Taylor Swift tweeted recently about Owl City's album "Ocean Eyes." Then she showed up at the Minnesota pop group's New York City gig -- get this -- the night after she was besmirched by Kanye West on the MTV Video Music Awards. "We knew she was going to be there," Owl City main man Adam Young told I.W. "I was terrified. I'm a huge fan of hers. I saw her in the balcony and she knew all the words." Afterward, they chatted (yes, about the VMAs) and have since been exchanging e-mails. What about? "Life and travel and the countries she's been to."

JON BREAM

They won't put Curtiss A out of business, but the musicians behind last week's Current-generated Beatles tribute at the Turf Club certainly meant business. Big Trouble, the instrumental offshoot of Heiruspecs (that's right, hip-hop guys!), offered surprisingly faithful renditions of songs the Fab lads never played live. Drummer Peter Leggett especially nailed rock's most famous drum solo. Two Harbors singer Chris Pavlich made for a fine Lennon impersonator on "Tomorrow Never Knows" and more. And the best example of Lennon's wit came from Current DJ and "I'm Only Sleeping" singer David Campbell (who was at the Turf two weeks earlier with his band E.L.nO, playing for rock scribes Chuck Klosterman and Melissa Maerz's pre-wedding bash). Complaining about "A Hard Day's Night" looming too large on a nearby movie screen, Campbell quipped, "It's like trying to lose your virginity with your parents' picture next to your bed."

CHRIS RIEMENSCHNEIDER

Otto Ramstad of Minneapolis-based Body Cartography Project has been selected to create a new work for Lyon Opera Ballet in France. This is a big honor -- the company's list of collaborators includes William Forsythe, Bill T. Jones and Trisha Brown. Ramstad, along with artistic collaborator Olive Bieringa, recently held auditions in Lyon, and he sent an e-mail update from Finland between performances at two festivals: "They are truly beautiful dancers. There are 29 dancers in the company currently, and it was thrilling to see material that I have worked on with groups of maximum five dancers played out over such a huge group." Artistic director Yorgos Loukos tapped Ramstad after reviewing his work for the Rolex Protégé award. Although he didn't win, Ramstad is happy with this turn of events and looks forward to the world premiere next June on a program shared with Australian Antony Hamilton and New Yorker Jason Akira Somma.

CAROLINE PALMER

If you're curious about that Albrecht Dürer print that pops up on page 263 of "The Lost Symbol," Dan Brown's latest bestseller, you can hop over to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and find it hanging in Gallery 316. Tom Rassieur, the museum's print curator, said he hadn't read the book but got a tip that Dürer's 1514 image "Melencolia I" plays a role in the plot, so he got it out of storage and hung it. The engraving shows a grumpy-looking angel working with a compass, surrounded by carpenter's tools, with a dog at his feet, a sulky putti at his side and a square of "magic numbers" above his head. The four numbers in each line always add up to 34 -- vertically, horizontally and diagonally. The numbers help Brown's hero, the Harvard "symbologist" Robert Langdon, to decipher the book's mystery. "Dürer is easily among the greatest artists of all time and a real favorite of mine," said Rassieur. "That print is rife with symbols, but I think it's also a psychological self-portrait that expresses the frustration of a creative genius whose mind can travel the heavens the way the comet does in the upper corner, but he's limited to the physical world in what he makes."

MARY ABBE

Maybe the most honest assessment of a crowd ever made by a rock star onstage: "You look good tonight ... if a bit homogeneous." Courtesy of Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy at Roy Wilkins Auditorium last Friday.

CHRIS RIEMENSCHNEIDER