Northeast

On May 4, Border Crossing, a play about immigration, finished an 8-day-run at the Ritz Theater. The play was produced and directed by the Off-Leash Area, a Minneapolis company known for adventurous movement-based productions. Reviews were complimentary, but the playwright, Marcie Rendon, refused to see it. Rendon also insisted that the program read: “The text was adapted and excerpted from a larger body of work by Marcie Rendon.” She asked for corrections in reviews that didn’t make that clear, and posted a letter on her blog after the play opened. MORE »

Relatively speaking, there’s a lot more money spent on graffiti removal locally than you probably realize. Along with the Minneapolis Anti-Graffiti Initiative, which pays citizens cash for leads about graffiti that produce arrests, the city of Minneapolis is offering Graffiti Micro Grants to non-profit community-based organizations and churches for beautification programs, graffiti clean-up, and teaching the Graffiti Hurts curriculum, among other projects. The cap for each organization is $10,000. (The image above, by the way, is the city’s very own anti-graffiti graffito.) MORE »

The strains of guitar, upright bass, saw, and folksy vocals wriggled their way through the crowd last Friday as over fifty local cartoonists, along with scores of friends and patrons, packed the Altered Esthetics gallery in Northeast Minneapolis for the opening of “Lutefisk Sushi.” The show features the work of over fifty local cartoonists on both gallery walls and in a box of black-and-white “mini comics” written by each artist for the occasion. MORE »

Stone Soup are blues rock at its best, with a classic style and solid chops. They’re also smart enough to have been patient with bringing the band along. Over the past couple of years, they have methodically gone from cutting a demo and digging up gigs to steadily building a following while working on their CD Roots. The whole thing is paying off handsomely. Instead making a common mistake—pushing a rushed product to market and then trying to hustle up an audience before the disc is obsolete—the guys have something to show for themselves and a faithful core of fans to show it to. MORE »

Seeing 21 films in 11 days is an arduous journey filled with delights, insights, and disappointments. Attending so many films can be both exhilarating and exhausting. A few films left indelible imprints in my mind, others fell by the roadside, and a couple I should have just ditched. MORE »