LUCAS RAYALA IS NOT A FILM GEEK, PER SE. By his own admission he’s more of an overall projects guy with a proclivity for seemingly impossible tasks, and someone who isn’t afraid to take on a little risk. After reading a 2009 roundtable in McSweeney’s San Francisco Panorama newspaper about the state of movie distribution, the Northern Wisconsin native  had what he calls “an a-ha moment” regarding the…

FROM A FEW BLOCKS AWAY, IT’S THUMPING BASS. Closer, you get unintelligible calls and the occasional flash of white tennies in the air. From a block away, you see shoes and crotches at strange angles, as if the stage were some new state fair ride. And you see how the action on stage sets everything in motion around it — the pigeon-breasted man crossing the street, even the windblown garbage. It’s hot, hot…

SO, WHAT EXACTLY IS ZONE 5? Those of us whose professional work and/or extracurricular proclivities lie at the intersections of art and architecture have been asking that very question, ever since something called The Department of Public Design (DoPD) began issuing missives on a project website and blog about its inaugural exhibition, Interim Report on the Excavation of Zone 5. Back in May, the DoPD…

THANKS TO MRS. FIELD, A GREAT TEACHER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE at Normandale Community College, I spent my twenties reading most of the American canon — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Mark Twain. Mrs. Field, being the solid sage she was, advised me to read slowly and without interpretation, to fall into each story as if I were talking with a friend. She wasn’t at all…

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO GET TO KNOW THE FOLKS IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD? In the case of two theater companies, Bedlam and Mixed Blood Theatres, it means bringing members of the community together to create a new play. In that spirit, Ku soo Dhawaada Xafadeena (Welcome to Our Neighborhood), which will be performed at the Cedar Cultural Center this month, is a collaboration between the two theaters, playwright…

ECLECTIC EDGE IS, AS ITS NAME SUGGESTS, a company of various moods, all based in jazz. More specifically, all these moods derive from a performative, tightly choreographed, smiley, lyric style of jazz, most familiar to Twin Cities audiences from Danny Buraczewski’s Jazzdance. This past weekend, I saw the ensemble’s Send in the Jazz line-up. I’m going to be frank: terrible things can happen in this style…

THE GARAGE AT 3310 15TH AVENUE S. LOOKS LIKE ANY OTHER in South Minneapolis. It has a wide bluish-grey door with prominently placed house numbers and sits next to a tidy wooden fence that encloses the adjacent yard. If you were walking by on your way to Powderhorn Park you probably would not think anything of it. But, come July, a sign and a doorbell will designate this common domestic structure as…

I ALMOST LEFT MIDWAY GALLERY AFTER KARL RASCHKE’S OBFUSCATION. It was the first piece I saw, and I’d gotten a little lost in it, immersed myself in a way that seemed unfair to the other photographers in the 2010-2011 McKnight fellowship show, and to the 2009-2010 fellows, whose work, mounted at Franklin Art Works, I was supposed to view next. All told, I’m sure I spent at least a half hour with the…

LAST MONTH, I PERSUADED SEVERAL OF MY ARTS JOURNALISM STUDENTS to join me in viewing Czech-Canadian artist Jana Sterbak’s infamous meat dress, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, at the Walker Art Center. The simple sleeveless sheath, stitched from 60 pounds of flank (or skirt) steak by Walker assistants in 1994, is part of the ongoing Midnight Partyexhibition. Sterbak’s 1987 original, 50…