originals” plays his own bluesy, two-handed arrangements of “Jingle Bells,” “Silent Night,” and more holiday favorites, plus vintage tunes including Charlie Straight’s “Santa Claus Blues.” 4 p.m., Dec. 15.  FMI and tickets ($15 door, $10 advance).  

Courtesy of the Cedar

Mary Mack

“Mary Mack’s Holiday Meat Raffle Show with Doggy Sweater Competition” at the Cedar. We barely know where to start with this. It’s a variety show with singing, accordion, audience participation, improvisation, angry dancing, and bad meat, raffled off by a fake butcher. You may come out scratching your head, but your wallet won’t be much lighter than when you went in. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 19. FMI and tickets ($10/$12).

Stocking-stuffers: Four holiday CD releases by area artists

That’s right, four. You can go to the shows, enjoy the music live, buy CDs as gifts and have them signed. Holiday shopping made easy, plus you have a night out.

The Jana Nyberg Group, “Winter Song.” An album of original music and fresh, fearless arrangements of old faves like “Let It Snow” and “The Nearness of You.” Nyberg is a strong singer with a clear, spacious voice and considerable charm. Her husband is trumpeter, composer and bandleader Adam Meckler, and together they make a formidably talented music power couple. “Winter Song” has swing, sass and already a sort of timelessness. Sweet surprises: “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” with string quartet, and a playful run at the daunting “Waters of March” in Portuguese, with Meckler joining in on voice. Nice work, you two. Saturday, Dec. 7 at the Dakota. 8 p.m., $10 at the door. FMI.

Laura Caviani, “Holly, Jolly and Jazzy.” Caviani’s impeccable pianism and superb sense of swing make these holiday chestnuts shine as if they were written yesterday. Her trio – Gordy Johnson on bass, Joe Pulice on drums – are right there with her, sharing a brain and the same feel for the music all through this exceptional album. “Greensleeves” has never sounded so sunlit and cheery, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” so witty and sly. We have a huge stack of Christmas CDs and this one’s on the top. Sunday, Dec. 8 at First United Methodist Church in Sartell. 4 p.m.; free-will offering. Also Friday, Dec. 13 at the Artists’ Quarter. 9 p.m., $10 cover at the door. Remember, the AQ is closing. 

Larry McDonough Quartet, “Angels, Kings, My Favorite Things.” Let’s just say it: “My Favorite Things” is a cute song, but wimpy. Whiskers on kittens, warm woolen mittens, yawn. Pianist, composer, bandleader and vocalist McDonough gives it a kick in the pants, turns Richard Terrill loose on some Trane-ish saxophony and tells a different story. His imaginative arrangements transform all of the familiar tunes on his latest recording, making this the holiday CD to reach for when you’re tired of the same-old. “Little Drummer Boy” with no drums? Fine with us. And it’s good to hear “Ode to Joy” in a jazzy new version. Thursday, Dec. 19 at the Artists’ Quarter. 8 p.m., $5 cover. Also Sunday, Dec. 22 at Icehouse. 7:30 p.m., $5 cover.

Charles Lazarus, “Merry & Bright.” It’s said that the trumpet is an especially demanding instrument, one you have to play every day or risk losing your chops. A trumpeter with the Minnesota Orchestra, Lazarus hasn’t had a steady gig for more than a year, but if this new CD is any sign, he’s sounding better than ever. High-energy, big and brassy, it’s just what we need to take the chill off the winter. Having played with some of our finest, Lazarus knows how to choose a team: pianist Tommy Barbarella and vocalist Bruce Henry are two of the talents who join him in this joyous and varied outing, which starts with a velvety “Silent Night” and ends with a spicy “Jingle Bells.” Thursday, Dec. 19 at Wayzata Community Church. 7 p.m., FMI and tickets ($20/$15). 

Photo by Cameron Wittig, Walker Art Center

Sage Cowles with Merce Cunningham in 2008

This article was written for the Walker Art Center, which has granted MinnPost permission to republish it.

“My theory is that we’re not a body and a mind; that we are one whole and no matter what we do, this gesture is going to affect what happens in my mind and my heart. We’re all inter-related, and I feel we aren’t educated in that in any way.”

— Sage Cowles, in a 2012 interview for the Minnesota Dance Pioneers Oral History Project

Mother, wife, grandmother, friend. Philanthropist, fundraiser, benefactor. Networker, cajoler. Feminist, political activist, educator. Softball and fitness enthusiast. Artist: choreographer, performer, dancer. Sage Cowles — who passed away November 21 at age 88 — wore all of these labels, and their attendant responsibilities, with the sincerity and lightness to which we’d all become accustomed. Was there anything out of her prodigious wheelhouse? Seemingly not.

Sage and her husband, John Cowles, Jr. (who passed away in 2012), are perhaps best known publicly because of their remarkable generosity, philanthropic leadership, and financial largesse. But Sage is also remembered, particularly in the dance community, for something more elemental.

“The key thing that people remember about Sage is that she was an artist,” says Philip Bither, the Walker Art Center’s Senior Curator of Performing Arts. “She had the sensibility of an artist, the openness, and the pure support of innovation that creative artists have for one another.” And that, he adds, informed her philanthropy is unusual ways.

In talks and interviews at the Walker, Sage spoke to artists she helped support, such as Valda Setterfield and her great pal Merce Cunningham, “like a fellow artist and a friend, not a funder,” Bither says. Sage would invite local dancers to her cabin where they could work freely: they only needed to make her dinner. She frequently hosted dinners and other gatherings for dance artists at her home, where she could be found chatting with her fellow artists. Deborah Jinza Thayer, dancer and choreographer, was her great friend; when Thayer was hurt in a freak accident, Sage helped Thayer work her body back to health.

Sage faithfully attended shows at the Walker, her namesake Cowles Center, and the Northrop Dance Series. But she was really keen on new and experimental local work at smaller venues like the Southern Theater, Red Eye, and Laurie Van Wieren’s 9 X 22 showcase at the Bryant Lake Bowl. In these more intimate theaters she could more easily talk with the performers.

'Driven by her own curiosity'

“The thing about Sage I so appreciated was that she was driven by her own curiosity about things and about people,” says Linda Shapiro, who with Leigh Dillard founded New Dance Ensemble in the 1990s, a venture Sage supported. “There wasn’t any small talk. She was interested in you, in your work. The fact that she was a dancer made a difference when she approached and appreciated dancers. She got what was involved.”

Dance was her heart. Sage and John helped make the Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts a reality, giving Minnesota its long-awaited flagship for dance; and helped establish the Sage Cowles Land Grant Chair in Dance at the University of Minnesota, which brings in visiting artists — and many stayed and further enriched the Twin Cities dance community. In 2005, the Sage Awards for Dance were created to honor her profound contributions. In 2001, the Ordway Center honored Sage and John with a Sally Award for their decades-long support of the arts.

Sage and John’s contributions to the Walker Art Center specifically include a $1 million gift for Minneapolis Sculpture Garden (resulting in the Cowles Conservatory), and another gift toward the Herzog & de Meuron-designed expansion. Sage was a member of the Patron’s Circle for more than 25 years and a founding member of the Producers’ Council (whose members provide philanthropic leadership in support of the performing arts program).

Sage supported the multidisciplinary exhibition Art Performs Life in 1998, which featured the work of Cunningham, Meredith Monk, and Bill T. Jones. She was involved “in one way of another, from the big picture to the smallest detail,” Bither says, in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s 15-plus engagements in the Twin Cities, as well as in bringing Cunningham and John Cage’s monumental Ocean to a quarry near St. Cloud in 2008. Sage has also given a number of visual art works to the Walker, including work by Michelangelo Pistoletto, Michael Goldberg, Donald Judd, Barry Le Va, Glenn Ligon, and Kris Martin.

Moreover, Sage’s cultural leadership and “magnetic personality drove people to her,” Bither says. “Aside from the direct contributions the Cowles’ made, they were a model for other people, for the next generation of funders to be responsible corporate and community leaders. So many loved and believed in Sage, that if she was behind something, they would be too. And not just in funding major cultural institutions, but small grass roots organizations, too. Sage in particular understood the ecology of the arts scene, the dance scene, and was always looking for ways support and keep the ecology going.”

And her influence extended beyond the arts. The Cowles’ funding of the University of Minnesota’s Jane Sage Cowles Stadium for softball indicated the couple’s dedication to community service. Sage served on the board of Planned Parenthood. She and John were fellows at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, where she taught the other fellows to engage with their bodies during movement workshops and wrote a paper calling for a more holistic educational model as the body isn’t “a second-class citizen, separate from the mind.”

Sage had “a real social vision,” says choreographer Bill T. Jones. “Sage and John were interested in Change with a capital C, which earned her high marks in my way of thinking.” Dance, and Sage’s ongoing engagement and curiosity about the body, remained a fundamental part of her life, however.

The artist: In her own words

Jane Sage Fuller was born on May 5, 1925, in Paris: Her father was in graduate school there. When she was three months old, the family moved to Bedford, New York. Her father, Charles Fuller, was an architect. Her mother, Jane White, was a sculptor. After her parents divorced, Sage’s mother married Cass Canfield, who became the chairman of Harper & Row.

Sage studied rhythmic exercise with Portia Mansfield, who came to her school; and tap, folk, and ballet at the Ned Wayburn School of Dance in New York City. She studied ballet privately with Ella Degonava, and she went to the Perry/Mansfield Summer Camp, where she became assistant ballet teacher and actress Julie Harris was her roommate. She went to Lisa Gardner’s School of Ballet in Washington, DC, then found a family in New York she could stay with while studying dance.

“I lived on 55th Street, between Madison and Park,” Sage told me when I interviewed her in 2012 for the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Dance Pioneers Oral History Project (from which all of the following quotes are taken). “I walked half a block to the New York Tutoring School where I could take three-quarters of an hour of a little history, a little French, maybe a little math, and then I could walk four blocks to 59th Street where the School of American Ballet was. Heaven!”

But “as soon as I got toe shoes, I knew I was in the wrong pew,” she said. “That and the fact that the repertory is all about swans and myths and fairytales.”

While at the School of American Ballet, Sage met Cunningham, who had just been asked to join Martha Graham’s company. She saw Cunningham perform at Jean Erdman’s studio in 1944. The piece was The Root of the Unfocused, with music by John Cage. “I just knew I had never seen anything that interested me as much as that.”

In the mid-1940s, Sage had been studying international relations “because I thought somebody had to focus on saving the world and I’d better get out there,” but was also shopping for a new college. Only the University of Wisconsin–Madison responded, so “I packed a suitcase, and what did I find there? Margaret H’Doubler.”

Toured with Wisconsin Dance Group

She earned a BA in art history, but spent most of her time studying with H’Doubler and dancing with Mary Hinkson, Matt Turney, and Miriam Cole. Together they started the Wisconsin Dance Group (which included nine percussionists) and toured to Toronto and across the Midwest in a 1933 Buick, earning $50 a performance.

“Our goal was to be the intermediary between the lay audience and the professionals,” Sage explained. The opening line of their lecture-demo was: “We live in a world of movement.” The group lasted two summers.

Sage never had any intention of marrying or having children, she said. But she married fellow UW-Madison student Edmundo Flores and moved to Mexico, where she met Rosa Reyna and Raquelle Gutierrez, who had studied with Anna Sokolow. She had her first child, Tessa. When she and Edmundo knew the marriage wasn’t working — but had resolved stay friends — Sage traveled to New York City, “baby on hip,” for her sister’s wedding. There she met John.

When he approached her, she said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve been out in the world, and I have a baby.” She got a job as a chorus girl in Bless You All, choreographed by Helen Tamaris, who was married to Daniel Nagrin. Pearl Bailey was the box-office draw. Sage’s partner for the Charleston was Bertram Ross. “I couldn’t believe I was being paid to have so much fun!” She also danced in The Lucky Strike Hit Parade, a live Saturday-night television program.

One night John picked her up backstage and took her out. “He said, ‘You know, I would like to see more of you, but this may not be a good time for you.’ It was such a brilliant statement; I almost dropped everything and said, ‘You’re for me.’ But no. I said, ‘You are absolutely right. This is a lousy time.’ Edmundo and I weren’t divorced, and I wasn’t in any hurry to be making big decisions about this. So I took a deep breath and said, ‘I would like to see you again but not now.’ So he went away and he came back six months later.”

After John and Sage married, they lived for a time in Kansas (John was in the Army at Fort Riley). When they moved to Minneapolis, Sage began dancing with Nancy Hauser. She taught for Hauser and at the YWCA. Sage and a group of other dancing mothers started the Dancers’ Forum. Then, after her children Jane, Fuller and Jay were born, she and John became involved with starting the Highcroft Country Day School and other social and civic causes. She was in her 40s and “all tangled up, not in dance at all, but in civil rights, kids, school, parents, and I was interested in all of them, but it didn’t feed me.”

In the 1970s, Sage became involved with dance therapy and worked with autistic children at Washburn Child Guidance Center, after which she developed her “I Can, I Can Choose, and I Can Change” workshops for people uneasy in their bodies and needing to make changes in their lives.

At this time, Sage said, “really a lot of my energy was for Merce.” After years of fundraising, she became a board member of Cunningham’s company. “My feeling was I was the luckiest person alive to be on Merce’s board, because if you asked me who in the dance world would you like to support and work for, it would have been Merce.”

She did support several individual dance companies in the Twin Cities, but “was looking for the umbrella, and that’s what made me want to put my energy into MICA [Minnesota Independent Choreographers Association] when Judith Mirus and I finally connected and had a conversation.” In addition to her work with MICA, Sage continued to perform.

She and John lived for a time in the Flash Electric Company building downtown, where they helped pioneer the City of Minneapolis’ revitalization of the Mississippi riverfront. Their place included a dance studio, where Sage taught workshops, invited choreographers to rehearse and perform, and hosted receptions for dance artists and critics.

Experimental works with film

In the 1970s, Sage collaborated with St. Paul filmmaker Molly Davies to produce a series of experimental works in which the filmed moving image and the live moving performer (always the same person, Sage) were juxtaposed in space and time. In 2005, the two now-older women introduced and showed excerpts from these explorations in a piece titled Space, Time and Illusion. Sage also recreated her role.

“The original piece was so ahead of its time, with its mix of media and live performance,” Bither says. “Then seeing a 20-something Sage on film, juxtaposed with a 70-something Sage on stage, made the piece elegiac in its tone.” Sage had also performed Sage Time and Again, a work with film by Davies in Walker Auditorium.

Cowles also performed as part of the 1993 Walker exhibition In the Spirit of Fluxus: “My younger son [Fuller, a sculptor] came up to me after and said, ‘Ma, that was not your proudest hour.’ I choreographed something that I thought was pretty tricky and hard on 11 or 13 treadmills.”

She was part of “A Celebration of Collaborations” in 1980 (performing with Shapiro, Loyce Houlton, Emile Buchwald, and Wendy Morris); and was included in the Walker’s New Dance USA festival in 1981, performing A Reminiscence at the Children’s Theatre. She helped choreograph Suzanne Lacy’s The Crystal Quilt, performed in the IDS Center.

A supporter of New Dance Ensemble and choreographer Donna Uchizono, Sage helped bring in Rachel Rosenthal to collaborate with Uchizono and the company, recalls Linda Shapiro. Sage, along with Shapiro and Molly Lynn, performed in the work — “and at one point we danced naked,” Shapiro says. For Sage, it wouldn’t be the last time.

'Uncle Tom’s Cabin'

One day Sage and a group of friends asked each other whether anyone had the feeling “there’s still something inside of you that has not gotten out? That has not found expression?” Sage found her answer. It was Bill T. Jones. More specifically, it was performing in Jones’ epic Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land —  perhaps most infamously, in the nude.

“He asked me to do things nobody had ever asked me to do before,” Sage said. “I had to speak. I had to shout. I was Harriet Beecher Stowe. I was Sojourner Truth, I was Lula, who seduced and then killed a black man. That’s a pretty good list. The nude was nothing compared to all that.”

“There was something about her standing on that table in that white dress, talking to R. Justice Alan, while she was in the character of Lula,” Jones recalls. The scene was The Dutchman by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Lula attempts to seduce Clay (Alan) and calls him an Uncle Tom for not having sex with her. Clay tells the audience: “You never see the pure heart, the pumping black heart… I sit here, in this buttoned-up suit,to keep from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly.” Lula kills Clay and turns her attention to an even younger black man. It was tough stuff.

“It’s one of those stellar moments in my memory of Sage, watching R. Justice — a recovering heroin addict just out of prison — and Sage going at it on stage,” Jones continues. “She took it as a real, meaty challenge. Willing to try anything. The language is so coarse and abusive. The two of them had great fun. She told me that every night, before that part, they’d give each a knowing look and say ‘Come on, let’s give ‘em hell.’ They had a real relationship.”

Sage recalled: “You know if you care about justice in the world and inequities and any kind of discrimination, [Jones’ piece] just fed into all the things that John and I both cared deeply about. As a part of that show, every night, a local minister or rabbi or somebody from the church … was invited to come on stage and talk with Bill … about the Book of Job. Well, that was probably the highlight of the evening, where Bill was ever ready to say, ‘Well, if you believe that, why aren’t you more aggressive about fill-in-the-blanks.’ We were so proud!”

Last thoughts

“Sage made so many contributions to dance, it’s more effective to talk about her influence as a whole,” Shapiro says. “I really think it was her spirit. She had plenty of money. But more important is that she was always there, at performances, not just the big venues, but lofts, off beat places. People felt buoyed up by her; that someone of her caliber and influence really cared about dance. Sage elevated the visibility of dance in the community. And she wasn’t gushy. She said what she thought.”

When I asked her, during our interviews, how she defined herself, Sage said she often struggled to come up with an answer. Then, “it suddenly popped out, ‘I’m a dance activist.’” she said. “And that covers such a broad spectrum of things that I think that’s a good one for me.”

Camille LeFevre is an arts journalist in the Twin Cities who also once had the pleasure of dancing with Sage and John at a wedding under a tent out in the country.

The musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra mixed some Beethoven and Mozart with what appeared to be a shot across the bow of the Minnesota Orchestral Association at a unique Monday morning meeting with the media and the public.

Although there were frequent comments from musician leaders that their No. 1 priority is a contract settlement to end the 14-month-old lockout, they also announced plans for as many as 10 concerts for the winter/spring season.

This news was greeted by big cheers from an overflow crowd — perhaps 200 — who came to hear a status report from the musicians. The gathering was at the Hilton Hotel, which, of course, is only a few steps away from Orchestra Hall.

At the meeting, musicians announced that they had organized into 13 committees, which do everything from raise money — to date, more than $600,000 — to organize concerts. The funds have come from more than 1,200 donors, according to the musicians.

“We’ve learned so much about each other,’’ said harpist Kathy Kienzle, who heads their members committee. “This is a very smart, multitalented group.”

The musicians' education committee has arranged a substantial number of orchestra performances at metro-area schools — which always has been part of the orchestra’s mission. Additionally, the orchestra has performed in such unusual venues as a YMCA in north Minneapolis and at a club, the Rodeo, on Lake Street, which is a particular favorite of Hispanics in the Twin Cities. 

At least one MOA board member reportedly was seen at Monday’s meeting, although she was not available for comment. It’s impossible to say whether her attendance shows at least a crack in the unified position of the MOA board. That board, by the way, meets Wednesday.

The MOA responded to the musicians' meeting with a statement, emphasizing its vast resources:

"We are pleased to hear the musicians referenced today their desire to reach a negotiated settlement. The Minnesota Orchestral Association raises millions of dollars each year to support the musicians' salaries. It offers hundreds of performances in the community to audiences reaching more than 350,000 people and organizes outreach events for 85,000 music lovers each year. Clearly, we are a stronger organization with much greater reach when we are together. We very much hope the musicians will soon agree to join us at the bargaining table."

Does the scheduling of a wide variety of school programs and full-blown concerts mean that the musicians are moving toward a complete break-away from the MOA?

“Our No. 1 goal is to come to a contract agreement,” said Tim Zavadil, clarinetist for the orchestra and the head of the musicians’ bargaining committee. “But short of that, we have to have plans.”

The MOA made a similar announcement via its report to the city of Minneapolis last week. The MOA said that it had a Plan B, if a settlement with the musicians is not reached.

Separating from the MOA — starting with a new name — is a huge step. But clearly it has been talked about among musicians, who have been buoyed by support they’ve received locally as well as from symphonies and musicians’ unions around the country.

Minnesota Orchestra musicians have performed with 80 different symphony orchestras during the lockout, ranging from the Alabama Symphony Orchestra to the New York Philharmonic.

Performing elsewhere, said violinist David Brubaker, has increased his appreciation toward what he described as the special skill and work ethic of the Minnesota Orchestra.

At this meeting, Brubaker performed in a quartet along with violinist Rebecca Corruccini, cellist Anthony Ross and violist Michael Adams. Their performance made this a very unusual public meeting/news conference.

The four had practiced for two hours on Sunday, put in another hour before the meeting and were lights-out spectacular at a time of day and in a pretty unusual performance space for A-team musicians.

Even in this small room with “terrible acoustics” on a cold December morning, Adams admitted to being nervous when the musicians sat down to play, only a couple of feet from where TV cameras were stationed.

What was on Brubaker’s mind when he drove to the Hilton for this performance? Wasn’t he afraid that his fingers would freeze in place making the trip?

“I tell you what I was thinking,’’ said Brubaker. “I can’t imagine how people in construction can work outside. Whatever they’re getting paid, it’s not enough.”

Spoken like a blue-collar union man.

The event not only gave musicians a chance to display their special talents, but more importantly, a chance to get their message out.

Throughout the negotiation, musicians have been criticized for not coming up with counter-proposals to the deep cuts proposed by the MOA.  Those cuts, the MOA has insisted, are necessary for the orchestra’s long-term sustainability.

At this session, musicians told their most ardent supporters that they’ve made 10 counter-proposals. Most of those proposals, they said, have included pay cuts and other cost-saving measures. All have been rejected, they said.

Cellist Ross, whose public comments have been more militant than those of many musicians, told a story that he believes shows both the musicians’ passion and their desire to resolve the conflict.

“I had a moment of revelation recently,” Ross said. “I was at an event recently and a woman who was about 10 years older than me was looking at me. Finally she said, ‘You’re that angry cello player, aren’t you?”

“My face does not lie. How can we not be angry? But our No. 1 goal is to get back with the MOA and start rebuilding now.”

Still, there has to be an option, he said. And that means concerts.

“What this orchestra is doing is because we love the music and we’re family,” Ross  said. “And you, the people here and in our audiences, are part of that family. We will not let you down. I promise.”

The Minnesota Orchestra has received its second Grammy nomination in two years for Best Orchestral Performance, this time for “Sibelius: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 4.” Last year’s Grammy nod was for “Sibelius: Symphonies Nos. 2 and 5.” Plans were for the Minnesota Orchestra to record “Sibelius: Symphonies Nos. 3 and 6” in mid-September, continuing its series on the respected Swedish label BIS, but that didn’t happen because the musicians have been locked out since Oct. 1, 2012, in a historically long and bitter labor dispute. The cancellation of the September recording sessions, followed by the cancellation of two November concerts by the orchestra at Carnegie Hall, led to music director Osmo Vänskä’s resignation Oct. 1, and soon after to the cancellation of the orchestra’s 2015 residency at the BBC Proms. We apologize for our redundancy, but there’s no acceptable synonym for “cancellation.”

In his review for the Star Tribune, Larry Fuchsberg had high praise for Sibelius 1 & 4, which you might want to add to your Christmas list. He calls special attention to the “spellbinding account of its opening clarinet monologue” by Burt Hara, who left the orchestra in May for a position with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. MPR’s Luke Taylor has compiled a list, with descriptions, of the many distinguished recordings by the Orchestra and Vänskä, 11 in all. Sibelius 3 & 6 would have made it an even dozen.

Minnesota can claim still more Grammy connections. Composer/conductor and Windom native Maria Schneider’s “Winter Morning Walks” was nominated for three Grammys: Best Contemporary Classical Composition; Best Classical Vocal Solo, for renowned soprano and former SPCO artistic partner Dawn Upshaw’s performance on “Winter Morning Walks”; and Best Engineered Album, Classical (kudos to David Frost, Brian Losch and Tim Martyn). The SPCO is also featured on the album, performing Schneider’s “Carlos Drummond de Andrade Stories” featuring Upshaw.

Meanwhile, the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra have added a second concert with Vänskä to the reopening of Northrop Auditorium in May. The first, scheduled for Friday, May 2, sold out almost immediately. The second will take place Sunday, May 4, and 2 p.m. Tickets go on sale at noon next Monday, Dec. 16. FMI and link to tickets (not yet live). And the SPCO, which ended its own seven-month lockout on April 30, last Tuesday announced a balanced budget for fiscal year 2012-13 and a net surplus of over $280,000. That amount cuts an accumulated deficit of nearly $800,000 down to $512,000, which the SPCO plans to eliminate over the coming years through planned surpluses.

On the topic of money (for which there are several synonyms, some entertaining: scratch, dough, bread, loot, clams, moola, smackers), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) last week released a preliminary report on the impact of arts and culture on the U.S. economy. According to the new Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA), the first federal effort to learn how many greenbacks the arts and cultural sector contributes to current-dollar gross domestic product (GDP), 3.2 percent of 2011’s GDP was attributable to arts and culture. Which doesn’t seem like much until you translate that into Benjamins: $504 billion.In contrast, BEA’s estimated value of the U.S. travel and tourism industry was 2.8 percent of GDP. Take that, travel and tourism.

Chedda and the arts is the focus of the next Policy and a Pint, co-presented by 89.3 the Current and the Citizens League. On Monday, Dec. 16, radio host Steve Seel and guests Gülgün Kayim (director of arts, culture, and the creative economy for the City of Mineapolis), Laura Zabel (executive director, Springboard for the Arts) and Peter Leggett (chair of St. Paul’s Cultural STAR board) will meet at the Varsityto talk about the connection between arts, culture and economic health. We’re telling you now because these events often sell out. Doors at 5:30 p.m., event at 6. $10; $5 students and Target employees with valid ID. Register here.

With libraries across the country slashing hours and staff due to budget cuts, it’s heartening to learn that the Hennepin County Library will add hours starting Jan. 5. Responding to patron requests and use trends, making hours between libraries more consistent (and schedules less confusing), 34 libraries will increase hours, three (Roosevelt, Southeast, Webber Park) will maintain hours, and four (Champlin, Maple Plain, Oxboro, Westonka) will reduce hours. In all, the library will add 249 open hours per week across its 41-library system. That’s a lot, actually. Here’s the full 2014 hours schedule.

The Jungle has extended “Driving Miss Daisy” through Dec. 29.We loved it when we saw it last month. FMI and tickets. To meet demand, the History Theatre has added a performance of its Andrews Sisters holiday USO show, “Christmas of Swing.” All WWII veterans are invited to attend for free. Now through Sunday, Dec. 22. FMI and tickets. 

Last week on “Top Chef,” Twin Cities chef Sara Johannes was told to pack her knives and go. She had a rough time during the “Restaurant Wars” episode and also the judges’ review, where she threw some attitude at Padma, but she can cook for us anytime. Plus she knows how to wear a head wrap. Johannes is executive chef at Shoyu, a Japanese noodle and sushi shop familiar mainly to travelers, since it’s at the MSP airport on the other side of the security checkpoints.

Courtesy of Bluewater Productions

Bluewater Productions has released a new 32-page comic
book about Prince.

Five diverse and worthy diversions featuring Minnesota musicians: 1) A song by saxophonist George Cartwright is included with the latest issue of the award-winning literary magazine Oxford American, shoulder-to-shoulder with songs by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Bessie Smith, Elvis Presley, Emmylou Harris and other artists. The issue’s theme is Southern music, with a focus on songs about Tennessee. Cartwright’s contribution is “He Who’d Ask.” Listen here, then buy the current Oxford American at B&N or Common Good. 2) Vocalist Sophia Shorai sings Dylan’s eternally touching “Forever Young” for a Kohl’s holiday commercial. If you want more (we did, because it’s irresistible), she has released a full-length version, now available at cdbaby and iTunes. 3) Dessa gave a Tiny Desk Concert at NPRand sang three songs from her terrific new album, “Parts of Speech.” Watching a Tiny Desk Concert always makes us dream of inviting stars to perform in our similarly unspacious living room. 4) Bluewater Productions has released a new 32-page comic book about Prince. Written by Michael Frizell, with art by Ernesto Lovera, it’s what Prince fans want. Download from iTunes or order from Comic Flea Market.

Finally: 5) “Minnesota Beatle Project Volume 5” is now available. This annual compilation of Beatles songs covered by Minnesota musicians is a treat for music lovers and Beatles fans and a gift to kids: 100 percent of net proceeds support music education across Minnesota. Enjoy Dosh’s take on “Blue Jay Way,” the Greycoats’ “Nowhere Man,” the Suburbs’ “Taxman,” Actual Wolf’s “Your Mother Should Know,” and Sonny Knight & The Lakers’ “Day Tripper” while doing good for kids and music programs in our public schools. Quantities are limited, so get thee to Target, the Electric Fetus, or another record store. This is the last "Beatle Project" release; Vega Productions, the nonprofit behind the series, has a new idea up its sleeve for 2014.

Our picks for the week

Tonight at SubText: Jim Walsh presents “The Replacements: Washed Up Hair and Painted Shoes: The Photographic History.” A MinnPost contributor and author of the earlier “The Replacements: All Over but the Shouting: An Oral History,” Walsh shares his latest look back at the iconic Minnesota-based band. 7 p.m. FMI.

Wednesday at Bryant Lake Bowl: The Star Wars Holiday Special 35th Anniversary Spectacular! After devoting Friday’s Artscape to holiday events, we vowed privately to forego all such for today … and then we found this. A 1978 TV special set in the Star Wars galaxy and starring the film’s main cast, it was broadcast in its entirety only once, apparently because it’s such a train wreck. Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) once called it “the horrible Holiday Special that nobody talks about.” Now, of course, it’s a cult thing. Bring an unwrapped toy donation (for Toys for Tots) and get in free. 7 p.m. (doors at 6) and 10 p.m. (doors at 9:30).

Wednesday at select cinemas: the (London’s) West End production of Noël Coward’s “Private Lives.” Toby Stephens and Anna Chancellor star. Go here, click the orange “Buy Tickets” button and enter your ZIP to find the nearest theater(s).

Thursday at the U: a winter light show designed by students at the College of Science and Engineering. A 3D sensory experience: lights synchronized to music composed and performed by students, plus a 22-foot lighted tree, an 8-foot snowman sign, and a big lighted M. Presented by the Tesla Works student group in the Civil Engineering Building Plaza, 500 Pillsbury Dr. SE, Minneapolis. Free and open to the public. At 5:30 p.m., 6, 6:30, and 7. Also Friday and Saturday.

Thursday at Pillsbury House Theatre: “3 Figure$” by Emily Zimmer. Part of Pillsbury House’s annual “Naked Stages” series featuring completely new, interdisciplinary work from artists with local, national and international credentials. Zimmer performs with Frank Theater, Open Eye Figure Theater, Children’s Theatre Company and more. Her play uses three characters to explore the financial collapse of 2008. OK, maybe not the cheeriest holiday fare, but it might keep you from overspending. Also in the series: Moheb Solimen’s “A Great Lakes Vista” and Zainab Musa’s “Habeas Corpus.” FMI and pick-your-price tickets here.

MinnPost illustration by Andy Sturdevant

Any building on the U of M's campus is going to have paintings and prints galore that are generally located in public spaces.

Art is for everyone, it’s true. This column is firmly devoted to that ideal. In reality, though, there exists a continuum involving what types of artwork you can actually look at.

At one end of this continuum are public artworks — geometric sculptures and cherries on spoonbridges and generals on horseback — which are the easiest to find and easiest to experience. Anyone can walk up to the Mary Tyler Moore statue on Nicollet and take their photo with it, day or night, without special permissions of any kind. We could even call this the Mary Tyler Moore factor. The statue of Mary Richards is a perfect 10 on the MTM art accessibility scale. The Spoonbridge is maybe a 9.5, since there are hours when the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is closed. But Nicollet Mall is open 24 hours a day.

At the other end of the spectrum is artwork in private collections and studios, locked away in houses and not viewable without an invitation from the owner or the artist (or, in the extreme case of someone like Henry Darger, not viewable until the artist has died). In my apartment, for example, I have a graphite drawing depicting the six degrees of the late Whitney Houston to every major cultural figure of the postwar era, which I bought for $40 at a West Bank art space in 2008 or so. Short of emailing me to invite yourself over to see it, and making firm plans with me to do so, there’s unfortunately no way you could see that piece in person. It is a 1 on the MTM scale. If I die and it is accessioned by a Whitney Houston fanatic and sent into a climate-controlled art dungeon forever, it becomes a 0.

Most artwork in the world lies somewhere between those two. Roughly in descending order, from 10 to 0: outdoor public spaces, public museums, libraries, art galleries, retail stores, coffee shops, salons, bars, restaurants, alley murals, hospitals, offices, archives, private collections, and finally private homes. Each rung down, you need a more specialized sort of access to see the artwork, whether that access takes the form of an admission fee, a good reason to be there, social capital, or an intercessory of some kind.

Almost exactly in the middle — maybe roughly between a library and a hospital — is the university, and specifically for the purposes of this column, the University of Minnesota. The University of Minnesota is swimming with amazing artworks of all kinds, owned by the university but not stored away in the art holdings at the Weisman. Any building on campus is going to have paintings and prints galore that are generally located in public spaces.

I was reminded of this in the past week when my friend (and previous guest Stroller) Peter Schilling mentioned a painting he’d seen during a brief professional stint at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs several years ago. I decided to go find and it, and see what other Hubert H. Humphrey-themed artworks the building might have. I wasn’t disappointed at the range.

Again, the Humphrey School is probably a solid 5 on our MTM scale. At no point walking through the building looking around did I feel specifically unwelcome, but there is a lingering sense, wandering into offices and past administrative desks, that you don’t really belong there. I like taking The Stroll to places anyone can see, without needing special access, and the offices at the U generally fall into that category. A few people asked if they could help me find something. Once you say you’re looking for art, people tend to be very helpful and friendly. The great thing about the sort of artwork I was after is that, since the audience for it is so small and specialized, people tend to be very proud of it.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

Is it a portrait of Humphrey, or an artwork presented to him when someone noted the resemblance?

The portrait Peter had mentioned is located in the Global Policy Area, which is behind a locked door, so you have to ask permission. It is indeed a wonderful and unusual piece: What looks like a thangka, a traditional form of Chinese, Tibetan or Nepalese painting on silk depicting the life of the Buddha. Funny thing is, the central figure in the piece bears a very striking resemblance to a certain Minnesota senator and vice president. There are no didactics or signage accompanying the piece, and no one in the office knew much in the way of backstory. Is it a portrait of Humphrey, or an artwork presented to him when someone noted the resemblance? It’s a pretty witty piece, either way.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

A more conventional HHH portrait by Li Lin-Chia.

There is also some more excellent HHH-themed artwork in the office. A more conventional portrait is by Li Lin-Chia. Mr. Li was a Chinese artist who worked in both southeast China and Taiwan, and taught for many years during the ’60s and ’70s at St. John’s College in New York City. He traveled America giving demonstrations of traditional Chinese watercolor techniques, and created portraits of many prominent figures, including the king and queen of Thailand.

This piece is interesting for incorporating a Western-style portrait into the framework of a traditional Chinese painting. Humphrey’s face is tightly painted, in fleshy tones, the vice president guffawing one of his trademark guffaws, and looking off to the left. He stands in front of a traditionally rendered pine tree, standing over the trunk like a lectern. I especially like the way Li handled Humphrey’s coat — a black, watery shape, very simple but deftly handled in such a way that the mass and form of Humphrey’s body is suggested with little detail.

There’s also a watercolor painting in the office of three mountain goats, by Liu Ming Ts’ai and presented to Vice President Humphrey at some point in the mid-1960s. Liu was a 30-year-old Taiwanese journalist and teacher who, starting in 1963, traveled across the world by bicycle and bus, meeting people and collecting postmarked stamps from each city he visited. He shows up in a brief item in the Detroit Free-Press in April 1966, so he presumably made it to Washington, D.C., that year and presented this lovely painting to Humphrey. The Free-Press notes that Liu found our highways “too dangerous” for safe bicycle travel.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

A watercolor painting of three mountain goats by Liu Ming Ts’ai.

A photo of Liu, a handsome, smiling young man in a black fleece-lined leather jacket, accompanies the piece. Other than that notice, I can’t find much about Liu’s journey around the world. The fact that he was able to not only secure an audience of some kind with the vice president, but also present to him a gift that remains in the collection of the school, suggests that his travels must have rightfully achieved some degree of notoriety.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

HHH THE HOUR OF HISTORY

In the Student Affairs office nearby, there is what looks like a framed poster — a red and blue sign with a stopwatch, the face of which reads in white: “HHH THE HOUR OF HISTORY.” At first glance, from a distance, I’d thought maybe it was mass-produced poster by someone like Ben Shahn, a leftist graphic artist with a fluid hand. Upon closer examination, though, one finds it’s not a poster at all, but a plank of wood decorated with paint. One also sees it’s probably not the work of a professional artist, either. It’s a little too odd, a little too enthusiastic to be the work of a seasoned pro. Most likely it was held aloft at a rally, or placed on a roadside or airport during a campaign appearance. The stopwatch emphasizes the ticking-clock quality of Humphrey’s image as an almost prophetic figure in pre-New Left liberal circles. His speeches were strewn with references to time.

In his most famous — delivered to the 1948 Democratic Convention in support of a civil-rights plank in the party’s platform — he wound up to this still-famous cry: “The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” Fifteen years later, with the ascension of LBJ and the adoption of a strong civil-rights plank in the Democratic Party platform, that “hour of history” seemed to have arrived.

Down in the basement, in room 55, the International Fellowships Program, there are two incredible gems — so remarkable I can barely believe they’re not highlighted more prominently. The coordinator of the Global Policy Area told me about them, and I’m glad she did, because otherwise I likely wouldn’t have seen them at all. One deals directly with Humphrey’s “sunshine of human rights” speech. It’s two drawings by the artist and civil-rights activist Tracy Sugarman, who died this past January in his hometown of Westport, Conn., at the age of 91.

MinnPost photo by Andy Sturdevant

A drawing by artist and civil-rights activist Tracy Sugarman.

They’re drawings with gray and white charcoal, on buff paper, of Humphrey. One depicts him sitting with LBJ, conferring. The other is Humphrey in 1948, then mayor of Minneapolis, taking the stand at the Democratic Convention and intoning his famous aforementioned “sunshine of human rights” speech. Sugarman was an illustrator, with a varied career that included everything from jazz album covers to action scenes of soldiers in battle and protestors marching (he was a Freedom Rider, working in the Deep South in the early 1960s and illustrating a memoir on the experience called "We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns: The Kids Who Fought for Civil Rights in Mississippi").

This portrait of Humphrey captures beautifully the tension and drama and heroism of that moment, Truman’s face on a banner receding into the background, Humphrey pushing forward his hand and opening his mouth to speak those words that half of the delegation didn’t want to hear into the microphones in front of him. The Humphrey School is full of wall graphics and interpretive displays portraying and explaining that famous moment, but they don’t quite capture the expansive, cinematic quality of the moment the way Sugarman’s piece does.

You might have to ask someone nearby if you’re allowed to see it — it’s in an office, in the basement, hanging near a cabinet over eye level — but it’ll be well worth your time and effort.  

Despite the silence at Orchestra Hall, the Minnesota Orchestral Association will make no leadership changes in the coming months.

What remains to be seen is if there’ll be any change in negotiating tactics with orchestra musicians.

That the MOA will stick with current leadership was the key development from the MOA’s annual meeting Wednesday, held at the Minneapolis Club. Annual meetings are routinely the time when leadership changes are made.

There are many — including 10 DFL legislators— who have come to believe that without a change of leadership, a settlement between the MOA and the musicians, who have been locked out for 14 months, will remain out of reach.

The legislators, all from the metro area, sent a letter to MOA board members earlier this week calling for the resignations of CEO Michael Henson, Board Chair Jon Campbell and past Chair Richard Davis.

But those calls for leadership change did not come from the MOA’s massive board at the annual meeting. It’s uncertain whether a change in negotiating strategy was even discussed.

Campbell will stay on as chair until a negotiated settlement is reached, an MOA spokesperson said.

The decision to stay the course, however, is not surprising. MOA leadership — and apparently the vast majority of board members — believe that it’s the musicians, not management, who have been unwilling to change.

In a statement, Campbell said: “We are hopeful that we’ve reached a point in negotiations where musicians will choose to join us in negotiating a compromise settlement that helps to address these financial issues and enables the players to return to concerts at Orchestra Hall soon.’’

That’s a variation of a theme that’s been a constant since the lockout began.

The MOA on Wednesday reported [PDF] an operating deficit of $1.1 million for fiscal year 2013. That is substantially less than the $6 million deficit from the previous year, when the orchestra actually was performing.

“The fact that the organization’s deficit is substantially smaller in a year without any performances indicates the degree to which this business model is out of alignment,’’ Campbell said in his statement.

Not surprisingly, the report tried to put a positive spin on the past year. For example, the report states that “two thirds of all donors, 68 percent, maintained their support of the organization, with contributed income totaling $5.7 million, compared with $8.2 million the previous year.”

Minnesota Orchestra summary of operating results

The other way of looking at that stat, of course, would be to note that donations were down by a third. The harsh question out of that would be what percentage of those donations will come back, assuming there is a settlement in the future.

In fairness, it should be noted that musicians attempted to paint an equally rosy picture of its accomplishments since the lockout began.

The report does acknowledge that there were concert costs even in a year in which there were no concerts.

For starters, the MOA returned a $961,888 grant to the Minnesota State Arts Board in the wake of the concert-less season.

The MOA also paid out $2.2 million for musicians salaries and benefits because usual salaries were paid for the first month of what the MOA calls “the work stoppage.” Those expenses also included unemployment compensation for musicians that was reimbursed to the state for the remainder of the fiscal year.

It appears that the word “lockout” cannot be found in the report. There also is no direct line showing how much was paid to the law firm Felhaber, Larson, Fenlon and Vogt, which is believed to be behind the lockout strategy.

One line — “negotiations and negotiations related’’ — shows an MOA expenditure of $885,000.

But overall, the tone of this report was upbeat — and filled with the conviction that it’s the board and management that’s “in the right.”

A letter to the board members signed by Campbell and CEO Henson ended on an upbeat tone:

“When a settled contract is in hand, we must travel down these paths (building audiences, etc.) without delay to ensure a thriving Minnesota Orchestra and classical music art form in the 21st Century. We hope fervently to be able to begin that journey soon.”