The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

AMONG THE GREAT unanswerable questions that haunt our city is this one: Why is there a giant, crappy K-Mart superstore sitting in the middle of Nicollet Avenue?

Travel back with me, if you will for just a moment, to those happy, halcyon days of the year 2001. Oh, what a time to be a young American artist it was!

Billy X. Curmano, performance artist and provocateur, doesn’t care much for the conventional wisdom that says artists must live in a large city. He may have grown up in Milwaukee and spent time in the East Village and other urban centers of art, but ultimately he decided to make his base of operations a picturesque corner of rural southeastern Minnesota.

In accordance with standards for staging cosmic spectacles, (however low-budget), the cast of A Gift for Planet BX63 (above photo) appeared in glittering, metallic costume.

There's some interesting discussion over at the Walker blogs concerning the performance career ender that was staged, just this past weekend, by Claude Wampler. I saw the show on Friday but, sadly, didn't stick around for the Q&A, which sounds to have been very tense. Truth be told, my date was