Your Locally Grown Alternative Newspaper
Volume 9 * Issue 44 * February 1 - 7, 2006 * FREE wheelin'
PulseTC.com
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Hot Tickets for February 1 - February 7, 2006
Crossing the Atlantic CD Release...The Story of Hope...Illusive indy films...Art on ice...The Devaney Hearts...punk Passions...Emily Carter...plus, Flogging Molly and other shows/events/tix/ to boil out your case of S.A.D. (Show Asphyxiation Disorder).
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Heck on Wheels: Minnesota RollerGirls
by Dwight Hobbes
photos by James Schwart
Minnesota RollerGirls represent. A member in good standing of skater-owned and operated Womens Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA, with 30 leagues across the country), Minnesota RollerGirls return an old-time institution to area working-class folk. Accordingly, dyed-in-the-wool blue-collar entertainment is alive and well in the Twin Cities. With a vengeance. Minnesotas league introduced itself only about two years ago and already shows signs of serious staying power.
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U.S. Senate candidates Bell, Klobuchar respond to questions
Editors Note: Pulse will be asking national and state candidates in Minnesota elections to chime in throughout the course of the year leading up to November. This week, Minnesota DFL U.S. Senate candidates Ford Bell and Amy Klobuchar were asked the following questions:
1) Do you support Congressman John Murthas positionthat the United States should withdraw its troops from Iraq within six months?
2) Do you support universal single payer health care?
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Commentary: Confrontation underutilized in current political landscape
by Steve Butcher
When Green Party member David Baldwin wrote, in a recent commentary for Pulse, that the United States is currently a partisan battlefield, and is undergoing the kind of crisis not seen since the decade immediately preceding the Civil War, I almost fell out of my chair. Other than a few mild but subdued grumblings, there is nothing on todays political landscape that even remotely approaches the legendary period of the 1850s, when the nation endured the fugitive slave laws, Bleeding Kansas, the Pottawatomie Massacres, or the Harpers Ferry attack. There is nothing resembling the 1852 beating inflicted upon Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks; no effort equivalent to the one undertaken by New York Times publisher Horace Greeley, who personally financed a gun-running operation in support of Kansas free-staters; and certainly nothing to rival the election of 1860, which resulted in the dissolution of the United States.
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At Witts End
by Christopher Koza
Ghostbirds and Gumbells? These characters and others from the mind of artist David Witt infiltrate Lowertown St. Paul in a series of new paintings currently on exhibition at the cozy Back Alley Gallery. The works are colorful, humorous, illustrative and identified by titles such as A Conspiracy of Ghostbirds, A Beanbugs Distress and March of the Gumbellsstreet signs in a universe where Willie Wonka and Dr. Seuss take tea amidst the playfully twisted existence of strange inhabitants.
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2005: An Underrated Year of Film
by Paul Bachleitner
2005 was a good year for films. It certainly offered more quality than last year, when Million Dollar Baby, Sideways and Closer mightve swept the Oscars if it werent for Jamie Foxxs uncanny impersonation of Ray Charles. Audiences seem to be voting with their entertainment dollars to defeat talk of gay marriage bans and the hate of right-wing conservatives. No fewer than four homosexual-themed films struck mainstream gold while securing high praise from critics: Brokeback Mountain, Transamerica, Capote and Breakfast on Pluto.
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Marah: Brothers in Arms
by Rob van Alstyne
To a certain extent one assumes that high profile critical hosannahs for rock bands result in a subsequent upgrade in their personal fortunes; unfortunately, thats not always the case. Exhibit A: Marah. A band with more famous fans than you can shake a stick atStephen King cites them as a favorite; the Boss himself called them onstage at Giants Stadium to jam; and novelist Nick Hornby devoted a whole 2004 New York Times column to them entitled Rock of Agesthats somehow still stuck playing in bars with a capacity of around 350 rather than 3,000.
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"Your Locally Grown Alternative Newspaper"
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