The Tangential

“Country Roads”: Plymouth Playhouse Celebrates the Music of John Denver

Country Roads: The Music of John Denver is currently being staged at Plymouth Playhouse. Conceived and created by Dennis Curley, this show is not about revisiting Denver’s life, but instead focuses on how John Denver’s music has touched our lives. Denver wrote and sang about things that everyone can relate to — home and family, love…

“Germinal”: Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort Discover an Absurd World at the Walker Art Center

Germinal gets the first of its many laughs with a teasing lighting cue at the show’s very onset. The amusement continues for the next 90 minutes, as four performers (Arnaud Boulogne, Ondine Cloez, Halory Goerger, and Denis Robert) awake on a blank stage. Each is clutching a sound-mixing board, which provide their first key to unlocking a series…

The Painter in Me is Obsessed with Makeup Tutorials

The latest content consumption hole I’ve fallen down is watching makeup tutorials on YouTube. If you’ve never seen one, they usually go like this: A beautiful woman will say, “Hello, today we’re going to do this look,” and then proceed to completely transform her face until she looks like a mermaid goddess and/or Kylie Jenner. I have…

Gay Sims I Made In 7th Grade

1. Freddie Freddie was supposed to look like Freddie Prinze, Jr. (who I had a major crush on), but I could never get the facial proportions right. He never had that Prinze pout. Instead of starring in teen slasher dramas, Freddie found a job as a “Subway Musician” through the newspaper (???) and caught a…

“Pericles”: A Tall Tale, Told Warmly at the Guthrie Theater

I had never seen Shakespeare’s Pericles before today’s matinee at the Guthrie Theater, but I was plenty familiar with its latter-day regional descendants: tales of love, loss, and adventure on the stormy seas. In our case, that would be the Unsalted Sea. In shows like Ten November and Riding the Wind, Lake Superior performs the same function that the Mediterranean Sea…

Rabih Mroué’s “Riding on a Cloud” at the Walker Art Center: A Tender Brotherly Portrait

Last time Beirut-born theater artist Rabih Mroué was featured in the Walker Art Center’s annual Out There series, he came to town with Looking for a Missing Employee, a show about the Kafka-esque bureaucracy at the Lebanese Ministry of Finance. At the time (2013), I wrote, “The performer’s style — a faux naïveté and hammy schtick — clearly…

A short history of The Tangential

The Tangential is a pop culture and creative writing blog launched in 2011 by three writers living in Minneapolis: Becky Lang (now Radecki), Jay Gabler, and Katie Sisneros. That was a golden age of irreverent confessional blogging, and over the first couple years we built a national following. Notably, we gained over 120,000 followers on Tumblr, where we were often associated with the provocative, extremely online writers in the movement known as alt lit. We created spinoff blogs including The Sport Hole, The Party Whip, The Tangential Ruins Minneapolis, and Tan Genitals. We hosted Minneapolis events and published three books.

We were having so much fun, in fact, that we never got around to monetizing. Oops! Well, we did have a little income from the books and events, and we became an Amazon affiliate. (This is your official disclosure that we subsidize our hosting costs via revenue from partner links.) Eventually, though, the editors and contributors who fueled the site’s early years largely moved on to other projects.

Today, The Tangential is run by Jay, who continues to publish criticism and other writing as well as to maintain the site’s catalog of posts — if only for, as we’ve always said, “the good of society.”