It is good to have hope, that thing with feathers, as the poet said, and it’s best when it comes as a surprise. Biking down Nicollet back when summer seemed new and endless, before word came down that some Twin Cities cultural hubs were losing their spaces, it was good to see the reappearance of a certain flock of hopeful and forward looking birds, the quickly sketched but effortlessly floating marker work of Aaron Bickner and Andrew Shannon. The flying pigeons, black ink on the whitewashed panels of the building at the southeast corner of Nic & 10th first appeared last summer as part of the supposedly temporary Save Canvas show organized by Overproof, a show using empty retail spaces and found materials.

Even though a year has now passed, the installations in the abandoned retail spaces never were taken down but the shop tableaux were never my favorite part of the project. The birds were just so much more immediate, offering up a simple vision of how to use urban, publicly visible space (a legal and philosophical distinction from public space) in a way that makes the city more livable. This winter, the wall was covered up by a bright-hued ad campaign to visit Montana, wisely chosen to show the verdant mountains and crystalline lakes of Montana in summer, because in winter, Montana makes International Falls look like sunny South Beach. The color, in winter, was a nice mental getaway, but that’s all it was- escapism. The birds were put there by people, artists and organizers and entrepreneurs who live in this city and care about it.

It was the right positioning, too- the building once was the physical home of Let It Be Records, now a mail-order entity and still has the advertising for the failed 10th & Nicollet luxury highrise that followed adorning the top of the window canopies. That corner, for the better part of the decade has stood for collapse and failure, a downtown reminder of the decline of independent retailers, the folly of inflated real estate markets and the ensuing recession. Save Canvas, it felt, was a defiant bird flipped to hard times. When we go broke, when the state of affairs, to cop Dessa’s verse from Low light/Low life, feels like “the flight of the salesman, the death of the bumblebee, nothing left for the attorneys and the tumbleweeds”, when the For Lease signs start becoming more apparent and longer lasting, it is good to have artists move in and take the chance.

Tonight was the last night for the Art of This space on South Nicollet, a space that has hosted a lot of adventuring and risk-taking over the last five years. As the excellently ambient and passionateTake Acre played the last installment of the Tuesday Night Music series in that space, David Petersen, director of the gallery, looked in from outside. He didn’t seem too worried- the music series is moving over to the Open Eye Figure Theatre and hopefully they can get some grant funding to help keep it running, but they have a good deal going for now. The space won’t sit empty- Jake Luck of Leisure Birds and GAYNGS is opening Yeti Records in the storefront on October 16th. A new salon, Honeycomb, has opened next door and word is that Kim Bartmann of Bryant-Lake Bowl, Barbette and the Red Stag has purchased Casey’s, the dive bar on the block. “What would we do here?” Petersen smiled, “We wouldn’t even fit in. We’d be the black sheep.” Plus, now he gets to make his own art, which is ultimately what artists should do, even if running the gallery has been it’s own form of sculptural installation. Not having a space is suddenly freeing again.

The Los Angeles Times Culture Monster blog also ran a story earlier in the year about the non-profit arts entities making big moves in L.A. Alexandra Grant, a member of the board of the Watts House Project had a quote that brings out the best of the times we live in. She said, “It’s such an exciting time for nonprofits. There’s an opportunity to think of these legal entities as a very creative space for people to organize. To think about the relationship between money and creativity and how they’re applied, and how a small nonprofit that’s on the ground can rethink some of the bigger, slow moving boats of culture.” In other words, let’s be birds in flight and not mud-stuck hippos. Local projects like Works Progress, Minneapolis Art on Wheels and even projects of the “slow moving boats of culture” like the Walker Art Center’s Open Field project show a collaborative, survivalist and innovative bent. Joseph Belk, who helped organize Save Canvas, teamed up with printers Burlesque of North America to launch CO Exhibitions. The Art Shanty Project may taking 2011 off, but if it is to better re-organize and re-energize it’s audience, it is for the right reasons. Bedlam Theatre may be losing it’s beloved brick-and-mortar space, but it is fighting on. In fact, they just announced they have a temporary new space to move into, so be there this Friday to blow it all out. Flocking together is what it is about.

Walking back down in the cool summer dusk when the birds first re-appeared on Nicollet, two kids, barely teenagers, had taken over the corner with a fuzzy boombox and, apropos of nothing and a box for tips, were voguing their hearts out to Gaga as bikers rolled past laughing. That’s the feel a city needs to survive- that we can own it’s private and publicly visible spaces, that artists are a critical part of a city’s well-being (a point well-made by MNPlaylist.org’s Alan Berks in blog post titled “I Want Something More Than Money From Minneapolis”) and that life here matters. We all want something more and if we can be fearless enough to street-corner dance, to move our arts organization into the homeless unknown, to risk a new record store, we can have what we want and more. Like it said inside the front door of Art of This, a quote from the poet that is Kermit the Frog, “You are not going to watch the show, you are going to be in the show.” So join in and fly right.

Ben Kyle at the Cake Shop from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

Ben Kyle at the Cake Shop from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

Ben Kyle at the Cake Shop from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

Update: The excellent Mr. Andy Sturdevant informs us that indeed, the price remains the same, $300 a share. If I am reading the Springboard website correctly, even though there will be 18 participating artists, the boxes will still contain works by 3 artists apiece, so each share will get the work of 9 different artists. Count us in and reserve your Fall share for $100 here.

About a week ago, I was the only press person to show up for an advance screening of the Mexican comedy Nora’s Will at the Parkway Theater in South Minneapolis. Granted, the showing was at 9 o’clock in the morning, a time when most writers are contemplating pillows and mortality, but you had to figure the promise of coffee and breakfast would get some scribes out of bed. (The breakfast was delicious, by the way- watermelon dusted with chili powder and coconut, who knew?) I also recommend going to see a movie at the Parkway; attached to Pepito’s Restaurant, it is a venerable old theater with murals on the walls and couches instead of theater seats for the first couple rows. So I stretched out with a cup of coffee and took in the movie as if I was in the comfort of my own home, only with far better picture and sound.

Made in Mexico in 2008, Nora’s Will won 7 Ariel awards (the Mexican Oscar) and has been making the festival circuit picking up awards and accolades for it’s cast and especially for it’s writer and director Mariana Chenillo. The film (originally titled “Cinco Dias Sin Nora”, literally, “Five Days Without Nora”) tells the story of José, a retiree living in an apartment across the street from his ex-wife, Nora. José, played by Fernando Luján, is an affable sort who has gotten too old for God and lived through too much not to by cynical about it and through Luján’s portrayal is full of winks and sly moments. His ex-wife drives him crazy, but despite that, he never moved away from their facing apartments, where, the opening credits reveal, Nora keeps a pair of binoculars to keep an eye on José. To say it is a complicated relationship is understatement, and the relationship is further complicated when, as the beginning of the movie, Nora commits suicide. The very meticulous planning includes brewing coffee for José and the attending physician and family friend, Dr. Nurko, prepping and leaving detailed instructions for a Passover dinner and arranging for a delivery of meat to José in order to aggravate him into coming over. If this all sounds morbidly funny, it is; Chenillo’s pacing effectively uses the silences of aging to build a touching honesty into what could have been a farce.

As José attempts to get his son Rubén (Ari Brickman) home from vacation so that he can be there for the burial, he is thrown up against the ancient and cantankerous Rabbi Jacowitz (Max Kerlew) who points out the religious dilemma, that with the Passover and Shabbat coming, Nora must be interred immediately- not an option without Rubén- or kept on ice for the duration of the high holidays. This clash of secular and religious provides most of the comedy and tension of the film, as José goes and makes alternative burial arrangements at a Catholic cemetery, orders a bacon, sausage and chorizo pizza for the Rabbi and along with the more passive and obsequious Rubén, fights for a proper burial for Nora, whose suicide dooms her to being interred with thieves and murderers. As the rest of the family rallies around the bickering and sniping (José continuously and dryly points out that Nora is his “ex-wife”) breaks down to the solidarity of tragedy, with Nora doing in death what she could not in life- hold her family together.

Nora’s Will is bolstered too by some excellent supporting roles, including the faithful maid Fabiana (a warm and determined Angelina Peláez) who takes the young Moisés, a Catholic convert to Judaism who is sent over as a Rabbi Jacowitz’s lackey, under her wing. It’s a movie with a sense of sunny cynicism and hope about the imperfect lives we live, and it should be shared. If you can have it all to yourself, that’s great, but bringing someone with you is better. Nora’s Will opens to the public this Friday at the Parkway Theater for a one week engagement.

“I would have killed you if you had done the same thing in the third scene as in the first two,” I told Jeremey Catterton, actor, director and producer, as he stood sweating in his boxing shorts after the preview performance of The Polish Pugilist. “I know,” he beamed, “it’s all payoff, big beautiful payoff.” It is, The Polish Pugilist is all about the payoff, which is surprisingly traditional given the experimental work that Catterton produces. It doesn’t feel all that traditional though; described as a “postdramatic performance triptych”, the first scenes take you through a Polish immigrant’s gritty life in turn of the century Chicago while the final scene is the payoff centerpiece, to take the art metaphor further, a gloriously physical rendition of George Bellows’ Stag at Sharkey’s flanked by those miserable scenarios straight out of Ben Shahn.

The Polish Pugilist uses a text culled from the storyline of Upton Sinclair’expose of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle, the first Rocky movie, a never-ending list of Polack jokes and Catterton’s own poetry, all mixed together in order to create the “postdramatic” sense of the production- that there are multiple stories that comment on eachother. The stories may comment on eachother almost too well, despite Catterton and his able collaborators switching between accents to indicate which reference source is being enacted, there is a emergent narrative is familiar. Catterton as Leshak Shapanski emigrates from Poland to the United States to be with his family, Claire Monesterio and Abbie Williams, who portrays his wife Oona. Musician Jacob Grun (Me & My Arrow) plays George O’Connell, boss, boxing promoter and all-around archetypal bad guy while Mike Rylander takes on the role of the champion boxer, “The Truth”. They work together to tell this immigrant’s tale of privation, strife, indignity and injustice (one, which Catterton pointed out in the talk-back afterwards, is still a relevant theme if you change languages and skin colors) across three different floors of the performance space.

The “Coming to America” tale isn’t so straightforwardly told and general linearity doesn’t mean that there isn’t lots of charachter-shifting and aside moments, cues for song-and-dance scenarios taken from Rocky- “Why do you do this? Because I can’t sing or dance.”- and a barrage of Polack jokes that become more and more painful to both the cast and audience as they are nonchalantly flung, stand up comedy-style, about stage. These may be recognizable elements, but what is “post-“ about them is their undifferentiated and fluid sources- everyone tells Polack jokes, even the actors playing Polish characters, actors break into personal narratives, because in a Catterton production, there are not just actors playing characters, but actors playing themselves as actors playing characters. It is a shift that forces the personal to become at the disposal to the characters in the narrative and when used conscientiously as it is here, is a powerful boost to the authentic experience of theatre. Thus, Rylander’s broad but keen humor and larger-than-life delivery is critical to “The Truth”, Grun playing guitar in the production is no surprise, but that his parents are Czech immigrants and his mother a psychologist who wants to write a book titled “I’m an Immigrant, Not an Idiot” have a direct bearing on the presentation at hand.

The best reasons to go to The Polish Pugilist are those small details that add up to bigger ideas, the slapstick moments that carry deeper implications. The best challenge is the presence of Paula MacDonald, American Sign Language interpreter who is present and signing throughout the play. Her presence becomes increasingly insistent and at the points when you feel like you really must know what she is signing in order to carry on, unless you know ASL of course, you will be lost. That feeling of a lack of accessibility is crucial to the context of the immigrant experience and a powerful way of communicating that. It is, in a way, amazing what a simple presence can do to shape a story, but if there is anything to be taken from being in the audience of The Polish Pugilist, from the characters, from the actors portraying the characters of The Polish Pugilist, it is that we all show up with what we have, and fight for what we need. Postdramatic as the performance may be, that fight is elemental.

The Polish Pugilist runs Thursday, Friday & Saturday this week and next, August 19-28 at 8pm. Standing tickets are $15, seated $25, with a special offer this Friday & Saturday, 2 standing tickets for $20. E-mail thepolishpugilist@gmail.com for more information, or check out the Facebook event.

Disclaimer: I was a member of the Lamb Lays with Lion company from 2007 until earlier this year, working with Catterton, who was Artistic Director. I also work on the Clapperclaw Festival of the Arts with Catterton and co-producer Kristina Perkins. If I didn’t like The Polish Pugilist, though, I would tell you. Jeremey knows that.

On top of their musical generosity, the road-tested Spirits crew were full of stories of other bands and hosts who had been generous to them while on tour. They spoke of Austin, TX band Some Say Leland and their mash-ups of contact sports and whiffle ball, the giant barn of Willy T. Taylor and his wife Bethany outside of Modesto, CA where the people started coming and partying at 10:30 in the morning yet still sat silent through the set before getting back to partying. Dovekins from Denver, CO were also thanked for their friendship and support, and that’s the best that any of us can hope for- some friends to see us through travels and some more to welcome us home.

Spirits of the Red City- “Coat of Arms” from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

Spirits of the Red City- “Constant” from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

Spirits of the Red City- “Living Ghost” from CakeIn15 on Vimeo.

CakeIn15.com is happy to announce the next in the series of house shows at The Cake Shop. On Thursday, August 26th at 7pm we will be hosting an evening of solo music by Ben Kyle, frontman of favorite local alt-country band Romantica. Kyle, with his lush and emotive voice, has duetted with the likes of Carrie Rodriguez, Alejandro Escovedo and Ryan Adams, as well as played on stage with the Jayhawks. With his Irish heritage, he brings an inimitable touch to ballads, the blues and country-western tunes, so expect an evening of lovely and passionate music.

This concert will be limited in capacity, so reserve your space today. Reservation cost is $15, and to reserve space, please log into PayPal and send your payment to CakeIn15@gmail.com. Please mark your payment as a “GIFT” in order to avoid PayPal fees. This is money going to the artists, so please don’t short-change them!

Your reservation to this special show is confirmed ONLY when you receive an email both confirming your payment and giving you the house address. This email must come from CakeIn15@gmail.com and NOT Paypal (so make sure to check your spam filter). Guests are invited to bring a beverage of their choice to enjoy.

When: Thursday, August 26, 2010
Time: 7:00 pm
Where: The Cake Shop, location upon RSVP
How much: $15 reservations

The Cake Shop is dedicated to providing artists and audiences with a unique and intimate experience that allows artists to freely experiment with new material. Shows at The Cake Shop directly financially support the musicians playing. Previous performances at The Cake Shop include Spirits of the Red City, Dark Dark Dark and Elephant Micah, Pezzettino, Roma Di Luna, Jeremy Messersmith, The Pines and Chastity Brown.

CakeIn15.com is dedicated to covering and supporting culture issues of importance to the Twin Cities- local music, art, fashion and theater as well as national acts. After all, we do live here.