Item World

It won't go for PeanutsAn early three-panel comic strip drawn by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz is expected to fetch more than $20,000 at a New York auction next week. Nearly 2 feet long by 6 1/2 inches tall, the panel -- which was never published -- shows a Snoopy-like dog upstaging a newsboy who looks a lot like Charlie Brown. The late St. Paul cartoonist gave the 1961 strip, and three others, to his longtime friend Frieda Rich, a Minneapolis art instructor who inspired his curly headed character Frieda. Rich's family has consigned all four strips to Heritage Auctions, which estimates they could sell for up to $50,000. MARY ABBE

Walker: Broken within?London artist Goshka Macuga loves Walker Art Center -- but hates the building's 2005 addition where her first U.S. museum show opened this month. The $136 million expansion "was an extremely unsuccessful attempt to create a place people could actually use," Macuga told I.W. She found especially problematic the addition's sloping hallways, the ice-cube-glass chandeliers, and the "totally terrible and interfering" lace-filigree screens that serve as gallery doors. "Those hallway spaces are an extremely difficult and overdecorated part of a building that is very hostile to art," she said. On the other hand, the museum's staff and crew are so helpful that "from an artist's point of view, the place is amazing, a dream situation," she said. She also loves the minimalist elegance of the original 1971 building so much that she had the museum's staff re-create architect Edward Larrabee Barnes' gallery steps in her installation, "It Broke From Within."

MARY ABBE

Watch at your own riskTakashi Miike's films are so violent that publicists for his "Ichi the Killer" handed out barf bags before a Toronto screening in 2001. The Japanese filmmaker's latest bloody epic, "13 Assassins," played for two sold-out crowds at the Mpls-St. Paul International Film Festival last week. No vomit receptacles were provided at St. Anthony Main theaters -- but maybe they should have been. During the Friday screening, the movie had to be stopped for more than five minutes after a filmgoer was overcome -- and taken away by ambulance. The man's episode followed a particularly gruesome scene featuring the mutilated body of a peasant woman. Forget barf bags, do we need smelling salts with our popcorn?

TOM HORGEN

Fiddling for free moneyLittle Big Town calls them fiddles, Minnesota Sinfonia calls them violins. But they're not splitting horse hairs over learning how to play an instrument. The country quartet and its corporate partner, Country Financial Insurance, has set up a painless program to raise money for Minnesota Sinfonia's music education program. It's called Drive 4 Music. You can help pad the MN Sin budget -- at no cost to you -- with just a couple clicks of your mouse. Go to the Facebook page www.tinyurl.com/Drive4Music and click "like" and then click "like" Minneapolis and $1 will be directed toward MN Sin. The deadline is Thursday because Little Big Town will present a check before its concert on May 7 at Target Center with Sugarland.

JON BREAM

the cast list for the Guthrie's "Arms and the Man." In 2002, we profiled her as a teenage actor on the move -- and then she seemingly disappeared. Actually, she went off to Boston University and then the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She worked at the Utah Festival, too, before coming back to the Twin Cities as the ingenue in George Bernard Shaw's play. "It's totally surreal," Nakasone said about working with actors she grew up watching. "To get to be in a show with them is out of this world." Sadly, Nakasone is leaving us again this fall, for graduate school at Yale, with an eye eventually on Hollywood.

GRAYDON ROYCE

Atmospheric pressureAtmosphere accomplished what few other Minnesota artists not named Prince ever do: It landed high on the Billboard 200 album chart at No. 13 with first-week sales of "The Family Sign." The disc on Rhymesayers Entertainment sold about 28,000 copies, landing it at No. 2 on the rap album chart and on the independent album list. Atmosphere's previous big disc, "When Life Gives You Lemons ...," fared better in 2008, reaching No. 5 on the Billboard 200 with 36,000 copies sold in its first week. "The Family Sign" also lost some ground with critics, earning a 5.8 rating at Pitchfork.com and a 5-out-of-10 from Spin. Nonetheless, Minnesota's best known hip-hoppers have landed some prestigious gigs: Lollapalooza in Chicago, Red Rocks amphitheater near Denver and the Greek Theater in Los Angeles.

CHRIS RIEMENSCHNEIDER

Busy beeBritish author Chris Cleave is coming to Cambridge, Minn., to discuss his New York Times bestseller "Little Bee" (known as "The Other Hand" in his homeland). The story about a friendship between a Nigerian refugee and a London journalist is Cambridge's 2011 Community-wide Read Choice. That means everyone in town is asked to read the book and then join in a discussion with fellow citizens. That's just a warmup for the discussion with Cleave himself on May 10 at the Cambridge-Isanti High School. I.W. hopes that the author doesn't think he's starting his U.S. book tour in Cambridge, Mass.

Yellow journalismSince he writes about us all the time, I.W. thought we should share the latest about David Brauer, who monitors local journalism for Minnpost.com. He's sidelined after suffering liver damage due to a bad reaction to an undetermined prescription drug. "It's not life-threatening," Brauer told I.W. The veteran journalist, who says his skin tone is somewhere between yellow and pumpkin, is constantly itchy and quick to tire. His sleep habits have ballooned from six to 16 hours a day. While he won't be blogging for a while, he will continue to tweet @dbrauer. "Tweeting kind of fits my short-awakeness lifestyle right now," he said.