Evangelical cartoonist Jack T. Chick hates Halloween. Chick, creator and publisher of the inexplicably popular Chick Tracts, is a somewhat mysterious figure. No information exists about him except a brief...

Folk music appears to have such rugged integrity. Steadfastly rooted in history, sung in foreign tongues and played on ancient instruments, it has always presented itself as an inflexible ode to the roots...

We're coming up on a reflective time: winter, specifically. Winter seems to be off to an early start this year and will be actively seeking to murder us in a few months. And I can't be the only one who...

There is an exhibit at the Walker Art Center that has invented a name for itself. In fact, its title contains not one, but two neologisms. See if you can spot them - the show is called Ultrabaroque: Aspects...

Here it is, the greatest film ever made. Even the title is a masterpiece - Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! It is the sort of title exploitation filmmakers dream of. The title alone guarantees ticket sales,...

It is time for a radical re-envisioning of Ö well, of time itself. We have been living in a dream of the present for too long now, and it is time we admitted the awful truth to ourselves: We are not living...

As more evidence that there just ain't no justice in this world, who do we find at the helm of the latest incarnation of Thomas Harris's trilogy of books detailing the awful appetite of Hannibal "The Cannibal"...

Swan Lake, that hoary old classic of ballet by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, is not famous for raising critical hackles - but, then, really, how much ire can be raised by a story of songbirds in love? Louise...

Variety reports that CBS is taking Elly Mae up on her invitation - "Y'all come back now, y'hear?" - and reviving its classic series "The Beverly Hillbillies" with a reality-show twist, transplanting a...

Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, lately of the film Spirited Away (currently showing at the Uptown Theater) is a greatly ambiguous filmmaker, and I adore him for it. American films sometimes seem to exist...

These are dire times for any sort of animation that doesn't involve computers. Such old-fangled crafts as cel and puppet animation, which require thousands of meticulously detailed drawings or carefully...

For those of you who don't know it, The Children's Theatre Company's artistic director, Peter C. Brosius, is behind the most interesting productions in the Twin Cities. He has a taste for offbeat, ingenious...

During the interminable television - watching hours of this Sept. 11, sandwiched between repeated images of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center buckling and collapsing in on themselves, a firefighter...

There is something about Aaron Cometbus that makes it seem as though he is writing the story of your life. A recent City Pages review of a new compilation of Cometbus's self-titled zine began with the...

American Idol has wound down, finally, last night it finally spun into nothingness. It is a show that I have watched for reasons other than those intended by the producers, and if I can sum it up in two...

Not to be glib, but I have developed a recent — and admittedly morbid — fascination for dieting Web sites which, among your typical suggestions for weight loss, include tips on hiding your...

It is summer, and once again the studios, like little boys at camp, are kicking into the dirt to see what sort of creepy crawlies will emerge to frighten us. Of course, what emerges is never that unexpected:...

  Illustrator Edward Gorey, whose strange, crabbed, finely detailed illustrations and blackly humorous accompanying text seems perpetually to hang on the walls of college dorm rooms, died in April...

Well, we at The Lens are starting to feel as though we are turning into something of an official press organ for Vaudeville. We don't mind it -- after all, we pepper our conversations with phrases from...

  Bart Hopkin is mad, but his is an elegant madness. Some people collect sounds ñ it is a mania common to musicians, for whom sometimes the whole clattering world seems to be made of potential instruments....

Some of us could watch television forever if it weren't for television shows constantly interrupting all those marvelous commercials. There it is, Nike's staggeringly comic "Tag" commercial, in which it...