OF THE 150+ FILMS AT THE FAIRLY VENERABLE (27 YEARS!) Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Fest (MSPIFF), a dozen or so have Minnesota connections. But only a very few of these are Minnesota products, through and through. 4 Track Films (with White Man’s World) is a Minnesota film production company based in Duluth. Its principals, Jason Page and Carrie Boberg, both 35, have been making drama together for…

FOR ITS 27TH YEAR, THE MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (MSPIFF) is on us again — that sprawling, sometimes sloppy, but consistently fascinating collection of world films. With 140-plus films on hand, it’s not so much a festival as it is a smorgasbord in which the discerning cineaste can create their own mini-festival composed entirely of, say, documentaries, or horror films, or films out of…

WHEN MOST PEOPLE THINK OF THE GUTHRIE THEATER, THEY THINK OF THE CLASSICS: Molière, Shakespeare, Shaw. Three years ago, the 46-year-old institution moved into a new, three-theater complex on the riverfront, and with this new building came a commitment to produce new work — no doubt part of the Guthrie’s bid for increased credibility within the national theater community. This new focus is best evidenced…

I’M LEANING UP AGAINST THE TRUCK, IN THE FRONT YARD OF OUR OLD FARMHOUSE in Ellsworth—about fifty miles from the Twin Cities, across the river in Wisconsin. I’m wearing pajama bottoms, a wife beater, smoking a cigarette and holding a rifle. I’m waiting for a squirrel. The mailman drives his old beater station wagon down the driveway, carrying a package too big for our mailbox. My husband and I are the…

“IT WAS SLUMMING IN REVERSE,” says Rachel Haselbauer over email, recounting her days as a gallerist in the art space she ran with her husband for four years, between 1979 and 1983. “By day, we were living in a tiny walk-up in Stevens Square, sharing a bathroom with three other families. By night, though, we’d be forty stories up over downtown Minneapolis, right in the middle of the financial district. You…

DULUTH IS A CITY UNLIKE ANY OTHER. Okay, maybe that’s true of all cities, but it’s really true of this one. I’ve lived in a lot of different places, but nowhere else is as simultaneously intimate and various, worldly and homey, wild and civilized, as this one. And the most Duluth event of all, the one that best sums up the city and its music-obsessed citizens, is the annual, week-long Homegrown Music…

WITH THE ADVENT OF SPRING, SEVERAL FINE MINNEAPOLIS GALLERY EXHIBITIONS have sprung up like inspired flora. Of particular note are two that use the landscape genre as a departure point and a third, which imaginatively explores the self and the interior landscape of the mind. Historically, in Western art, the landscape has been an actual and existential force cultivated by artists, regardless of…

DYLAN AND VAN RONK HAD GERDE’S FOLK CITY. Pollock and de Kooning had the Cedar Tavern. Scrimshaw and Serrand have Bedlam and the BLB. In a twist of fate no playwright would dare try to get an audience to believe, Maren Ward and Kristin Van Loon—two high school classmates from Winnetka, Illinois—are calling the shots at these two hubs of independent theater in Minneapolis. Ward is one of two…

ON THE DAY OF HIS 21 BIRTHDAY, AT THE BEGINNING OF A JOURNEY 280 miles to his home in Birmingham, England, Bill Watkins caught his foot on an iron spike, rendering his ankle unusable. Following the call of the hiraeth — the primeval longing for home and kin — landed our wayfaring hero facedown and unconscious. As he lay there, two Gypsies stumbled upon him and helped him back to their camp to care for…