Calhoun - Isles : Featured Stories

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 pair of highly unusual--as in flamboyantly libidinous--eco-activists bring their film-in-progress to town.

Our yearly onstage carnival of the odd, the eloquent, the poignant, and the perverse is over for 2012. Bill Kelley was in the audience at the Rarig Center and Intermedia Arts to record six of the 163 shows that took the Fringe stages between August 2 and 12. From a raucous burlesque version of a classic TV sketch to Chinese dance to a surreal Dust Bowl fable, here are images of performance at its edgiest.

Capturing hundreds of sequential Street View images from Google Maps using ScreenHunter software, then stitching them together  and time-lapsing them in Windows Movie Maker, the peripatetic highway videographer who goes by the YouTube handle eluko79 has created a real-but-virtual photographic journey into the heart of the city.

A handful of local coffee shops are redefining the coffee experience as an art form. From sourcing to roasting, grinding to "latte art," their watchword is quality. If you're looking for quick joe to grab and go, you may need to adjust your expectations upward.

Most of us in the Twin Cities are aware that we've become a great town for bicycling in recent years, but urbanist and author Jay Walljasper--an avid biker for decades--has been digging into the trend to find out the what and the why behind it. In this adaptation of an article he wrote for Bikes Belong, he fills in the story and gives us some impressive facts about the sheer scale and promise of our new two-wheel era.

To accompany Jay Walljasper's take on bike policy and bike culture in the Twin Cities, here's a video by Streetfilms that shows just how valuable one of the crown jewels in our bikeway system is--the Midtown Greenway, running more or less parallel to Lake Street from Chowen Avenue to the Mississippi River.

Following our selection of some favorite public artworks in Saint Paul two weeks ago, here is our take on the beautiful and the quirky in Minneapolis outdoor art--minus the Spoonbridge and Cherry, which is terrific but a little overexposed. It's just a taste of the richness available, designed to get you outside looking at art before the snow flies.

The palmy days of Prince, H�sker D�, the Replacements, and other iconic Twin Cities bands may have passed, but our music scene is just as vital, and a lot more diverse, today. Just as in the golden age, seeing and hearing the bands live is crucial to really getting to know the scene, so here is our list of definitive venues--from the legendary and cavernous former home base of the Purple One, First Avenue, to the beer-fragrant holes-in-the-wall where tomorrow's stars are plugging in their amps.

Design maven Alyssa Ford scoured the Cities for places where great design is for sale, from legendary pottery to elegant, magazine-spread-worthy home decor to art toys straight out of Japanese cartoon culture--and our photographer, Bill Kelley, came along. Check out her picks and his pix.