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Scotty could kick Dave’s ass. We got your ribfest right here, in Southwest Minneapolis. Scott Ja Mama’s is a screen-door two-seater joint that does a sweltering ribs business every week. It’s a call-ahead-and-order place, and we think the two seats are for the few who can’t escape the saucy aromas and make it to the … Read more

We’d wager there are a few families left who prefer slide shows or Super-8 screenings to home videos. But how many do you know who create art exhibitions celebrating their life together? Melba Price, Bruce Tapola, and their daughter Oakley did so in 1993 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; eleven years later, it’s time … Read more

If it makes us sound shallow, so be it: We love supporting the arts because we love parties. Is there a finer way to show your support than to enjoy cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and dancing with intriguing, passionate, and creative people (many of whom inevitably have amazing footwear)? And when you can buy art and … Read more

Only in the snotty West have we developed this idea of “outsider art” for crafts and art forms that are “vernacular.” Look to the East to find traditions that not only predate modernity, but keep right on ignoring it. Like Russian lacquer boxes. These incredibly detailed and lush paintings on boxes, plates, miniature caskets, and … Read more

Now in its ninth year, the Rain Taxi Review of Books remains a stalwart champion of “difficult” literature—stuff that challenges our assumptions about narrative, language, or even what makes a good story. It also celebrates the larger world of things bibliophilistic with the Twin Cities Book Festival, which it has sponsored since its inception in … Read more

Straight talkVINCENT GALLO Since its infamous debut at the last Cannes Film Festival, director and actor Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny has become the year’s most controversial movie, as much for its deliberately slow pacing as for the final scene, in which Gallo and Chloë Sevigny engage in an explicit, unsimulated sex act. Gallo chatted … Read more

A friend recently pointed out the hypocrisy in how I love bloody, mobbed-out films where people get whacked with a ball point pen in the jugular—and yet nearly have a nervous breakdown when I see a squirrel smashed in the street.I don’t know if this requires serious examination on my part but it is true. … Read more

We were a little disturbed by the explosion. All around the city, there was a sudden, violent eruption of elegant apartments, lofts, row-houses, and condominiums. And it wasn’t just along the Mississippi or in the Warehouse District. It was where a gas station had stood at Fiftieth Street in Linden Hills. It was where something … Read more

That afternoon, I remember, I’d attempted to perform back surgery on a dwarf who had gotten so stooped and hump-shouldered that she could barely walk. Neighborhood children had been throwing rocks at her for years. She was brilliant and very funny, but struggled with a terrible speech impediment, and was also cursed with a disastrous … Read more