arts and culture : Featured Stories

In A Line or Two, I share some of my enthusiasms and discoveries as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: An evening at the JoyFace Poetry and Arts Collective's pop-up celebration, the Full Blast Bliss Reading and Art Show.

Shops that pair high-end coffee with edgy, adrenaline-boosting activities are becoming a Twin Cities hallmark. We've got coffee and motorcycles (Bob's Java Hut), coffee and serious biking (Angry Catfish), and now coffee and that artistic test of pain-endurance called getting serious tattoos.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my enthusiasms and discoveries as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: a venturesome group of artists and poets have created a pop-up gallery in a vacant storefront at 38th and Chicago. This weekend, you're invited to join the Joyface Poetry and Arts Collective as they fill the space with experimental beauty--and plan the future of their project.

He's an up-and-coming rapper who divides his time between Ghana and the Twin Cities. She's a globetrotting business consultant who trained as a classical musician and an engineer. Together they created Giant Steps, a sort of Startup Weekend for creative types. The idea: business and art can (and should) find common ground.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my enthusiasms and discoveries as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: A preview of what's coming up in the Walker Art Center's performance program, including Britain's hottest young choreographer and a show in which an elephant-headed Indian god takes on Hitler.

No doubt about it: the aristocracy of the circus are the aerialists, the trapeze and high-wire and other up-in-the-air artists who defy gravity (and major injury or death) by soaring high above the crowd. There's a deceptively modest-looking place in Northeast Minneapolis where you can study these arcane skills, and photographer Bill Kelley paid it a recent visit.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my enthusiasms and discoveries as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: At an upcoming potluck and community meeting,  you can get to know a unique arts-based activist group in Saint Paul's Frogtown.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my enthusiasms and discoveries as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: The frightening challenge of not messing up sushi-making at a new, hands-on cooking school.

The capital city glows like a jewel box in this time-lapse video, which takes in the Mississippi and the downtown skyline.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my discoveries and enthusiasms as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: On Thursday, a scholar of public art talks about the new memorials that are springing up in America--and the challenge of memorializing victims rather than heroes.

Web journalist, Ruby on Rails geek, entrepreneur, and DIY maven Bruno Bornsztein, founder of Curbly.com and a handful of other sites, typifies the tech-savvy business guy circa 2012. But his most intriguing characteristic might be the limit he's put on his ambition.

The founder and artistic director of Youth Performance Company reflects on what she's learned from the kids she works with about the real source of the "bullying epidemic" in our schools--and why she commissioned a musical theater piece to deal with it.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my discoveries and enthusiasms as I make my way around the Twin Cities.Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: The IFP Minnesota Center for Media Arts lauds James Bakkom, a one-of-a-kind artist who also contributed to some of our region's finest achievements in theater and film.

The Dakota War of 1862, the survival of Native languages, Minneapolis' urban Indian heartland--these were the challenging themes that a group of young Native filmmakers took up this summer at an innovative media institute dedicated to reconnecting them with their roots.

In A Line or Two, I share some of my discoveries and enthusiasms as I make my way around the Twin Cities. Call it an editor's note as blog entry. This week: A lively lunch at Minneapolis' newest brewpub on its first day--and a first look at Paul's Ball.