Front Row Seat

For the second year of Minneapolis's Northern Spark overnight art event, I followed my own advice from the previous year: I formed a posse (well, a mini-posse, with my friend Heidi) and stayed out all night (well, almost). I'm glad to report that it was good advice, and that I had much more fun this year. It helped that this iteration of Northern Spark felt overall livelier, denser, and more diverse than last year's.

Don't ask why a dramatic comedy about midlife crises was one of our favorite movies to watch when my siblings and I were kids, but it was. Recently I watched Alan Alda's The Four Seasons (1981) for the first time in several years, and afterwards someone asked me what I thought about the film given my background in sociology. I responded by talking about changing attitudes toward divorce, but as I thought about the question later, I realized that what had most struck me on this viewing was just how old the characters act.

When a movie critic says something my dad doesn't agree with, Dad will grunt. "Those critics see too many movies! They have no idea what the average person likes." Of course, if a critic says something Dad agrees with, he'll cite it favorably. "Did you see they gave Zorba the Greek four stars? That's a classic." Welcome to the world of the critic, where favorable reviews are greeted as the sage musings of a discerning viewer and negative reviews are dismissed as useless hackwork.

My aunt Betsy Gabler—a regular Daily Planet contributor—worked for a time at Alchemy Architects, a firm sharing a St. Anthony Park building with the studio of well-known photographer Alec Soth. Soth's work is shown around the world, and his prints would return to the studio in wooden art-shipping crates. Betsy remembers that Alchemy principal Geoff Warner, a re-use advocate, would say, "Don't throw away those crates!"