Fall Arts Preview

A cool season�s worth of art, books, dance, film, music, and theater listings

Comments (0) By City Pages Staff Wednesday, Sep 13 2000

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The plain fact of it is, there's too much art in the Twin Cities. You heard us right: too much. Confronted with the 700 (or 800? 1,200?) events listed in the pages that follow--art, books, dance, film, music, theater, and who knows what else--the beleaguered reader may be forced to ask a hard question: With all this to do, who will stay home and attend to that orphaned TV screen? Who will slump over the loveseat with a frozen sausage-and-maraschino-cherry pizza while reviewing the pressing events of the day in People? Who will have time to cast that election-day ballot for Eugene Debs?

Take October 6. A typical Friday evening. What couple will stay home to attend to their couple needs when the James Sewell Ballet is debuting a new composition, the U Film Society is screening the music-industry exposé The Target Shoots First, Victoria Williams and Mark Olson are singing their shoo-bee-doos at the Woman's Club Theatre, and Jesse Ventura's political aide Jack Uldrich is reading from an original mystery novel? No, your average pair of blissful newlyweds poring over the descriptions and listings below will have no choice but to leave their comfy roost that night--and virtually every other night between now and Thanksgiving.

We know what you're thinking: If people immersed in the deepest of human passions can't get around to expressing that affection--and we don't mean in a poem, either--who will spawn the next generation of audiences? It's a frightening prospect, but we must address it head-on. Perhaps, like poor Iowa, Minnesota will soon find itself lobbying the INS for immigrant audiences!

Artists infiltrate our homes. They drag us from our beds. They depress our birth rate. They prevent us from voting. Could this Fall Arts Preview represent an unwitting prop in a frightfully efficient campaign to wrest control of society and re-engineer it with performance poets and lithographers controlling the organs of the state?

Let City Pages' position on this be clear: Local artists, we will praise your events, and encourage people to go see them. But we will not be party to your cultural revolution. The applause stops here.