The staff takes it for granted, but there may not be a better-smelling building in Northeast Minneapolis than the tiny warehouse that houses the 19–year-old B.T. McElrath Chocolatier empire, which last year cranked out 70,000 pounds of chocolate retail items in the form of 190,429 chocolate bars.

The main office, two small kitchens and storage rooms are positively lusty with the smell of cocoa beans, butter, sugar, salt and chocolate, which probably accounts for the work force’s Willie Wonka-ish smiles all around. 

“These bars right here, we made 95,000 last year, and Phung Do touched every one of them,” said lead chocolatier Peter Maccaroni, a co-partner in B.T. McElrath with founder and CEO Brian McElrath, during a recent tour of the facility. “It’s impressive, because we can’t replicate what these guys do. We have machines, but it’s gotta take a person to touch it.” 

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

“I take them like this, fold this, and put them in just like that, every single one of them, and then…,” the bars go out into the world, said Do, a McElrath employee of 11 years. She doesn’t have time to chat: The company recently partnered with the American Refugee Committee International and Dunn Bros Coffee to create the “Changemaker” charity candy bar, and this time of year is always the busiest, what with the holidays coming, December’s darkness and the hungry reward centers of chocoholics’ brains kicking in, and pre-Valentine’s Day pre-orders coming in.

As the four-person production team made, melted, molded, salted, and packed a recent batch of dark chocolate bars, Maccaroni talked all things chocolate with MinnPost.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

MinnPost: You were trained as a chef and had a successful run at places like The Sample Room and Kings Wine Bar in Minneapolis. How did you become a chocolatier?

Peter Maccaroni: I’d been a chef for ten years and toward the end of my time at Kings, I was totally disillusioned with restaurants. My heart wasn’t in it, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do; I have a kid I want to spend time with, and I was going to be 60 years old cooking in a kitchen? So I was talking with my fiancée, Alexa, and I said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, because I’m only trained in food.’

I started looking around, and oddly enough there was an ad on Craigslist from Brian and he was looking for a chocolatier. I was like, ‘I can totally do that.’ And I had no idea what I was doing. I came in, and he was a chef, too, and we hit it off as two chefs would.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

MP: What did you know about chocolate going in?

PM: Very little. I’d worked as a pastry chef and I’d worked with chocolate before, But working with five pounds of chocolate for truffles in a restaurant on a dessert menu is different than running 500 to a thousand pounds of chocolate that we run in a day. So I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got this no problem’ and Brian saw something in me and I got the job and the first day I was like, ‘What the [hell] did I just do?’

It was so foreign to me. Nobody was cursing, nobody was drunk, nobody was angry, nobody was hung-over, there was no drama, and it was just a regular job. Brian gave me the job and I just bluffed, and fake it ‘til you make it, and kept going at it and picked it up quickly, learning on the job. 

I was a lot like most Americans, I knew Hershey’s and Snickers. I had learned a little about fine chocolate from being a pastry chef, but when you start working with it every day, you start to understand the molecular make-up and you pay attention to the humidity, because the humidity effects how the chocolate behaves. All of those things are such a fundamental part of making chocolate that I had to completely readjust, because this is not a batch of soup where you can throw salt into it. If you mess it up, that’s it. You’ve got to start over. 

MP: What’s the difference between fine chocolate and, say, Hershey’s?

PM: Like with anything with food, it’s subjective. I can tell you it’s fine chocolate, but if somebody says Hershey’s is fine chocolate, there’s nothing I can say that can change their mind. I can tell you facts about fine chocolate: Fine chocolate is not diluted; it’s pure ingredients that come from the cocoa plant. So you’ve got your cocoa liquor, which is all the dark, bitter stuff that’s in chocolate; you’ve got cocoa butter which gives it it’s fluidity, and then you’ve got sugar, vanilla, and another fat — in our case we use butter — and that gives it the sweetness and taste that we associate with chocolate.

The last time I checked, Hershey’s has the legal minimum, 11 percent of any derivative of the cocoa plant, that they have to have and can still call it a chocolate product. And ours has 70 percent.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

MP: How does it feel making it, knowing that you’re contributing to all these festivities and very personal celebrations? And do you know for a fact that people crave chocolate especially around this time of year?

PM: Yes, you’re right on the mark. There’s something really cool about it. People all over the country are eating our chocolate and I think about that on occasion. We don’t do great sales during the summer; I think it adds something to the freezing cold or maybe it helps you deal with your family, or whatever, but it does have all sorts of properties and it effects everybody differently. We start ramping up for Christmas in September, and right now we’re at the tail end of getting stuff out for Valentine’s Day. From September until the end of February, people are really into chocolate for some reason. You don’t have to have an excuse you just have to get it.

MP: You’re immersed in chocolate. What do you know about chocolate in terms of pop culture?

PM: A lot of what Americans think and feel about chocolate has to do with the Hershey’s and Mars guys. They had all sorts of crafty ideas. We only get chocolate on Valentine’s Day because they suggested it 80 years ago, and they pushed it so heavily and it just became part of the culture and we accept that. It’s been proven that human beings, once we figured out about chocolate — I mean, the Mayans traded it as currency, it was that valuable — and then the Spaniards picked it up and it was a totally different thing: It was a bitter, sour drink, and then, leave it to the Dutch, they added sugar to it and made it more palatable and it just exploded.

That was 120 years ago, and in terms of food and how we eat, that’s still really new. We’re still in the middle of the trend that’s chocolate and it’s constantly evolving. A couple years ago they released that information about dark chocolate being good for you as long as it’s 70 percent or above, and you reap the health benefits, and that adds a whole other segment of people who want to eat chocolate. It’s a wonderful, wonderful plant that does a lot of things for a lot of people. Chocolate is special, and it’s catching on all over the world – China and India are huge into chocolate now, and this is primarily something that they never ate before.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

In the summer of 1984, there may have been no bigger Prince fan than Alan Light. That summer, Prince and “Purple Rain” were everywhere, and 18-year-old Light started keeping notes.

His “Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of ‘Purple Rain’ ” hit stores last month. A writer and editor at Rolling Stone, Vibe, Spin, and the New York Times, Light has penned biographies on the Beastie Boys, Tupac and Gregg Allman, as well as “The Holy or the Broken – Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascension of ‘Hallelujah.’ ”

A few days before tonight's Current-sponsored celebration of “Purple Rain” takes to the Fitzgerald Theater stage and screen, he spoke with MinnPost about a pop moment in history that still captures the imagination:

MinnPost: How did you become a Prince fan, and when did you first see “Purple Rain”?

Alan Light: It came out in the summer of 1984, which as it happens was the summer I graduated from high school in Cincinnati, so what was happening is super vivid in my head. My friends and I were already big fans and had gone to the “1999” tour and so we were really counting down when they were going to premiere the first single on the radio, and staying up ‘til midnight with the cassette tape recorder held up to the radio for the first time when they played “When Doves Cry,” and then counting down the days until the release of the soundtrack, and waiting in line for the premiere of the movie, and spending all that summer, really, immersed in going to the movie over and over, and then going to college [at Yale] and going to the movie again over and over with new friends. … You know, I don’t think there’s any record or music project that in real time meant as much to me as this one did: You discovered Dylan records or Beatles records after the fact, but in terms of actually living with it, this was probably as crucial as anything else that I can remember.

MP: How many times did you see it that first year?

AL: Ten or 12 times; probably half a dozen times in Cincinnati and another half a dozen times at college in Connecticut. It seems like it’s all we did. 

MP: What was it about Prince that you as a high schooler discovered? What were you drawn to?

AL: It really was this sense that this was a crystallization of all the things that I liked, that we all liked – this rock & roll spirit and the band feel and guitar playing with the strongest funk rhythms and dance feel and super provocative words and images – all these things that you’d be fascinated with when you were 16, all in one place. In high school, you’re listening to all this stuff, James Brown and the Beatles, and here was this guy who sort of seemed to embody all of that — and then, as now, was better on a stage than anybody else alive.

MP: After seeing the film, what was your impression of where he came from, from afar?

AL: I knew that Minneapolis was part of this story, and that it was this weird place. I was also in the Midwest, so I think I just thought of it as another city in this part of the country, but colder.  Other than the Twins and the Vikings, I didn’t have any sense about Minneapolis as a place.

But I think when you go back and look at “Purple Rain,” he didn’t do a single interview the entire cycle of “Purple Rain.” The last interview he did was for “1999,” with [the Los Angeles Times’ Robert] Hilburn, and he said, “That’s it, I’m never doing it again.” And he didn’t do another interview until “Around the World in a Day” came out.

So we were just fascinated by any scrap of anything, and that sense of, “How much of this is real life and is it his story?” We didn’t know anything. We knew it was where he was from, but we didn’t know if it was really like that in Minneapolis. It was totally mysterious, and I think that was really central to the whole fascination with it.

MP: And now?

AL: I’m happy to say that when I came to Minneapolis last year to do interviews for the book, it was at the absolute worst moment of the Polar Vortex and I got to be there when the high was 16 below or something, and was very pleased that I got the full-on Minneapolis experience.

MP: From where you sat, what was the perception of Prince coming out of seemingly nowhere to conquer the music world?

AL: When I’d talk to friends, especially people who grew up in and around New York, there was a feeling that there was something sort of corny about him and his showmanship, and I guess because I grew up also with these Midwest clubs where you gotta go out and win a crowd, I related to that more and knew that, “No, you have to bring it.”

Every step was maximized, and it gave him the space where it didn’t feel stiff because he was always improvising on top of all that [choreography and rehearsal]. But I just think that that version of “Purple Rain,” the one everyone knows – it’s the first time they ever played it in public. It was the ’83 First Avenue show, [guitarist] Wendy [Melvoin]’s first show with the band, the first time they played “Purple Rain” in public, and they nail it so hard that “OK, that’s it. We have it.” That’s incredible.

MP: How many times did you watch it while writing the book, and what did you learn as a chronicler versus as a fan?

AL: I watched it probably half a dozen times and then going back to certain scenes throughout. The most interesting time I watched it was with Questlove, who taught a Prince class at NYU last semester and I went in and did stuff with him, and he screened it for his students, many of whom hadn’t seen the whole thing before. It’s an interesting experience to watch it with people who aren’t true believers, but who are young and interested and just watching it. And you can get hung up on these things, but most notably, obviously, the treatment of the women in the film, and some of the very casual misogyny in the film, and hearing people gasp at the scene where the woman yells at Morris [Day] and Jerome [Benton] picks her up and throws her in the dumpster – not seeing it as slapstick but as something horrifying to these kids. It makes you aware of how different the time was.

Nobody’s done anything like it since. The performances feel as new as if you shot them yesterday, but a lot of the world around it stuff is where you realize that it was 30 years ago, a long time ago.

MP: How much of a Prince fan and listener have you been in recent years?

AL: Always a fan, which is not to say that I love everything he does. But always interested and always pay attention, and try to consistently when there’s an excuse to write about him and report on him so I can stay plugged in to what he’s doing.

With “Purple Rain,” it was the first time anyone had a number one single, album, and movie simultaneously, and they go out on tour and take over the world and he abruptly cuts off the tour six months in. They don’t go overseas, they don’t go to Europe, and I think that moment is really interesting and sets up everything that follows.

He reached the mountaintop and he saw what that was, and he realized, “If I do this, now I’ve got to go play the same show for the next two years, and I can’t do it. I’ve already made the next record, I’m already thinking about what’s after that, I can’t work like that.” But the other side of that is, he wanted to make “Purple Rain” and everybody around him thought he was nuts. The band didn’t understand, the management didn’t understand; they did it because he told them to do it. And then he was right and everybody else was wrong, and it was the success that it was, and it became very difficult to say no to him.

So the last thirty years is, “Is this guy the biggest cult artist in the world, and has a million people who will follow him no matter what he does, or is he a pop star that plays halftime at the Super Bowl and arenas?” And you just see that seesaw over and over again.

Bertolt Brecht was Germany’s most famous poet and playwright, credited with penning some of the theater world’s most oft-produced scripts, including “The Threepenny Opera,” “Life of Galileo,” “Mother Courage and Her Children,” and “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.”

Or did he?

“Rehearsing Failure,” a new play mounted by the 15-year-old Minneapolis-based independent company Novi Most this month at the Southern Theater, asks that question via the stories of the three women behind Brecht (played by Pearce Bunting) – his wife, Helene Weigel (Barbra Berlovitz), and two of his former lovers, writer Elisabeth Hauptmann (Annie Enneking) and director Ruth Berlau (Sara Richardson).

“Brecht was obviously a major figure in 20th-century theater, but he didn’t work alone at all,” explained Novi Most founder and director Lisa Channer, who co-wrote “Rehearsing Failure” with playwright Cory Hinkle with a lot of help from the company and Enneking and Dan Bonespur’s original score. “He worked always with a lot of people, who were probably equally as involved as he was, but it all lived under the name Brecht, and that was partly due to expediency or economic reasons, but that’s also how he wrote.

“You often hear, ‘Behind every great man there’s all these great women,’ but in his case it’s really true. These women were profoundly bright, profoundly skilled, profoundly talented, and then really uncredited. The scholarship on that is just coming out now, and we’re understanding the depths to which some of them should have been credited.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Novi Most founder/director Lisa Channer, right, in tech rehearsal for “Rehearsing Failure.”

The promotional material for “Rehearsing Failure” says it “borrows from Brecht’s own playbook – it’s a play that reaches back into history to examine contemporary themes of politics, sex and complicity and asks the question: What do you need to survive, as an artist and a person, and what are you willing to sacrifice?”

That question has been on the mind of all concerned, including Berlovitz, who said at a tech rehearsal earlier this week, “Creating anything is next to impossible. It’s really hard, and everybody has their own difficulties and frustrations with it. I’ve had my own struggles with it. How do get your ideas out? How do you feel an equal partner in something that you feel is an equal situation?” 

“Rehearsing Failure” takes place in the summer of 1947, with Brecht and his women, the lot of whom fled Nazi Germany and moved to Hollywood during World War II, living together commune-style and rehearsing “The Life of Galileo” before the playwright’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy hearings. 

“There’s a lot about what it means to live with integrity,” said Channer, “and about how to live your morals and values, and Brecht didn’t always live by the morals and values he preached. He contradicted himself a lot, which we all do.” 

Photo by Bill Prouty

Pearce Bunting, center, as Bertolt Brecht in “Rehearsing Failure.”

“When I started reading about Brecht, and all these relationships he had with these women, what I really got into was these really dark, sexy, weird, [messed]-up relationships that hopefully come out in a lot of the scenes,” said Hinkle. “I mean, the scenes that I wrote for the play, there’s the political backdrop, but they’re really about how these people worked together, how they lived together, how they collaborated.

“These women ran his life for him. I think he was just one of those guys who couldn’t have done it alone, and he never would have wanted to do it alone. Helene Weigel ran Brecht’s life like a business. I think Ruth and Helene were definitely muses, and I think he had a different relationship with Elisabeth, because Elisabeth was such an intellectual and they had a sexual relationship when he was very young into most of their adult lives.”

“Cody wrote it in collaboration with us,” said Berlovitz, “and we all come in and out of the play, and it’s so much about being human, and about relationships and about, how do you negotiate relationships with other people in an honest way, in an open way?”

The play’s musical score was penned by Bonespur and Enneking, leader of local rockers Annie and the Bang Bang. “We do a version of Brecht’s “Baal,” which David Bowie did, and I really believe ours is better,” said Bonespur, to nods all around at tech rehearsal.

One of the production’s highlights is a Sleater-Kinney-worthy tune delivered by a trash-can-pounding Richardson; a raw-throated Enneking, and Berlovitz, a musical vet who straps on the electric bass for the first time in her life for “Rehearsing Failure.”

“There are [Brecht] lyrics that are present in the play, there’s a poem that we translate, and then there’s a lot of original material,” said Enneking. “The way that he used music is in the middle of the play a song happens and the singers sing to the audience. It’s really a direct address, and the songs become commentary. There’s a rock song in the piece, and it comes after [the women] have all had their own conflicts with him and it all busts out in this rock song.”

“I think it makes you want to know more about this history after you leave, and about this female-male dynamic not only in art-making but in general,” said Hinkle. “Brecht wanted his audience to think, and to not only leave the theater moved, but thinking about an issue. Hopefully it makes you think, because I know I’m more open to thinking about an issue if I’m moved and entertained and blown away by some visuals and music.”

In the end, what does a play about a long-dead Marxist icon and playwright living, creating, and loving in post-war exile have to say to artists and theatergoers today? Plenty.

“If you go across the country, you’ll find that 24 percent of plays right now are being directed by women, when women are making up a good 70 percent of the graduates of the major directing programs and have been for decades,” said Channer. “And for women playwrights, it’s equally dire, if not worse. When you get to commercial theater, where money’s being made, it’s 7 percent.

“This is a huge conversation in the American theater, and even internationally. The Guthrie did a season two years ago that was all white men playwrights ... and it got a lot of attention all over the world. So that’s a conversation that’s been ongoing: Why is this happening?

“Collaboration and credit in the publishing business insists on a single name, even though works are often done collectively. In Brecht’s case, it’s rather famous and was talked about for years in hushed tones though everybody knew. Now it’s being talked about a little bit more loudly, and that’s what our play is about.”

Since it started in 2008, National Public Radio’s “Tiny Desk Concerts” have provided stay-at-home public radio listeners with intimate musical performances staged at, yes, musician/producer/founder and “All Songs Considered” host Bob Boilen’s desk. The series has taken the music video world by storm, and featured several Minnesota artists, including Cantus, Trampled By Turtles, Dessa, Bob Mould, and Peter Wolf Crier.

Last month, Boilen and crew put out an open call to musicians all over the world: “Want to play a Tiny Desk Concert? Now’s your chance: NPR Music and Lagunitas are holding a contest, and the winner gets to perform at my desk here at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“To enter, make a video of you performing one original song behind a desk of your choosing. It could be your work desk, your home office or the product of your imagination. We’re looking for great unknowns, so if you already have a recording contract, you’ll have to sit this one out.”

The deadline for submissions was Jan. 19, and now the good tastemakers at NPR are poring through the pixels to choose a winner, to be announced Feb. 12. A scan of YouTube finds a number of Minnesota-made entrants, along with plenty of banjos, guitars, cityscapes, countryscapes, snow banks, frozen lakes, house pets, beer, and good songs (thanks to Brianna Lane and Banjo Brothers’  Mike Vanderscheuren for the tip). And the winners are …

Who:Lynn O’Brien

From: Minneapolis

Good to know: O’Brien is a music therapist-turned-singer/songwriter that the Aural Premonition reports, “has not only a voice, but a personality of gold. Accompanied by ukulele and now a well-mastered vocal looper, O’Brien’s music is overflowing with originality and optimism.”

Video/song:“Light Everywhere”

***

Who:The Adjustments

From: Duluth

Good to know:“We’ve been playing locally and regionally, with a few different lineups, since 2010.”

Video/song:“Two Dogs”

***

Who:Dedric Clark and The Social Animals

From: Cloquet

Good to know:“While studying English at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Clark pushed forward with his songwriting and eventually started playing live. By junior year he had assembled a band – originally named Diet Folk – and amassed a considerable following, thanks partly to the group’s high-energy live shows.”

Video/song:“Waiting”

***

Who:Har-di-Har

From: St. Paul

Good to know:“This song was spawned by an argument that resulted in someone getting kicked out of the car and walking home.”

Video/song:“We Scare Each Other”

***

Who:The Poor Nobodys

From: Minneapolis

Good to know:“Easily characterized as music from a film score, their original compositions weave unconventional melodies through rustic roots, all the while refining a carefully chaotic meter.”

Video/song:“Waking, Still Asleep”

***

Who:Jacob Grippen

From: Caledonia

Good to know: Grippen is the Minnesota DFL Secretary

Video/song:“Questions Asked”

***

Who:Brianna Lane

From: Minneapolis

Good to know:“Your rock & roll heart don’t satisfy me/Gimme banjos and bluegrass and moonshine and sweet tea/Your rock & roll heart don’t satisfy me/Need a fiddle and a bow and porch songs and that old-time harmony.”

Video/song:“Minneapolis”

***

Who:Paul Doffing

From: Minneapolis

Good to know:Doffing is in the midst of his ongoing “Freedom From Fuel Tour,” which he’s doing cross-country on bike.

Video/song:“Banker’s $”

***

Who:Erin Fox and Charley Dush

From: St. Paul

Good to know: Video shot by ace Minneapolis-based photographer Steven Cohen.

Video/song:“Somedays She Gets Strange”

***

Who: MR DR

From: Minneapolis

Good to know: Singer/songwriter Stacy K plays bass in this groovy little lo-fi trio.

Video/song:“I Got a Feeling”

***

Who:Tree Party

From: Minneapolis

Good to know:“Tree Party’s third album ‘Iced Over: Thawing Minnesota’s Local Lore’ is a year-long project of researching stories and local history in smaller communities across Minnesota.”

Video/song:“Well Put, Bob”

***

Who:Chris Koza

From: Minneapolis

Good to know:“Over the last several years, Koza and his band Rogue Valley have released a total of nine albums and EPs. Koza’s songs have been featured on numerous television shows including ABC’s ‘Cougartown,’ MTV’s ‘Jersey Shore’ and ‘Matt and Kim,’ and CBS’s 2013 Super Bowl pregame show.”

Video/song:“The Healer”

***

Who:Tabah Yames

From: Minneapolis

Good to know:“It’s not okay just to be forgotten/Unless you’re burning man or stinking rotten.”

Video/song:“Curtain Call”

***

Who:Hank

From: Minneapolis

Good to know: Tiny desk appearance: 3:33.

Video/song:“This Time”

***

Who:Stacy K

From: Sleepy Eye/Minneapolis

Good to know:“Recent press: 89.3 The Current’s blog’s brand new acts to keep an eye on – ‘breathy, gauzy, moody pop.’ Vita.MN Are You Local 2013, best tracks – ‘down tempo trip-hop in the vein of Morcheeba, Portishead, but duskier.’ ”

Video/song:“Stay”

***

Who:Undlin & Wolfe

From: Minneapolis

Good to know:“Reminiscent of the folk duos of old, they have the vocal capabilities of The Carpenters but the edge of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.” – Music That Isn’t Bad

Video/song:“Lullabies Lost”

***

Who:The Awful Truth

From: Minneapolis

Good to know:Band leader Brent Colbert:“It’s music that is very vulnerable, almost to the point where it makes people uncomfortable, and I’m well aware of that.”

Video/song:“Equal”

***

Who:The Lowest Pair

From: Olympia/Minneapolis

Good to know:“The Lowest Pair is a quirky, old-time roots influenced duet featuring the high lonesome harmonies of banjo pickin’ songsters Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee.”

Video/song:“Hogtied”

***

Who:Spirits of the Red City

From: Louisville, Kentucky

Good to know: Arguably the most Minnesotacentric entry of the batch, this vid was partially filmed on wind-whipped and frozen-over Amelia Lake in Villard, Minnesota.

Video/song:“Halfway Poem”

***

Who:The Old Smugglers

From: St. Paul

Good to know:“Scotch and coffee, smelling like smoke and grandpa, truckload of soup cans falling from the sky, Americana shanty sounds of regret and revelation.”

Video/song:“The Devil Always Knows”

***

Who:Turn Back Now

From: Minneapolis

Good to know:“We are the narrators, the Greek chorus of the Apocalypse of Free America. We travel up and down the Mississippi in search of news from the rebels on the front lines and stories from our heroes in the field. Then we bring those stories to y’all, ‘cause we’re all in this apocalypse together.”

Video/song:“Monty’s Molotovs”

Last month at the Dakota jazz club, yours truly was forced to shush four chatty tables who were obviously unaware that a set of sublime acoustic music was taking place a mere 80 feet away from them in one of the best listening rooms in the world. My plea for quiet, delivered to a partying group of oblivious 20-something loudmouths with my best crazed dad/youth-sports coach glare and followed with a quick bow of thanks and “Namaste,” elicited kudos from a few bar-goers and staff alike – a heartening development in my lifelong mission to actually hear live music above the din of conversation.

Also heartening is the fact that there are still music lovers and listeners out there like Jim Vick, whose vision as booker/manager of Papa Charlie’s has made the chalet at the foot of Lutsen Mountain a model for all other clubs looking to create and cultivate a true listening scene.

“We designed it based on music clubs I’d been to; shallow shaped balcony with good viewpoints, kind of like the Fine Line and First Ave., and it needs to function as a bar and restaurant,” said Vick. “But when we do it as a music room, 500 people can be in the room and see and be part of the show. It was actually put together with that in mind.

“It started in 1996, just with Saturday nights, first show was the Jayhawks.

I’d known [late legendary concert promoter] Sue McLean; she loved to ski. I called her and traded her lift tickets for advice and she was able to connect us with the Jayhawks, a national touring act, and it was huge.”

Since then, Papa Charlie’s has became a dance and big band-fueled music club on the weekends, featuring high-octane acts like the Suburbs, the New Standards, Leftover Salmon, the Gear Daddies, the Honeydogs, Trampled By Turtles, the Big Wu, Presidents Of The United States of America, Iffy, G.B. Leighton, and Wookiefoot, who recently celebrated 10 years of hosting the club’s multinight Snowball festival.

As a rockin’ romantic getaway, it’s hard to beat – for bands and music fans alike. The combination of skiing, music, middle-of-nowhere nature, a hot tub, pool, sauna, and good bar food make for an environment that is, as Vick puts it, “the best week of the year for most of our guests.” But in the last four years, the weekend rock shows and dance nights have given way to Papa Charlie’s Monday and Wednesday night Songwriter Series, and Vick’s vision of the club as a world-class listening room has become a reality.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Songwriters circle with Erik Koskinen, Frankie Lee, Dave Simonett and the Pines.

“It took a while for people to get used to it, but we’ve trained audiences and the staff, and now it’s just expected,” he said. “The reality behind it all is that there is a different experience between going out to a place that has music and listening to music. We’ve discovered that people don’t want to be in this room when there’s this music club scene, but they would come to a concert.

“We started casually talking about it, and then we learned if we put out fliers that reminded people, ‘quiet, please,’ the room would stay quiet. I was counting on my staff to do all this, with me there hosting, and the staff was reluctant because they felt like anytime they told people to be quiet, they’d lose guests. But we quickly learned that if we didn’t do that, there’d be only a dozen people in the room, and now there’s 40, or 200, and people are coming specifically for it.

“Now we put it out there with the calendar listings and promotional material: “This is a listening room.” So we started presenting everything about it that way, and it worked. I have folks who come specifically to listen.”

A great listening room is a marriage between sound system and vibe. It’s not a church, or a theater, or a studio; it retains a lived-in atmosphere where memorable sounds and stories have happened in the past, with a promise of more to come. Along with the Dakota, the Twin Cities is home to several fine clubs-slash-listening rooms, including the Cedar Cultural Center, the New Century Theater, the Aster Café and it’s River Room, Icehouse, Harriet Brewing, the Amsterdam Hall and Bar, the Fine Line and First Avenue.

But in a noisy and competitive world in which too many clubs try to make money off food and booze first, and provide a stellar music listening experience second, Papa Charlie’s is a reminder of what can happen when the club takes control of the environment. To be sure, an intimacy takes hold when the performer isn’t distracted by the sound of people blabbing a few feet away, as can so often be the case with live acoustic music in this town.

“If people are talking over the music, we’d rather have them leave,” said Jerry LaVigne, who has been running sound at Papa Charlie’s since the beginning and has missed just one gig in 12 years – for his son’s wedding. “We might be losing 20 dollars worth of drinks, but we’re gaining people who really want to come there all the time and listen and have it be a neat scene. And Jim is all about the scene, he’s all about trying to make something, and he’s doing a good job at it.”

“It works, and as soon as you get critical mass, as soon as 80 percent of the room is listening, it becomes more obvious to everybody that that’s the deal,” said Vick. “Just last week we did a songwriter circle with Dead Man Winter and the Pines and Erik Koskinen, and there was this one gal whose voice just carries across the room, and I finally just went over to her and slowly led her up to the front of the room, where she got completely absorbed into the music and in the end she was thankful.

“You keep trying, and when it’s working it’s great and the room sounds great and that in turn goes to who I can bring in. I have a wait list for Monday nights now, because we’ve built a reputation amongst the artists that this room plays differently than any other place they play. Which goes to the future vision of when, someday when the rest of the world understands what’s going on, Mondays and Wednesdays are the times to be here.”

So far, acts that have played to the pin-drop atmosphere include such homegrown stars as Molly Maher, Chris Koza, Dessa, Charlie Parr, Jeremy Messersmith, Alan Sparhawk, Julia Douglass, Brianna Lane, Katy Vernon, John Louis, Caroline Smith, Joe Fahey, Rich Mattson, Germaine Gemberling, Teague Alexy, batteryboy, Martin Sexton, Richard Thompson, Ben Kyle, Meg Hutchinson, and several Lutsen- and Duluth-area artists.

“In Cook County, there’s a bunch of super quality musicians who just love their music,” said LaVigne. “They’re more folk and bluegrass musicians and they love coming on Monday and Wednesday nights and not having their ears bleed. Jim’s been looking for that for a while, and it’s working pretty well. It’s advertised as a listening room, and with singer/songwriters there’s usually a story with every song, and I think people are interested in listening to that, and getting to know the songwriters.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Jim Vick, left, and Jerry LaVigne: The men (and soundboard) behind Papa Charlie’s.

Given the successful implementation of the “quiet, please!” aesthetic over the last few years, Papa Charlie’s could just as well be called The Lutsen Listening Room and join the list of kindred spirits like The Listening Room (Fargo), The Listening Room (Crystal Lake, Illinois), The Listening Room Café (Nashville), the Red Dragon Listening Room (Baton Rouge, La.), The Rear Window Listening Room (Ganado, Texas), and The Listening Room in Port Clinton, Texas, whose finger-to-the-lips logo warn all ye who enter to check their conversation at the door.

“There have been times when the room is just so dead quiet we have to put signs on the bathroom blow dryers, telling people not to use them and we put paper towels out instead,” said LaVigne. “That’s how quiet it can be. There’s no drinks made with blenders or firing up anything. We bring the lights down to nothing, and if you’re talking, you’re made to feel like you shouldn’t be talking.”

Which could come off as precious or annoying to free-thinking music lovers who are used to blabbing whenever and wherever they want, but slowly and surely Vick and LaVigne have seen the fruits of their labors.

“I have a cadre of very staunch supporters that love what I do,” said Vick, a singer and guitarist who occasionally takes to the Papa Charlie’s stage. “At the end of every show they say, ‘How can we get more people?’ And I say, ‘Well, you have to invite them.’ It’s not that they don’t know, it’s that they don’t understand what it is and they aren’t patterned into doing it. We dance on the weekends, but on Mondays and Wednesdays it’s the smaller intimate thing, and that’s the best. That’s what gets really personal and has a much deeper meaning to it.”

“I just wanted to say I love your work,” the waitress at Emily’s Lebanese Deli in Northeast Minneapolis said to Winona LaDuke last week as she refilled the two-time Green Party vice presidential candidate’s coffee cup. The woman didn’t specify what work, exactly, but it’s a good bet she was talking about LaDuke’s current fight against big oil, the Koch Brothers, and others who would jeopardize, as one pipeline and fossil fuels critic called it, “the survivability of all civilization.”

A member of the Anishinaabe nation from the White Earth reservation, and leader of the nonprofit education and research organization Honor the Earth, last spring LaDuke launched a “Love Water Not Oil” tour and joined a group of ranchers, farmers and tribal members who rode the route of the Keystone XL pipeline and set up a “Reject and Protect” encampment near the White House. Last month she was in St. Paul, testifying daily before the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission against the proposed Sandpiper pipeline that would carry oil from the Bakken oil field in North Dakota to Superior, Wisconsin, and turn Minnesota into “an oil superhighway” that many fear would pollute the area’s bountiful wild rice beds, lakes, streams, and rivers.

LaDuke makes it to the Twin Cities regularly; last week it was for the premiere of “The Jingle Dress” and a trip to the Xcel Energy Center to catch a Minnesota Swarm lacrosse game. On Tuesday (Feb. 17) she’ll join authors Louise Erdrich and Eve Ensler and musician Chastity Brown at the Woman’s Club Theater for a program on sex trafficking and violence against native women.  

Before heading out to the film and game, over a lunch of salad and spinach pie, LaDuke talked with MinnPost about her ongoing efforts to honor the earth.

MinnPost: Your last year has been spent in very high-profile way, with “Love Water Not Oil.” You rode Keystone, and last week you testified before the utilities commission. In Minnesota, you’ve become something of a face for the fight against this ongoing encroachment of fossil fuels and limited leadership on alternative energy. Does it feel like a one-woman fight sometimes?

Winona LaDuke: No, there are many others. I had a plan. I was going to write books, grow corn for the wind turbine. Make things right. Create the community and the economy that I wanted in the North, for my community, and hope that that could be an example to inspire other communities. I just wanted to make it happen, and then they announced the Sandpiper and I thought, “That’s not going to work out.”

I’m a pretty smart young woman, but I didn’t know anything about pipelines. And I hear about this Sandpiper, and they want to run it through our reservation, and nobody knows about it, and I’m like, “What the hell?” So I thought I should do something because I have a skill set; I can do energy analysis, so my first job was to write a bunch of articles and explain it and make a bunch of Norwegians mad. Because nobody knew.

That’s what’s so wrong to me. People have a right to know, and their timetable is so fast, and they’re wrong. There’s a lot of people who really care about the North, who’ve retired to a lake home and love fishing, and this pipeline is going to mess with their stuff.

MP: It’s all about the Norwegians. But historically, you have more invested in the area than …

WL: It crosses our 1855 treaty area [PDF], the heart of which is harvesting. I’m an avid harvester. I don’t hunt, but I fish, I net, I pick birch bark, I pick medicines, I pick rice, I pick berries, I’m all over that place. I’d like to live the life the creator gave me, it seems like a good one, and that’s what I intend to do. This messes with what our instructions were.

MP: When did you first become aware of these pipelines and what they mean to the environment?

WL: I’m a first-world person, just like you. I like pipelines. I like infrastructure. I like sewer mains. I like pipes that work in my house, I like gas pipes if you’re in the city, water mains. I’m not opposed to pipelines. I’m opposed to pipelines that carry oil across the state that have no benefit. You know, if the earth isn’t giving it up easily, you should probably think twice about taking it. So if you have to explode the bedrock to get the gas out of North Dakota, that’s not consensual. That’s …

MP: Rape. Literally raping the earth.

WL: Exactly. That’s really really extreme. It’s the same thing as the tar sands— we live in an extreme extraction era. I think that people think there’s an inevitability with all of this. People have relinquished control, which I find to be incredibly problematic spiritually. We say we are powerful beings that have choice, but we don’t act like it. In our presence and in our persona, we act like we are people with choice. But what we did is we became people who could choose what cell phone we want, or what restaurant to go to, or whatever accoutrements. But basic things we relinquish control of.

We accept an industrial education; we accept an energy infrastructure that is ass-backwards. They are replumbing America right now, and none of us signed up for pipelines across the most pristine areas for really inefficient energy. It’s called stranded asset; in 10 years these are just going to be junk, because they’re so ecologically (out-dated).

MP: It seems like it’s all coming to a head now ...

WL: I feel like for me, it’s this moment. I’m pretty agile. I’ve raised six kids. I’m not going anywhere. I’ve got horses. I intend to live this way.

MP: How goes the fight with [Canadian-based Sandpiper pipeline maker) Enbridge?

WL: Enbridge is trying to lay the Enbridge Gateway Pipeline, a really egregious pipeline, really highly battled, and they don’t have that in. Enbridge is trying to get a few big pipelines in, and it’s not running well for them. We’re their second battle. They have two battlefronts: One is in British Columbia and one is here, and neither are going as planned. They act as if things are, but nobody wants that pipeline there.

MP: What can Minnesotans do to help stop it here?

WL:They need to pressure [Gov. Mark] Dayton, and they need to pressure the Public Utilities Commission. I think ultimately, it’s going to be a political decision. On the 21^st of March, we’re hosting an event called “What’s the Plan?” Minnesota had no idea this was happening. Minnesota is being asked to accommodate an industry that we don’t benefit from. 

Dayton needs to decide that this pipeline should not go through the North. Think, Minnesota, think. What’s the plan? Is our plan to redo our infrastructure for a high risk, and then sit back and cross our fingers and hope things work out? Or do we want a real infrastructure and energy plan for Minnesota? What I want is infrastructure that is not leaking; 19 billion dollars is leaked out of gas mains that consumers are paying for but don’t they know it. Why don’t we fix [stuff]?

MP: What is the main schism between the earth, talking about it like we are here, and capitalism? Many people would see these pipelines as progress and jobs.

WL: I call it “predator economics.” We live in an economy that’s based on taking more than you need and not leaving the rest. It’s based on this idea of endless access. There’s no infinite access.

Our motto is “Love Water Not Oil.” You can’t have both. You’ve got to make a choice. You can’t inject trillions of gallons of fracking fluids into injection wells under the assumption that what goes down will never come up. That’s a pretty big leap of faith that Colorado is making, and that North Dakota’s making. You can’t do the BP oil spill, you can’t do extreme extraction, and you can’t do pipelines across wild rice watersheds. It’s one chain of lakes after another, and you can’t do it. You’ve got to make a choice.

MP: What’s your gut feeling? Do you think Enbridge will be given the go-ahead to plow ahead?

WL: No. I think that we have a very good shot at the Sandpiper, but we need Minnesotans to oppose it and we super need Governor Dayton to say “That’s a bad idea.” ... We need to be far more thoughtful about where we’re going and what we’re putting at risk and what we’re investing in. Dayton did say a couple of times, “that’s a bad route,” and he needs to stick to that.

When David Carr came to bury his cousin Tim Carr at St. John The Evangelist church in Hopkins in the spring of 2013, the eulogizing priest noted that, “The Irish have a phrase for how Tim died: He went ‘out of turn,’ meaning too soon, too young.” That memory — and of David sitting in a church pew surrounded by family and scanning the hushed grief-stricken faces for meaning amidst the big mystery that is sudden death – is what first came to this my mind when news hit that the former Twin Cities Reader writer and editor and New York Times columnist died February 12 at the out-of-turn age of 58. 

That, and Robert Frost’s “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader; no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader,” and Mark Twain’s reminder to, “Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”

In the week since his death, Carr has been eulogized and mythologized by friends near and far, from his first journalism running buddy, David Brauer, and his first editor, Brian Lambert, to colleagues and sources worldwide, including Portlandia co-star and Sleater-Kinney singer/guitarist Carrie Brownstein, who commented from the First Avenue stage Saturday night, “We love Minneapolis because it was the hometown of the great journalist David Carr, who passed away this week. I had many fascinating conversations with that man. Thank you, Minneapolis, for giving us such a force in journalism and culture.”

Incredibly to anyone who worked and/or partied hard with Carr, his funeral took place Tuesday at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which has hosted funerals for the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lena Horne, Oscar de la Renta, and Mario Cuomo. 

Thursday night in Minneapolis, about a hundred of Carr’s closest personal friends gathered at a church slightly more befitting the guest of honor, Liquor Lyle’s in Uptown, for the Lambert-hosted “Irish Wake For David Carr,” which consisted of an extremely rowdy if sorrowful bunch of ink-stained wretches, drinking and telling stories about one of the most voracious gone-not-gone spirits the Twin Cities has ever known.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Brian Lambert welcomes mourners to “An Irish Wake For David Carr” at Liquor Lyle’s Thursday night.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Larry Long sings a song for his old friend David Carr at Liquor Lyle’s Thursday night.

“The overwhelming theme was a life well-lived,” Carr’s brother Joe told the Lyle’s crowd about the funeral services in New York for David, whom Joe said blanched at being called “Davey” and once asked his big brother to instead “call me ‘sweetheart.’” “It was a resurrection, if you will, from the bad-ass coke-snortin’ Hunter S. Thompson journalist he was here in Minnesota to the New York media big shot he turned into. The family who knew David, who loved him, had no idea of his impact, and the coolest thing is finding out about the people he mentored and helped along.”

“He died with his boots on,” said Carr’s old friend Paul Metsa, who, along with Nate Dungan, Larry Long, and John Fenner played tunes for their departed pal. The six-hour gathering proved to be something of a family reunion for members of the alt-weekly wars of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when City Pages and the Twin Cities Reader were the main games in town for non-mainstream journalism.

Lyle’s was a favorite haunt and breakfast spot for Carr and his old friend Eddie Nagel, and hell if the old watchdog’s spirit didn’t fill the joint in his absentia, packed out as it was with the likes of such Minnesota-bred journalists as Susan Hamre, Martin Keller, Emily Kaiser, Keith Goetzman, Kevyn Burger, Rick Shefchik, Jim Leinfelder, Bridgette Reinsmoen, Tommy Mischke, Sara Janacek, P.D. Larson, Jim Meyer, Britt Robson, Neal Karlen, and many more, near and far. More memories:

Jennifer Jones: “I worked with David at the Reader and when he had one of his birthday parties at McCready’s, he had these [t-shirts] printed. If you went you got one. I babysat for him when I was in college, and he always encouraged me to pursue [journalism]. He taught me a lot.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Jennifer Jones

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

David Brauer

David Brauer: “I knew him when he had a lot of rough edges, and it’s been such a pleasure to read the remembrances from all the people from the East Coast side of the family and how positive and loving and how deeply touched they all were, and they saw the David where a lot of the thorns had fallen away. And I just think about that redemption, and how we all want that, right? We want our best selves to emerge, however it emerges, and it really sounds like that happened with David and it hit deep in my heart and healed some of the wounds.”

John Fenner: “I knew David when he was at his worst and I was at my worst. We were goddamn drug addicts and users and it was a horrible, horrible life and I’m not happy I lived it and I’m not proud of myself. David Carr and Emily Carter wrote those drug memoirs, and they’re wonderful wonderful people. When they say there are no second acts, that’s a lie. Mr. Carr had a beautiful second act, he made his mama proud.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Teri Mach, left, and Connie Nelson

Teri Mach and Connie Nelson: “I was a cub reporter,” said Nelson, “and he took me out one night and said, ‘I’m gonna show you the town and I’m gonna show you how to do this.’ And I grabbed onto the back of his coat and 12 hours later I knew everything there was to know about Minneapolis, David’s Minneapolis.”

“I was an intern at the Reader, I had just graduated from St. Thomas and David was this larger-than-life guy but also really present and right there,” said Mach. “I had to interview a judge in Ramsey County, it was a personality profile and a cover story, way beyond anything I’d done. I remember David sitting down with me, word by word, a couple of trips to Moby’s, two packs of cigarettes, and rebuilding this thing and making it worthy of being published. What a ridiculously generous man.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Neal Karlen

Neal Karlen: “I’ve had editors at the New York Times who I’ve known for 15 years who if you get five yards away from their cubicle they freak out. I went there and he showed me all around the place, and he barely knew me. The Times is filled with guys and women who are the people who get As in sixth grade and don’t share, and there are only three Pulitzer Prizes so everyone hates each other, but everyone loved him.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Hannah Sayle and Steve Marsh

Hannah Sayle, managing editor at City Pages, and writer Steve Marsh: “I’m most impressed by the idea that he was such a straight shooter,” said Sayle. “If he was going to do something that was even mildly going to come off as a ‘hit piece,’ he’d call you up and let you know. And I just think that’s the honorable way to go; he was as honest as anyone could be and in this profession and that says a lot.”

“He was my hero,” said Marsh. “He f---ed up and came from here and wrote beautifully for all kinds of people. Sometimes in Minneapolis when you’re feeling down about yourself, whether you’re in between jobs or it’s not going how you’d like it to go or you have a new boss or a new editor or whatever it is, that was a guy who was in a worse hole than you were in and came out of it and blew up.”

I had the honor of introducing Carr and conducting the Q&A at his reading for “Night Of The Gun” at Magers & Quinn in 2008. It was a jubilant night given the drugs-to-riches story the book so rawly chronicles, and near the end of the program before we all headed for a post-gig cocktail, I asked Carr what kept him going, what kept him inspired.

“I’d disappear if I wasn’t typing,” he said, simply.

Lucky for the rest of us, David Carr hasn’t disappeared, but his words and archives live on. Whether it was in conversation, or in the pages of the New York Times, or in his wonderfully personal “Because I Said So” parenting column in Family Times, Carr’s enthusiasm for life, music, people, stories, and journalism was and remains inspiring. For all the journalists gathered at Lyle’s Thursday night and beyond, it’s heartening to think that his eagle eye will be looking over our shoulders from here on out, lending a pat on the back and a kick in the butt as only he could.

What a sweetheart.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

On Saturday morning a Minneapolis police officer was shot in what police chief Janeé Harteau called a "targeted" attack. Later that day targeted was the word used by attendeees at the First Annual International Hip-Hop Activism Conference at Augsburg College. 

“Our people are targeted by the police,” went the refrain from African American and Native American conference-goers during the all-day event, which drew about 75 students and hip-hop fans to such panels as “White Supremacy versus Racism,” “Native Lives Matter,” “Introduction to The Black Man Stand Up Movement’s Plan of Action for Political/Sociological Economic Independence,” and “Combating the Matrix: A Survival Guide for Professionals and Students of Color to Survive in Predominantly White Ideological Institutions and School Systems.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Banner hanging on the entrance to Augsburg College’s Christensen Center.

“I was 8 when I watched the police beat my father bloody,” said Chase Iron Eyes, a resident of the nearby Little Earth neighborhood of Minneapolis, during the Native Lives Matter panel. “I went to prison for 70 months for having a small amount of marijuana and they came in and put assault weapons in my kids’ faces and took me away. A few weeks ago they did the same thing to my 19-year-old son and his friends, who were doing nothing, minding their own business, in their home in Little Earth. But they won’t stop me. They won’t stop me from learning my language, teaching our children, living our culture, organizing powwows, being free.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Native Lives Matter panel at the First Annual International Hip-Hop Activism Conference.

At the end of a week that saw Geraldo Rivera turning hip-hop critic and The Washington Post asking, “If Minneapolis is so great, why is it so bad for African Americans?” and FBI director James Comey clumsily worrying about America’s police force and racial profiling, the time was right for a lengthy discussion about race and society. 

“The prison system was grounded in the history of slavery, right after the 13^th Amendment, right after the Civil War, so we don’t have 2.5 million prisoners in prison, we have 2.5 million slaves,” conference facilitator Neal Taylor said in his opening remarks. “We need to stop this. We can create peace right now, with hip-hop, and that’s what we’re going to do.” 

Well-organized if sparsely attended and somewhat repetitive, the Save The Kids-sponsored conference recast the energy and messages of recent citywide protests held in the wake of the shootings of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and others. The recurring themes were the systemic oppression of minorities by the ruling class, police brutality, media misrepresentation, the importance of home-schooling, the entertainment industry’s co-option of all things hip-hop, the prison system in America, and forward progress. 

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Brother Ali delivers the keynote address.

“This is a very important time that we’re in right now, this particular moment,” said Minneapolis hip-hop star Brother Ali in his keynote speech. “This is Black History Month, this is the 50^th anniversary of Malcolm X being taken from us in his physical sense, although he’ll never be taken from us in terms of what his legacy means. This is also the great celebration of Dilla Day (an annual tribute to the life and times of influential deejay/rapper/producer J Dilla since his death in 2006 from a blood disease), so we’re in the presence and spirit of greatness. I’ve been blessed to travel around the world, and I’ve seen the way that hip-hop mobilizes people and empowers people and the voice that it’s given to people all over the world.

“All around the world we are facing the same global monoculture system of domination and dehumanization, and all over the world there’s a united front of pushing back against this system of power and to build power within people. Brute force is being met with beauty; brute force is being met with human dignity and excellence; brute force is being met with a system of open hearts that unites people’s hearts with love. This is what hip-hop has been for us,  this universal language, beat, culture, texture of human excellence pushing back against domination.

“We’re talking about the very lifeblood of who we are as human beings, and what it means to face this terrifying reality of the world, particularly in this time, in which all spiritual traditions, all cultural traditions, all wisdom traditions have said that this is nearing the end of this project of space and time, that we are in end times. I’m not gonna get too much into that doom and gloom thing right now, but in every period there are people who are vanguards for protecting human dignity.”

One such vanguard is Reies Romero, who organized the conference. “I’m a student at Augsburg, and it made sense to do it here, so we made a Facebook page event and some flyers and decided to do it,” said Romero, a junior studying social work at Augsburg. “The atmosphere that is now in America, with this police terror, we felt like this was an important free conference with important topics. Most importantly, it’s youth-friendly; it’s not a bunch of adults trying to figure out ways how to teach youth; it’s youth participating and leading.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Augsburg student Reies Romero helped organize the conference.

Along with “targeted,” perhaps the most oft-used word Saturday was “they,” in reference to the powers that be that would seek to keep down entire races and classes of people. 

“When something becomes seen as normal, that’s the most dangerous thing that could happen to a system of oppression,” said Kim Socha, an animal rights activist and teacher at Normandale College. “Bad people go to jail. The police officers are your friends. We’re taught these things, and we’re not to talk about the disparities in the systems themselves.”

“Hip-hop is a tool we can utilize to combat all the oppression that’s around us, that’s trying to divide us, that’s trying to take away that human element and forces that are trying to break us down,” said Amber Gay, a member of Twin Cities Save The Kids. “This time is significant. Right now this generation in traditional native wisdom has been prophesized to be of importance to reconnect us with the humanity that has been lost through colonization and destruction.”

The conference concluded Saturday night at the Nomad World Pub in Minneapolis with a Dilla Day celebration, featuring scheduled performances by St. Paul Slim, the Lioness, Los Nativos, Mally, DJ Kool Akiem, DJ Francisco, Vie Boheme, and Danami. “I hope it becomes bigger in the future, and becomes a global thing,” said Romero. “I hope to make this an annual thing and get big names and work on future events to better our nation and world through the lens of hip-hop. Not everyone who’s in hip-hop thinks that way though. It’s simply entertainment for them, or a way to make money, or better their selves. But the true meaning of hip-hop is to better the community. My hope is to get like-minded people together to do that.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Last Friday morning, during the Timberwolves shoot-around at Target Center, players and members of the press alike were quietly abuzz about the just-announced news of Kevin Garnett’s return. On the court, though, it was business as usual for Wolves shooting coach Mike Penberthy, who spent the workout shagging rebounds and keeping a watchful eye on the shooting forms of Ricky Rubio, Anthony Bennett, and Chase Budinger during a spirited three-point competition.

“Ricky! Ricky!” Rubio barked as he clanked a couple in a row. A good-natured husband and father of three who wears bow ties on the bench, Penberthy immediately sidled up and said something to crack up Rubio, who has been Penberthy’s star pupil this year, going from dreadful down-in-the mouth bricklayer to steely-eyed shooter who should only get better with age.  

Rubio's development can be attributed in large part to the calm tutelage of Penberthy, an undrafted point guard out of The Master’s College who played two years in the NBA, winning a title with the Los Angeles Lakers, and who went on to work as shooting coach under Zen master and legendary Lakers coach Phil Jackson. Penberthy was hired by Wolves Head Coach and President of Basketball Operations Flip Saunders for his approach to positive thinking, philosophy, and psychology — and his ability to instill confidence in even the most nerve–rattled shooter.

His all-time favorite shooters? Mark Price, Reggie Miller, John Stockton, and Calvin Murphy. His dream job down the road? Head coach in the NBA. His favorite thing to do, off the job? Visiting high schools and sharing his knowledge about shooting the rock.

More than anything, I wanted to know if what Penberthy teaches the best basketball players in the world is translatable to the likes of me and other denizens of pick-up basketball nation.

“Hey Walsh, he can’t fix you,” hollered my old pick-up ball buddies, Star Tribune Wolves beat reporters Kent Youngblood and Jerry Zgoda, in tandem, as Penberthy and I sat down to talk about the art of shooting. I figured they were probably right, but Penberthy makes you feel good about giving it a shot anyway:

MinnPost: How did you get started at this, how did you become the Wolves’ shot whisperer?

Mike Penberthy: My dad was a coach in California. Valley Christian High School, he was Division Five coach of the year in 1979. I remember doing shooting drills when I was five years old. He always told me, “Have good backspin and shoot with high arc.” That’s what I tell young kids all the time, until they’re strong enough, “Make sure you have good backspin and high arc.” That will, by default, get you to do everything fundamentally right, and that’s easy for kids to remember. 

MP: Shooting is mostly mental, and muscle memory, right?

Penberthy: It’s all mental. The mental side never leaves. The mental side is everything. That’s a deeper subject; we start getting into the psychology of people and it really takes a lot of time to build relationships to be able to speak into that with somebody. Because now you’re getting into some pretty touchy areas, especially with some of these guys coming from difficult backgrounds.

You get into some sensitive spots, and that affects how you play the game, no matter what anybody says. You don’t take that life away from basketball; in fact, you may use that, like I did. I used people doubting me and people saying I wasn’t good enough to fuel the way I played. And Ricky’s similar in that people have doubted him and told him he’s not very good. I always tell him, “use that.”

MP: He’s improved so much from last year. He was so down, and hating life. He looks like he’s having more fun, naturally, almost hitting that Zen thing where you’re not thinking about it, just shooting it.

Penberthy: You have to get to that point, but it takes a lot of work to get to that point. It takes a lot of repetition, it takes a lot of technique, it takes a lot of focus. You’re probably talking about 50 to 100,000 reps before you’re not thinking about it. Most people say they read Outliers and think that 10,000 hours at anything [is the key to greatness], but I don’t believe that.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Mike Penberthy

Ten thousand hours of focused shooting to become a great shooter is not even close to enough, because you’re not taking the competitive side into it. Ten thousand hours of competitive shooting in a game situation is one thing, but you’ve got to do another 50,000 to get to that point, and then you’ve got to do more.

Guys are always saying, “You’re such a better shooter than me,” and I’m, “Yeah, but I’ve got two million more reps than you. You’re just behind in reps.” They say, “How can you make 92 out of a 100 shots?” and I just say, “Because I’ve taken millions of more shots than you.” Besides the fact that I’ve played more games and all that experience.

When you find older guys that are good shooters, they just have a volume of shot experience that’s deeper than yours. They’ve put in more hours and taken more game shots and missed more so that they know where their faults are and they’re very good at self-assessing. The idea is you have to be completely self-aware early on. 

Ricky’s done a lot of work, but it was a lot of bad work. It was the wrong self-assessment, the wrong psychosis, the wrong shot talk, the wrong self talk. Everything was just so negative, which affects his body language, which affects his mind, which affects his performance. So it was a matter of redoing all that, and then doing some technical things. It isn’t just moving your hands and, “Let’s shoot a hundred threes every day.” It’s way deeper than that.

MP: It’s truly not just muscle memory. It’s connected to the brain, the heart…

Penberthy: It’s your heart, your emotions… The deeper your emotions are tied to your shots, the better you’ll shoot the ball. You have to have those in practice. I tell them all the time, “You need to sense and feel the imagery of the arena when you’re playing by yourself. You should shoot and make shots and get chills; that’s how deep you should shoot the ball.”

I’ll say to guys, “Do you remember the best game you ever played?” and I’ll take them into that conversation as deeply as I can get, even to the point where they smell the popcorn, remember what shoes and socks they wore, coach’s energies. I mean, the best game you ever played, you remember, right?

MP: I do, I got hot a couple months ago and I’ll never forget it. I’ve always said that when you’re hot and really feeling it, it’s art, and you actually decide how the ball is going to go through the net.

Penberthy: I feel like every time I shoot, that’s how I shoot. Now, to get to that point is where I want all my guys to get. I want Ricky to get to that point. Like last night, I was shooting with Glen Robinson [III] and I was saying, “I’ll hit the back of the rim, 10 in a row.” He said, “How do you do that?” And it’s just, I’ve done it enough and I know exactly how my body’s gonna work to get the ball to go exactly where I want it to go. You have to know yourself so much.

MP: Have you studied energy work like qigong, or other practices that fine-tune the body and mind?

Penberthy: Not really. We did a little bit of tai chi stuff when I was with Phil and the Lakers. I’ve done a lot of research on body movement [and] mind, mental state, how to get yourself into the zone consistently even when you’re out of it; the ability to stop and turn in a moment and get back in the zone.

Which I do a lot with him [nodding at Rubio on the court] in pre-game, just because he’ll have moments where he might miss four or five in a row because he’s an immature shooter. He can take himself out of a good place because of missing a few shots and go bad. It’s like, “Dude. It’s four missed shots. Nobody’s out here with a gun. You’re just shooting.” And he’ll laugh and I try to erase the bad and get him back into it and he’ll make ten in a row.

So there’s that side of coaching that has nothing to do with technique and everything to do with what I’m saying and my voice. I want him to hear my voice in those moments of the game when he’s feeling that way, and the words that I use. Every player I have I use different terminologies so that when I talk to them in the games, they know exactly where I am. I’m anchoring them in those moments, so when he’s hot, I’m anchoring a word that ties into that moment so when I yell at him at the game, it takes him back to that place.

MP: What word do you use for Ricky?

Penberthy: His hometown (Madrid, Spain). That’s key. One day early on he was shooting and making everything, and I said, “I gotta get him thinking about this on a regular basis so he can take that feeling with him.” When Ricky says “I could feel my shot,” that’s what we’re talking about. You know how that feels, right? I want him to feel that feeling of putting up a shot and walking away, knowing it’s going in before it does. That’s the best feeling in the world, when you know it’s going in before it goes. It’s not that it goes in; it’s that you know it’s going in. You’re not thinking at all about technique, or who’s guarding you, or the score. You don’t even know anyone’s there. You’re just thinking about the fact that, as soon as I let it go, that’s it. That to me is the best feeling in the world.

MP: What happened with that third quarter this year, when [Golden State guard] Klay Thompson went off [for a record-setting 37 points in one quarter]? 

Penberthy: There were a lot of factors. His players were looking for him, which is communication from his team, saying, “We trust you, we want you to score.” There’s an energy and encouragement there, which is a big part of it. That’s what I try to bring into all these guys, the confidence, and your teammates need to do it, too. They were looking for him every time down the floor, and that’s gotta make you feel great as a player. Besides the fact that technique-wise, he’s one of the best in the league. He’s got incredible fluidity and smoothness in his shot; effortless in his release. 

MP: What do you teach these guys that might translate to pick-up ball players?

Penberthy: One, your expectation on the court has to be realistic, because you don’t put in the hours of practice [that an NBA player does]. The second thing I’d say is you should always walk out on the court thinking you can make every shot you take. Like, if I didn’t practice for a week, I could still walk out here and say, “I’m going to make 98 out of hundred,” and I can do it because that scene that I’m playing in my head is confident. It just falls back into muscle memory; I always say to guys, “Just fall back into that place where you’re making everything,” and you should be able to do that as a player, pro or not.

Some guys get superstitious about what shoes they’re wearing, and they want to wear the same ones they were hot in – not because they’re superstitious, but because they want to get back to that mental state when they were hot. I don’t even introduce that to Ricky, because it wouldn’t even matter. Ricky is all about feeling. I want to do something to empower him with something he can actually control. 

MP: It’s got to be all-consuming. How much do you think about this stuff? 

Penberthy: All the time, I’ve been thinking about it all the time since I was ten. I never wanted to miss. I always wanted to play efficient games. I didn’t want to take all the shots, because basketball is a beautiful game outside of shooting. There’s so much joy in setting a screen for somebody and seeing him make the right read and the ball arriving on time and spacing the floor correctly and scoring as a group. But I never wanted to miss, I never wanted to let the rest of team down, especially if everybody did their job and then I miss… I just never wanted to miss. I’ve been thinking about it forever, and I get asked about it a lot. 

I think most amateur guys – and I say that carefully because I don’t want to be disrespectful – but guys who don’t work with pros think that everybody’s shot is the same, from elementary school to high school to college to pro, [but] the pro game is completely different. You can’t take pro shooting and tie it to a high school kid, because he’s not playing 82 games, 200 days a year, travel, pressure, millions of dollars, fans, autograph signings, the lifestyle itself: the fatigue factor has to go into how you teach, and the high school kid doesn’t come close to experiencing that. It’s all about results here.

MP: It’s amazing to me how fast your shot can go when your legs get tired. It’s so true that the whole body is involved in shooting, with the energy going from the tips of your toes to the tips of your fingers. Leg fatigue is the main thing that leads to misses, yes?

Penberthy: Legs are everything. It’s the foundation. The majority of people who shoot baskets nowadays are pretty narrow in how their feet are. I think a wider stance, the wider the better, because I think the number one flaw of shooters in the NBA is balance; they’re all very casual with balance. They’re good enough to take off-balance shots, but guys that take balanced shots, like Klay Thompson, are going to be more effective. The reason [Golden State bomber] Steph Curry misses so much is because he’s off-balance. If he was on balance more, he’d make more. 

That’s what I did with Ricky, too. Just widened him out and slowed him down. He plays at such a frantic pace, it was like, “Dude you’re just going too fast, you’ve got to play slower to become a better shooter.” But your legs are everything, and having a wider base just engages the stronger muscles, your hamstrings and your butt, those strong muscles you need to have at the end of games.

MP: It is difficult to coach a shooter like [Wolves’ assassin] Kevin Martin, whose form is so from-the-hip?

Penberthy: Well, I don’t coach him; I just tell him to keep shooting. He’s such a good player, and very unique. But he does something that I try to teach the guys, as well: He times his release with his feet, so he’s snapping his wrist as his feet go. He’s using all the energy of his body to time it right at the end. That’s why he can, with very little effort, shoot the ball from so far away and so accurately. His shots rarely hit the rim. I would never say anything to change him. He’s a pro scorer, he’s a scoring shooter. Some guys are scorers, he’s a scoring shooter. Like Curry, he’s a scoring shooter.

MP: There’ve been games when I’ve been playing with guys, total strangers, and I’ll hit a few in a row and the call goes up: “Shooter.” The word itself is a defensive warning, a sign of respect. It’s like a gift, a special weapon. Not everyone who plays ball is a shooter.

Penberthy: Yeah, “We gotta guard that guy.” I play pick-up, and even this summer playing with the pro guys, they’re guarding me at half-court. Make a couple in a row and you’ve got [Indiana All-Star] Paul George guarding you. It’s like, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” He’s like, “Man, I’m not letting you touch it.” That’s the goal, that’s how I want my guys to feel, that’s how I want my guys to be treated: Shooter, shooter, don’t let him touch it. 

On Feb. 22, CBS Evening News reporter Jeff Pegues concluded his report about East African terrorist groups and ramped-up security at the Mall of America with, “Al-Shabaab has found sympathizers in Minneapolis’ large Somali-American population, where more than 20 people have been charged with trying to join the group.” 

The fact is, only a dozen Americans have been confirmed as ever being jihadi recruits. But beyond the stereotypes and media fear-mongering – and after a week of listening to ESPN’s Joe Soucheray on #blacklivesmatter versus the Mall of America (Souch is on the side of the law and order, period), and just hours after President Barack Obama’s Selma speech — a couple hundred Somali-American students at the University of Minnesota gathered in Coffman Union’s Great Hall Saturday night to celebrate all things Somali:

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Ahmed Abdulle and Ali Omar.“I’m studying IT here at the U; I identify more with Somali culture than western culture,” said Abdulle. “The biggest difference is the level of conservatism. Somali culture is a little more conservative; we don’t show off a lot our body, we’re kind of modest. We don’t try to put ourselves out there, and we’re not so individualistic, and we think each one of us plays a particular role in our society and our family. Like, going to school, we don’t just study what we want to study, we study what will help us and our families in the long run. We look at ourselves as more of gear pieces in a collective.

“My family and I watched the [Obama] speech today, and it was a moment for us to think about because our families were not there at the time, we were in a completely different part of the world, but at the same time had that [the civil rights movement] not happened, we would not have the opportunities we have now. So coming from the outside, we can definitely see the opportunities that we have and can take far more advantage of that and forget about the rationale or reasoning that happened because of [slavery and racism]. I have a friend who is African-American and whose family has been here for generations on end, and when they see themselves they see themselves in a very particular way. He’s not OK going to a city that’s full of white guys because of his and his family’s history, whereas Somali persons, when we see white people, we don’t have that hesitation.”

“Somali ENT is a group of young boys, me and my cousins, who produce Somali videos and comedy skits,” said Omar. “Our greatest hit got 300,000 views, called ‘Somali Catfish.’ Somali culture is unique and beautiful; we are part of the East African culture, but Somali is different in its own way. And Somali youth, we have a Muslim point of view of life, but we also put our own little ‘ummph’ in it, if you know what I mean. We’re kind of the generation that’s going to build Somali. You can find it in our poetry, in our dances, in our music, all kinds of things.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Liena Hamza, Aisha Barra, Hayat Mohamed.“I’m studying family social science at the U,” said Mohamed. “I’m originally from Mogadishu, Somalia. I was raised here, but it’s important to keep your culture from home so you never really forget where you come from. I love how diverse Minnesota is, and how all the different cultures come together at the U and do events together. It bothers me when people say ‘Somalians’ versus ‘Somali,’ because the original term is ‘Somali.’ It’s like saying, ‘I’m hanging out with the Mexicans’ versus ‘I’m hanging out with the Hispanics.’ There’s a big difference. The correct term would be ‘I’m hanging out with the Somalis.’ ”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Najmo Yusef.“I’m the president of the Somali Student Association. Somali culture is really enriching, it’s a really thick culture. Even if you’ve been here a long time, you still carry the culture with you. With our behaviors, with our characteristics, it’s so deeply rooted in us.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Yura Fora.“I’m here representing the nonprofit organization ARAHA, the American Relief Agency for the Horn of Africa. We’re just trying to get more awareness about what’s going on in the Horn of Africa, in terms of the poverty level, the drought, the suffering, and the good projects we’re working on. We have offices in Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Kenya. It’s my motherland; I care deeply about it, and the community, when we do come here, we have to remember where we came from and not forget the situation that’s going on over there.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Naima Hamad.“I’m a U student, I’m studying youth studies with a minor in sociology. I was born in Kenya, but my family is from Somalia. Somali music is very powerful. It sends a great message; a lot of the songs are about love, and that’s one thing that Somali people have for each other. They have love for everybody, but they have love for each other because of what they went through – the war, the turmoil, the drought, and hunger that’s going on there. Minnesota is a place I want to live forever, because of the diversity and I find that I learn something new every day about my culture and who I am from the people who live and work inside Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Everybody’s in show biz these days, what with the 24/7 news cycle and our Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Vine/Snapchat selves adding to the “we live in public”  ways of how we live and work nowadays. Self-promotion and self-everything has become part of the art itself, with new communication technologies allowing everyone and their finger-painting kid to promote ideas, lives, food, shows, artwork, and images with just a few keystrokes.

“Adapt or die” was the conclusion Thursday evening at Walker Art Center, in a fascinating Mn Artists-sponsored panel discussion called “Upload, Then What?,” which explored how the panelists – advertising branding guru David Schwen, video and cable TV provocateur Chris Cloud, and musician/reality video performance artist Ana Voog  — use the communication technology of the day to distribute their work.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Expertly and eruditely moderated by Mn Artists’ Jehra Patrick,  the panel discussion was part of Mn Artists’ “4 x Forum” series, which seeks to bring experts “together for issue-specific, moderated dialogues… geared toward taking some of our cultural scene’s most intriguing, hot-button conversations offline and in-person.”

To that end, with their vast experience in trend-surfing, Schwen and Cloud had much to offer, while Voog’s over-indulgence in the pre-gig wine made for a somewhat amusing if ignorable artist-at-work-and-play sideshow, but didn’t add much to the conversation about fast-moving communication trends and creativity. Which is a shame, since Voog’s pioneering experience of broadcasting her life to the world from her Loring Park apartment across the street from the Walker could have been illuminating when juxtaposed with the other artists’ experiences.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Patrick started off the discussion with a quote from Lauren Christiansen’s “Redefining Exhibition in the Digital Age” that said it all about the night’s fare — and the wild new world we traverse hourly: “With today’s burgeoning potential for digital mass viewership, transmissions become just as important as creations.”

That much was agreed upon by the panelists, who told tales of making and circulating their art, building audiences, and developing professional and creative persona. Schwen’s approach is to make things for himself first and foremost and constantly, without a specific client in mind, blast his creations out on Instagram, and see if it sticks. For a story in Wired magazine about balancing social media time, he made a yin-yang sign of the Twitter bird. His simple and stylish Pantone mustard and ketchup squares were seen and picked up by McDonald’s, with the end result and process itself suggesting an updating of Andy Warhol’s Brillo soap boxes for the digital age. 

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

“It’s interesting, because I feel like more clients are coming to me because of the Instagrams and social media instead of a traditional website, and I think that’s a really interesting age to be in because when I graduated from college, there was no Instagram or social media and you had to post things on your website and meet actual people. It just opens so many more doors,” said Schwen.

While working a full-time job at an advertising agency, Cloud and a friend launched MPLS.TV  a few years ago, the popularity of which has been achieved solely by not network or even cable television, but distribution via social media. Recently Cloud and his partner in collaboration Lea Devon Sorrentino launched Negative Jam, a truly forward-pushing and often hilarious attempt “to understand the changing climate of American culture in a digital age and to determine if ‘the struggle’ (between online and offline) is real.”

To that end, the duo also recently launched the terrific podcast “Last Month On The Internet,” a wry look at the memes, videos, and moments that blow by us and forgotten forever – by everyone but our trusty curators Cloud and Sorrentino.

“It’s a time capsule,” said Patrick.  

“That’s the whole point of it,” said Cloud. “We take offline what happens on the Internet so people can always have…”

“They can always have the Internet,” said Patrick. 

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

None of which would matter if the artists weren’t so good at what they do. Point being, if the content is great, it gets picked up or noticed and the artist gets paid – critically and financially. 

“I’m making stuff that I just love making,” said Schwen. “It’s something that brings me a lot of joy and I’m happy to share it. Some people are going to love it or hate it, but you’re just throwing it out there because you want to keep creating things, whether it reaches an audience or not. We’re making this stuff for ourselves, and people might not get it. Sometimes I post something and it doesn’t get a lot of ‘likes’ or comments, but I’m still happy with it and people might not know about it but it’s something you love making.” 

“I have a strong view on sparkling water,” responded Cloud. “I know I might get quoted on this and it might come back to bite me in the ass, but I feel like sparkling water is a really big thing with Caucasian people. My buddy, who is black, posted this La Croix article from the New York Times and I was like, ‘Yo dog, that’s just not right because black people don’t like sparkling water.’ And he’s like, ‘bra, no, that’s not cool,’ and so I posted something about La Croix water and asked what people’s favorite flavor was and it got all these responses. 

“But then I’ll post a podcast that I’ve been working on and it gets like two ‘likes.’ So sometimes it’s tough to see your work not get ‘likes’ but at the same time we’re going to keep doing it, we’re going to keep making it because we love it. You have to do stuff for the passion, not for the ‘likes.’” 

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

“What matters more is build yourself around a hashtag, or a very good mobile site, responsive sites,” said Cloud. “It bothers me so much when I go to artists’ websites on my phone and it’s really garbage. You’re an artist, represent yourself well. If you’re an artist, you should be embracing tools and new technologies and reading Mashable for a good flow of social things. It’s also important to experiment. You have to try things out.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

On Dec. 20, 2014, an estimated 3,000 people took to the Mall of America in the name of Black Lives Matter Minneapolis, as part of a nationwide wave of protests following grand jury decisions in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York to not indict white police officers who shot and killed unarmed black men. Despite warnings from the mall and the city of Bloomington, the peaceful protest went on as planned on the Saturday before Christmas, historically one of the busiest shopping days of the year.  

Twenty-five people were arrested and, on March 10, 11 activists were charged with trespassing and other misdemeanors, to which all pled not guilty. Now the so-called Mall of America 11 (#MOA11) face large fines if convicted, with Bloomington City Attorney Sandra Johnson seeking $40,000 in restitution for police overtime and lost revenue to the mall.

In the process, the activists have had their Facebook accounts monitored, supporters have called for a Mall of America boycott and mocked the mall’s post-protest promotional Twitter efforts to ensure that all lives matter at the Mall of America.  

On May 1, the defendants will return to the Hennepin County District Court-Southdale in Edina for a pretrial hearing. The date was chosen by the defendants in solidarity with May Day, or International Workers’ Day, which celebrates left-wing movements and working people all over the world.

To be sure, The MOA11 versus the Mall Of America, as its future Banksy meme will undoubtedly have it, is a battle rife with symbolism – idealism versus capitalism, activism versus shopping, the people versus politicians and police – and at the moment the MOA 11 stand together as a brave if somewhat reluctant figurehead, a group of thought leaders who see themselves as torch bearers of their lunch-counter-sitting and back-of-the-bus–sitting forefathers and mothers before them, taking on America’s history of institutional racism itself.

So who are these defendants, what are their backgrounds, and what do they stand for? MinnPost found out:

Photo by Donald Thomas

Mica Grimm

Mica Grimm: I was born and raised in South Minneapolis and graduated from Southwest High School. My grandmother was a community organizer in St. Louis, a really powerful woman, so it’s always been in my blood. Right now I’m campus organizer for MPIRG, a nonprofit run by college students, which is really dope because they know what’s happening and we know it’s our time to organize. I got started with Black Lives Matter Minneapolis the night of the Darren Wilson verdict (Nov. 24), watching on CNN the supposed riots with my little brother, and then I watched alone, crying and feeling hurt, and I was like, “I know I’m not the only one who feels like this, why am I dealing with this on my own?” I went on Twitter and people were talking about it, and people in Minneapolis were going, “Is anybody doing anything? We need to do something,” and I was saying the same thing.

Right now, to a certain extent, it’s kind of intimidating because there’s a lot of hate put on you. This is an issue that’s so pervasive and deep, and it’s really clear that the scars haven’t healed. We all like to pretend we’re in a postracial society, that’s what we keep hearing, but these issues bring up so much tension for society. So the hate that comes with all this is kind of heavy. I’ve gotten hate email and letters and even a fax, but at the same time there’s so much love and support. When we shut down Highway 55, that was the first time that I’ve felt a real community with that amount of people. I’d never felt that type of healing and that type of love. It’s clear that people needed this, and needed to be around other people, and needed to believe that we can make a change.

Courtesy of Michael McDowell

Michael McDowell

Michael McDowell: I got involved right after the Darren Wilson verdict came out. Folks were emailing the night before, and I got calls that there would be a big rally and march on Hiawatha and Lake, and people asked me if I wanted to be involved and shut down the highway and I said, “I’m definitely down.” Folks were already organizing. It was really organic, and after we did the Highway 55 shutdown, it was part of a national trend and we started talking to folks in Ferguson, who had a chapter there, and New York, who had a chapter there, and were like, “You shut the highway down. You guys should start a chapter there and start pushing policing policy in your state.” So it just kind of … happened.

Overall our target is not the mall, it’s to keep uplifting the message and pushing our demands around, citywide and statewide, towards the end of police violence against black folks, and I think that’s getting lost. But our target is not the mall, we’re just currently being charged by the mall. Our most urgent goal is to end the killings of black folks by police officers and we want to uplift the role of corporations like the mall in all of this.

I think what a lot of folks keep seeing is these awesome and rapid actions, but they’re not seeing what’s going on behind closed doors. We’re trying to push legislation and policy around policing statewide and citywide, and we’re figuring out how to plug folks into the work that’s being done at the Capitol so that we get some folks who really care about policing and community and talking to their legislators. That’s what’s next.

Courtesy of Nekima Levy Pounds

Nekima Levy Pounds

Nekima Levy Pounds: I moved here in 2003 and began teaching at the University of St. Thomas law school. I’m also a law professor at St. Thomas, and also the director of the Community Justice Project, which is the civil rights legal clinic, and I’m also a civil rights attorney. I got involved because of my connection to a lot of the young people who are part of Black Lives Matter; I’ve been working with them on a variety of different social justice issues, so when they were starting up the group they reached out to me to see if I was willing to be involved.

That was on the heels of me returning from Ferguson during Thanksgiving week, as a legal observer through the National Lawyers Guild. That was a life-changing experience. In Ferguson, I saw a visual representation of the militarization of the local police forces. The first night I was there, we were tear-gassed without warning by a police officer and that was just a shocking, jarring experience, because there was really no regard for the safety of the people — because when you’re tear-gassed, you can’t breathe, you can’t see, you’re immobilized for 15 minutes and people with fragile immune systems are in real danger.

That use of force on nonviolent peace protesters really set off some alarms in my mind; I’m a scholar who focuses on the impact of the war on drugs on communities of color, and I’ve written about a lot of these issues, so just to be there face-to-face with officers and the National Guard and seeing that all come to a head was an eye-opening experience.

I was really inspired by the young people who came out night after night in Ferguson, demanding equal justice under the law. I saw that they were relentless, and it reminded me of the things that I had studied about the civil rights movement and the activism of ordinary citizens and young people. So I was inspired and energized by that, so when the young people approached me about getting involved with Black Lives Matter in Minneapolis, it was a no-brainer.

One of the things that’s interesting to me is how often people in Minnesota talk about the inconvenience to shoppers at the Mall of America. People are more concerned about convenience than what’s in the interest of justice. A lot of people are indifferent to the plight of people of color, particularly African-Americans and the plight of the poor, and they are comfortable with the status quo. I just find that to be extremely troubling, but it also helps me understand how we could have Jim Crow laws in this country, and how so many people watched this happen and didn’t do anything about it. Too many people are sitting back, comfortable, while lives are being lost and constitutional rights are being violated on a regular basis, and I just find that unconscionable.

Courtesy of Cat Salonek

Cat Salonek

Cat Salonek: I grew up in Robbinsdale, but I’m a South Minneapolis resident now and I work for Outfront.org, because I saw how Outfront was not only working for LGBTQ justice, but was constantly for other parts of the movements. For me, racial justice is a life or death situation in our cities and our state and our country. Growing up in Robbinsdale, the police were very aggressive; it’s on the border of North Minneapolis, and police there would do everything they could to arrest poor people and black people and hold them to a different standard than white folks. So to me, when Black Lives Matter started emerging it was sort of an “of course; makes sense.”

I feel really angry, and infuriated, that the reaction to police accountability is an increase in police force and a manipulation of our constitutional rights to free speech. They’re not only charging us with these five misdemeanors – which are unconstitutional; we have the right to protest – but they’re also charging us with about $70,000 in restitution that, not so coincidentally, comes from an increase in police force that we didn’t ask for at this protest.

These charges are absurd. I didn’t trespass and none of the people they targeted with these charges were trespassing. We were, in fact, the people who attempted to coordinate with the police and pull people out of the action when they wanted but they wouldn’t allow us to do what we do best, which is run disciplined, safe and effective direct action. The police created the chaos. It was very unnecessary. The risk of any [chaos] would have been eliminated had the police followed the protocol I laid out for them. We wanted to have marshals at the event. We had 250 people trained weeks before the event, and not only did they infiltrate it, but they wouldn’t allow us to use the people we trained as marshals and instead decided to wrangle 21 different police units and law-enforcement agencies instead of just letting us have our marshals peacefully maneuver the crowd out of the space. I mean, we shut down two highways. We shut down other spaces. Never has there been an issue about directing people until the Mall of America.  

Photo by Patience Zalanga

Kandace Montgomery

Kandace Montgomery: I’m originally from Maine, and I work for TakeAction Minnesota as an organizer focusing mainly on economic issues impacting women of color. [These charges] are annoying, and oppressive. It’s not a scary feeling, because I feel oppressed every day of my life; it’s just another one of these tactics that they’re using to oppress my voice and thousands of other people’s voices. What they want is for us to think twice about going to a mall and demanding that black lives matter. That’s frustrating, because all of our work is about people speaking their minds and speaking their truth and holding this country accountable. It’s not scary. It pisses me off, more than anything.

It’s obvious that our politicians and people who work in our government are inside the pockets and at the hands of major corporations, and protecting their interests, not ours. So if anything, what we showed from the protests is that our cities and governments are still willing to protect the interests of corporations even if it means persecuting young people of color for gathering at a peaceful protest. That’s absurd, but it gives us more energy in helping us to create more strategy to really think about: How do we create structural change that says black lives matter in this state and in this country?

Photo by Elliot Malcolm

Adja Gildersleve

Adja Gildersleve: What’s the goal of putting us out there as the MOA 11? It’s kind of like a star-status type thing, that’s how I see it, and I don’t want us out there like that. I want there to be talk of deeper issues, and I don’t want to just like highlight me being a defendant because it’s not about me, it’s about a larger movement, and so the media that’s going out right now is really important, to be telling the story of everyone who is affected, because there’s nothing really special about the eleven.

Todd Dahlstrohm: I’m married to an attorney and have two children, 21 and 25, and I’ve been a long-time labor organizer here in the Twin Cities. I currently work for the Minnesota AFL-CIO as the director of organizing and growth. I think that any time you directly take on power, power strikes back and with the Mall of America, we’re taking on corporate power and they’re striking back at us. It’s always worth putting yourself out there when you’re on the side of justice.

Courtesy of Todd Dahlstrohm

Todd Dahlstrohm

Anytime when folks who have decided to change this country they’ve had to make other people feel uncomfortable, and that’s what has led to change in this country. Sometimes disruption and sometimes inconvenience is part of that, just like folks who sat at lunch counters during the civil rights movement – people were uncomfortable with that. [Our] staging a peaceful protest in the mall made folks feel uncomfortable; it wasn’t convenient, but it was really about institutional racism in this country and changing that. I feel confident that we’re going to stand strong and stay together and the movement will make change in this country.

Amity Foster: I’m from a small town in the southern Black Hills in South Dakota, and graduated from Concordia University in 1998 and worked in the library there for 10 years. I’ve worked as executive assistant and data/database manager at ISAIAH for four years, and my life has changed drastically since I’ve been here. When I started, I told my boss that I wanted the job because “I want to be part of something bigger.” I had no idea what community organizing was, and now it is so much a part of my life that I’m not sure who I would be without it.

Courtesy of Amity Foster

Amity Foster

I hope that people are angry about the protest because it made them look at a hard truth — that black lives don’t matter in so many systemic ways and that’s what is wrong. The major inconvenience to shoppers was caused by the police, that’s where their anger should be. Black lives are disrupted unjustly every day by racial biases in policing and by our criminal justice system, by the achievement gap, by systemic racism. That’s what Black Lives Matter leaders are saying, and that’s what you need to hear.

Jie Wronski-Riley: I’m originally from Washington, D.C., and I’m a senior in high school at Avalon School, which is a charter school in St. Paul. I’ve been involved in other social justice community organizing. I worked at Minnesotans United For All Families and TakeAction Minnesota. I went to the Mall of America on December 20 to honor the lives of black men and women and children who have been murdered by police in America. I went with the intention and spirit of love and mourning, and I think the way the mall and the city of Bloomington reacted … I just don’t think they understand why we were there.

Courtesy of Jie Wronski-Riley

Jie Wronski-Riley

Because if they did, they wouldn’t be doing this to us. We were there in the spirit of love and grief and standing up for your community and people you’re around. They’re very scared of what Black Lives Matter is saying and they’re valuing profits over people.

I’m 18, and when I think about how having criminal charges on [my record] will affect college and my future, I feel proud and I feel anger. I feel very proud, because I don’t think there’s anything else I’d want to be arrested for, than standing up for what I care about and my values. This is living my values. So I’m proud of that, but I’m also really angry about the fact that the Mall of America is not valuing black lives. Their actions seem to be out of fear and punishment.

Courtesy of Shannon Bade

Shannon Bade

Shannon Bade: I’m been a community organizer for over 16 years. I’ve organized in five states for over seven different organizations. I moved to Minneapolis a year and a half ago; I’m from the Chicago area. Most recently I was in Kansas, organizing for immigration rights. I’m currently an organizer with Minnesotans for a Fair Economy.

I’m organizing bank workers. My involvement with Black Lives Matter comes out of a deep set of values; I don’t want to live in a world where African-Americans are shot every 28 hours by law enforcement or vigilantes, and I think we’re at a tipping point in this country and it’s time to push it out into the public arena and start having these very hard conversations.

I think I’m a little numb right now. It hasn’t really started yet, and the trial hasn’t begun. In some way, it is scary, because we’re going up against corporate America and very few people have won those fights. On the other hand, I’m super hopeful. I feel excited to be part of such a really cool team that was really "organically" formed and now we’re being deemed the organizers, even though 3,000 other people made it out there. We have a team of lawyers, all of whom are working pro bono and are really impressive, and they’re pretty confident but I haven’t seen them in action yet.

Courtesy of Pamela Twiss

Pamela Twiss

Pamela Twiss: I’ve been doing organizing for 29 years. I was the organizing director at TakeAction Minnesota, and now I run a training program for National People’s Action. I go around the country now and I just don’t know if people appreciate what an [organizing] infrastructure we have here in Minnesota; it just does not exist everywhere.

I’ve been an advocate for us not calling it a protest; I never went to it as a protest. It was a rally in support of black lives. I think calling it a protest confuses people, as if we’re protesting a mall. We’re not protesting a mall. No one was there with anything against the Mall of America; the Mall of America was chosen as a site because it’s a very public place that will get attention.

I will tell you that in the 29 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve worked with many communities of color, and systemic racism is obvious to me. I’ve heard hundreds and hundreds of stories that cannot be explained by people’s individual behavior at all — people who have been doing everything to be as responsible in their lives as possible, and they still get screwed, and that’s about systems. I’m kind of amazed how unclear it is in the dominant culture. For one example, the mortgage crisis, [during] which in many corners people took out loans they couldn’t afford, and you dig a little deeper you see that Bank of America and Wells Fargo were selling subprime mortgages in communities of color to lower-income people. A slimy, slimy business.

That’s just one of a thousand examples. I feel like there are points in history where stuff that’s obvious in some communities start becoming obvious in the dominant culture, and I think with all the high-profile killings of unarmed black people lately, we have a moment in time to actually create some policy change that will lead to systemic change. But we can either use that moment, or we can squander that moment, and I think the mortgage foreclosure crisis was a squandered moment. That ship sailed, and it’s too late now, the moment of crisis is gone. I do not want to squander this moment of crisis.

Part of how organizing works is you take a thing that’s been a crisis in some communities, and you make it a crisis in the mainstream. Part of the Mall of America action was about making this an issue, a crisis, for mainstream Minnesota. We want to have a fight that keeps the conversation alive. It was not our intent for Sandra Johnson and Bloomington and these charges to be a battleground, but if that’s the battleground, fine, we’ll use it to keep the conversation focused on the actual problem, which is that there’s systemic racism in Minnesota, and in fact we’re the worst in the nation on a lot of it.  

However, we can get people’s attention about that. That’s what we want to do, and that’s what I want to be part of. We would like the charges dropped, but the main issue is we would like the city of Bloomington to address systemic issues of racism there.

Early in Norah Shapiro’s fascinating and beautiful documentary “Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile,” a Tibetan official proclaims that Western culture-inspired beauty pageants are antithetical to Tibet’s Buddhist ways of being and believing, because “competition is at the heart of all conflict.”

That quandary is at the core of “Miss Tibet,” which follows 19-year-old Minneapolis student Tenzin Khecheo to Dharamsala, India, the Himalayan home of the Tibetan government in exile, in her quest for the crown of Miss Tibet. But unlike North American beauty queens, Khecheo seeks the sash as a way of spreading the message of Tibet’s ongoing oppression by China, the work of the Free Tibet movement, and the peaceful nature of Tibetan people. The film premiered to enthusiastic sold-out notices in New York in October and makes its official world premiere at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival on April 18, after which it will hopefully gain wider attention given the fact that it begs plenty of timely questions, namely:

When’s the last time you heard an American beauty pageant contestant talk in her interview segment about inner peace, selfless love and the wisdom of the Dalai Lama?

“Never!” laughed Shapiro by phone Friday afternoon from Iowa, through which she and her family were road-tripping for spring break.

“I was interested in this story from the instant I heard about it, when I was working on my first film, ‘If You Dare.’ Based on my impressions and understanding of Tibet, and my impressions as a Western feminist about beauty pageants, I thought, ‘That can’t possibly be. What on earth is going on?’ Before it had any funding or anything, I just decided to jump on a plane and go to India. That was supposed to be just for research, but I ended up literally filming the whole time from the minute we hit the ground.”

The story revolves around Khecheo and the pageant’s sketchy founder, Lobsang Wangyal, a shady opportunist who launched the Miss Tibet pageant in 2002 and at one point proudly declares himself “the Donald Trump of Tibet.” In the end, Khecheo controversially doesn’t win the crown and Wangyal is exposed as a fraud. But along the way “Miss Tibet” provides an unprecedented glimpse into the peaceful nature of Tibet and it’s culture clash with the contemporary Western world.

“I was drawn to this story because of its complexities, “ said Shapiro, a third-generation Jewish-American and public defender-turned-documentary filmmaker who was in part inspired to tell a complicated immigration story after reading Rodger Kamenetz’s “The Jew in ohe Lotus.”“I love when things co-exist and rub up against each other. On the one hand, yes, competition is the root of all evil, and there’s the inner versus the outer, and yet here’s this beauty pageant that’s co-existing with all of that.

Flying Pieces Productions

Norah Shapiro

“I see this as a coming-of-age film, and I love how it ends, with her saying, I think I’m going to be dealing with this for the rest of my life: What is my Tibetaness? How does it manifest? It’s an evolving thing. And, it was a way to bring attention to this ongoing struggle. The situation in Tibet, which I didn’t get into in this movie, is ever more dire. The self-immolations going on inside Tibet because of how extreme of what’s happening there is a story that the world isn’t really paying attention to.”

At the moment, 24-year-old Khecheo is finishing up her nursing degree at Minneapolis Community and Technical College (MCTC), and works as a waitress and host at a Minneapolis Tibetan restaurant. Saturday afternoon, with incense burning and recorded Buddhist chants playing softly, over Tibetan tea and cookies and with her mother and two sisters hovering about the family’s modest Columbia Heights home, Tenzin sat down in the house’s candlelit cho-khang (prayer house) to talk about Tibet and her big screen debut.

MinnPost: What a beautiful room, a true place of peace.

Tenzin Khecheo: Every morning my mom puts water in those little silver cups up there as an offering to the gods, and then every evening we dump it out and start the whole cycle again the next morning. This is where my grandpa prays. He’s not here right now, he’s in Nepal at the moment, but when he was here he would wake up every morning at five in the morning and pray for an hour or two, and he does that every morning.

MP: The film is beautiful, and your goal obviously was to become Miss Tibet and talk about Tibet and the plight of the Tibetan people, yet you were never really allowed that chance – other than your interview segment, when you spoke about the Dalai Lama. What would you have said? What would you say now?

TK: Obviously, if I had won, there probably would have been more opportunities other than just this film now that I’m promoting, and stuff. I’m pretty sure there would have been a huge media outbreak in India, and because of my American citizenship, I think I would have had attracted more attention. What I would have said is pretty much what I said throughout the whole competition, letting more people know about the Tibetan struggle and how it’s been almost 60 years now, and the situation hasn’t improved.

But even with all that, there’s still hope for Tibet within the Tibetan community, and just to see that flame still be ignited after all these years, I think that’s truly a story the world needs to know. It’s not just Tibetans fighting for Tibet, it could be taken for other countries who are also struggling, who have gone through the same occupation as Tibet has been for so long. Human rights violations and injustices don’t only affect Tibetan people; they affect all people all over the world.

MP: Tibetan people are, by nature and culture, very peaceful people. It’s a very inner spirituality, as one of the contestants in the film talks about, this selfless love that Buddhism practices and which is such an important message to the world. But as the world melting pot burbles, and war and strife happen in so many corners of the world, the Tibetan people and their way of living have to be heard.

TK: Right. Selfless love doesn’t just apply to Tibetan people and Buddhists, it applies to the whole world. If you think about it, all religions are simple and kind of similar to each other. It talks about how you don’t harm others, and that’s basically what Buddhism is. For me, I consider myself a Buddhist, based on my grandparents and my parents, but I don’t practice Buddhism just because I wasn’t exposed to Buddhism the way other kids in Dharamsala were, so for me to sit here and talk about what a real Buddhist is is kind of difficult. But there’s that baseline where it says that Buddhism is about selfless love, not harming others, and putting others before yourself, and just being compassionate to every living being in the world. … I’m not 100 percent Buddhist; I have a lot to learn that I can never comprehend.

MP: I’m not asking you to be a spokesperson for Buddhism, I’m just saying that the idea of compassion and peace and love and the inner journey isn’t widely discussed in the West. It’s gotten better since the 1950s, but I mean, you and I have been talking here for seven minutes and we’re already talking about selfless love. That conversation doesn’t happen every day in mainstream America, and that’s what you were trying to do with this pageant.

TK: I’m glad you took that away from the movie, because that would’ve been my position if I had won Miss Tibet: to be a spokesperson for Tibet and Tibetan women, so I’m really glad you thought about it, but I know I have a long way to go before I truly become that because there are tons of people out there who have done much more than I have. I started out with all this passion in me and went to all the Free Tibet protests and along the way I kind of felt like it was drowning in me. I wasn’t as motivated and life and school and work got busy and I didn’t have the time on my hands to go on the Tibetan lectures and gatherings and protests. That’s why I thought being Miss Tibet would kind of step me up in the game again and to really connect with my Tibetan identity.

Going to India, being in the competition, having a week of lessons on Tibetan music, culture, religion, writing, that was a good foundation for me. With the crown, there are a lot of opportunities to talk about Tibet. But even without the crown, you can do that. I can do that. You don’t have to wear a sash or a crown on your head to talk about the struggle about Tibet.

After they announced the winner, I had people come up to me from Dharamsala and say, ‘You should have won, you’re the real winner,’ and I got tons of requests on Facebook from people in India, messaging me and saying they were proud of me for standing up for Tibet. I never really believed it myself, but after I got over the whole, ‘Oh I didn’t win, boo-hoo’ part, I kind of realized that in a way, every one of those girls were winners and were stepping up for Tibet. But with this movie coming out and the attention it gives Tibet, I feel like a winner.

MP: Beyond the troubles, what do you want people to know about Tibetan people? What do you love about your people?

TK: There is that huge conception that Tibetan people are peaceful, compassionate, open-minded, and [practitioners of] selfless love, and we have all those qualities within us, but we are much more than that. We are fighters, we are believers, we are hopeful people who have this really oppressed, horrifying history. Our land was taken from us, our country was taken from us, our beautiful monasteries were destroyed, lots of brothers and sisters were killed, and even then, we’re still here and we’re still celebrating our culture and practicing our religion.

Tibetan people are proud of who we are, and we won’t stop fighting for our country, until we gain our independence. I think what I want people to know about Tibet is to view Tibet as an oppressed country for sure, but also to look at us and let us be an example of what it is to be human, for what it is to be without a country to call home. Also to know that even with all the horrible things that have been going on in Tibet, we’re still celebrating who we are because that’s the only thing we can do. If we stop doing that, nobody’s going to know what Tibet is, or if it even existed.

So keeping Tibet alive is in our protests, our hearts, our morning prayers, and in our everyday conversations. I want people to make Tibet an everyday conversation, and keeping Tibet alive. That’s the message I want to get across with this movie: Tibetan people are still here, and we’re proud of who we are and we’re proud of our home country and there’s no way we’re giving up. We’ve come a long way, and I’m hoping that someday Tibet will regain its independence and people will celebrate.

MP: Did you enjoy the film, did your family enjoy it?

TK: My family really liked it; once they saw it and saw that it wasn’t just me, it was about Tibet and Tibetan history, my mom really liked that. It showed twice in New York, but I wasn’t as nervous as I am about this one, because this [April 18 premiere] is the hometown. I never really thought much about the fact that this stranger was going to come into my life and document my every move. I was like, “I’ve always wanted to be on a reality TV show,” and this is kind of like that.

It’s all raw emotions, raw feelings. It’s who I am, and what my mind was going through at the time. Seeing the film now, the journey itself was one of the best experiences of my life and having people give all this good positive feedback makes me happy and makes me think that maybe this is one of the good things I’ve done in my life. Hearing people talk about Tibet because of the movie has been really self-rewarding. I’m really excited and I’m super-nervous and I hope people enjoy it.

The writers are coming! The writers are coming! Actually, they’re here – 12,000 poets, scribes, small-press publishers, and other various wordsmiths landed in Minneapolis Wednesday for the AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) conference, which runs through the weekend at the Minneapolis Convention Center. 

MinnPost collared some registrants to talk about the joy of words and books and all things AWP:

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Chris Bolin, Collegeville; Michael Morse, Brooklyn, New York; Matt Rasmussen, Minneapolis.

Bolin: I teach creative writing at the College of St. Benedict’s/St. John’s University.

I’ll be signing my book, it’s called "Ascension Theory," out on University of Iowa Press. I’m thrilled that Claudia Rankine is giving a talk here; St. Ben’s helped out in publishing her book through Graywolf Press. It’s called "Citizen," and it’s a stunning book and a chance to hear her speak again is definitely on my radar.

Morse: I’m a poet and I’m looking forward to seeing friends and panels. I like Birds, LLC, great press; the guys who run it are kind of nuts, but they publish great stuff. My book is out from Canarium Books, small poetry publisher; they do great stuff and they throw an occasional weirdo like me in there, so that’s kind of nice. 

Rasmussen: I’m an editor at Birds, LLC. We publish two books a year; we did three this year. I’m on one panel, which is on Edgar Lee Masters'"Spoon River Anthology" at 100 years. It’s all epitaphs, and they all speak from the dead, so they all get one page of free verse. It’s a really cool, still contemporary book that a lot of people haven’t heard about.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Meredith Turits, Brooklyn. I’m the senior culture editor at Bustle.com, the largest women’s website in the country. We’re about a year and a half old, I’m one of the founding editors, and I run the book section. A lot of our content is geared towards feminism, and there’s a panel on writing about the female body and one on women and sex that I’m excited about attending.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Richard Jarrette, central California. I’m looking forward to reading at Icehouse Thursday night. I’m a poet, and my second book is being launched here by Green Writers Press. I’ve just finished seven years of composition and I’m going into the book fair right now to see it for the first time. I’m excited to pick it up. It’s called "A Hundred Million Years Of Nectar Dances." 

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Matt Hart, Cincinnati, Ohio. I’m with Forklift, Ohio, a journal of poetry, cooking and light industrial safety. It’s been around for 21 years, and I think this is our ninth or tenth AWP. I always love seeing what people are doing, small presses especially, and we’re hosting an event Thursday at the Triple Rock Social Club that I’m excited about. We’ve got 10 amazing readers, and that will be great.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Lisa Yankton, Minneapolis. I’m with the St. Paul Almanac and I’m volunteering at the registration booth and looking forward to meeting Native American writers. I want to know more about the craft of writing, because I’m a poet. I’m a Dakota, and there are very few Dakota writers that write about our people and our culture and history, and it would be better if it was coming from the mouth of our own people.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

John Shoptaw, Berkeley, California. I grew up in the boot heel of Missouri, I teach at UC Berkeley, and I’m here to walk over the Mississippi and see some readings and meet some people who are publishing poets I admire. I particularly want to explore your local Graywolf Press.

One panel I want to check out is "From Poverty to Poetry." I grew up in poverty and I’m curious about other people’s journey into poetry, and the journey into literacy, to begin with. I grew up in a very different world, doing farm work and in the lumber mill, and it’s hard to believe I even lived that. I’m signing my book at the conference; it’s called "Times Beach." 

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Merrill Cole and Rick Ponce, Macomb, Illinois.“I’m a professor at Western Illinois University, I teach literature and creative writing,” said Cole. “I’ve avoided coming to this conference for over 20 years, but my colleagues pushed me to come here. I’ll be reading some of my original poetry.” “I’m his spouse, so I’m just here as a tagalong, but I get inspired just going to the readings, so I’m excited about everything here,” said Ponce.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Lorinda Toledo, Los Angeles. I’m getting my master's in fiction at Antioch University. I’m graduating in June, then I’m starting the Ph.D. program at Nevada-Las Vegas. I’m assistant editor for Antioch’s literary journal Lunch Ticket, so I’ll be working the booth here and just getting people to know about us and get people to submit to us. I’m working on a novel, and I hope the panels will be inspiring and give me new ideas on how to work on it.

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

John Murillo, Brooklyn. I’m a poet, with a book out, but this weekend I’m just hanging out, drinking, and looking forward to seeing friends I haven’t seen in a while. I come every year, and it’s always a good time.

It started with a hashtag and a tweet, five years ago.

Patrick Stephenson was a shy 27-year-old copywriter for a downtown Minneapolis advertising agency whose only post-work exercise regimen was to play video games until he fell asleep and got up the next day to do it all over again. But he’d always loved bicycling; in fact, his first memory is of a bike crash as a kid that left a scar on his leg.

Then, in the summer of 2009, Stephenson’s “Call of Duty” addiction came face-to-face with his friend Zach Schaap’s passion for biking. 

“Biking was his lifestyle, and he was sort of my mentor into becoming a full-time biker,” said Stephenson Wednesday morning over his regular pre-dawn coffee at the One On One bike/coffee/art shop near his home in the warehouse district of downtown Minneapolis. “He biked to work, and that was the ultimate: ‘I bike to work.’ And thanks to him, I started biking from St. Paul to Minneapolis, and I just fell in love.

“I was slowly finding my way into this lifestyle: The proper way to dress, the proper paths, and here was this guy who was like, ‘It’s easy. I do it every day, it’s my life. You should try it, too. Of course you can do it.’ I had never made this jump in mindset that I could actually bike to work, I was more of a busser.

“I started working out with a personal trainer, and all this weight started melting off. I started to get more confident in myself. I was really shy; I would spend all this time inside playing video games and then all of a sudden I was going to all these social events and part of this bicycling scene. It was this huge explosion of confidence for me; like, all of a sudden I loved going dancing because I was confident in my body. It was really transformative.”

When the winter of 2009-2010 descended, Schaap schooled Stephenson in the hushed thrills of winter biking. Stephenson needed a hashtag to catalog his cold-weather biking thoughts and adventures, and #winterbiking was born. When spring came he needed another hashtag to frame his budding obsession and, inspired by another friend’s 30 days of yoga project, he rocketed #30daysofbiking into the Twitterverse.

“It was instant,” he said. “April 1^st was coming up, and Zach and I started promoting it, and we were like, ‘Who wants to join us?’ Somebody bought a domain name for us and I started making a list of people who said they wanted to do it, and it was 300 right away. It was a crazy explosion, all of a sudden people were drawn to this idea, and it was worldwide. We had a kick-off ride of 50 people, and it was just this crazy thing that happened that first year.”

Now in its fifth year, 30 Days of Biking (motto: “a community of joyful cyclists”) encourages people to bike every day in April, and has caught on in every continent on the planet, with thousands of participants. Stephenson and Schaap now lead a 15-member Minneapolis-based team, which organizes more than 1,000 annual events under the 30 Days of Biking umbrella.

It’s easy to see why it’ caught on: Bicycling is a mostly solitary exercise, but people like to feel part of something.

“I think it’s a natural human desire to be part of something bigger,” agreed Stephenson. “A lot of these rides you do are solo, like I was last night, just chilling. But when you know that you have this community that’s supporting you and sharing their adventures, it’s kind of cool. So it’s solo endeavor, but at the same time you’re sharing what you’re doing with thousands of other people who are excited about it.”

During April the hashtag #30daysofbiking pops up almost hourly in the Twin Cities and from all corners of the globe. A woman in Nebraska has biked every day since #30daysofbiking first launched; a man with Parkinson’s disease is taking up the challenge on his recumbent bike and stationary bike this year. Even Tour de France winner Greg LeMond tweeted, “Great idea out of Minneapolis 30daysofbiking.com,” and the feeling-good stories just keep rolling in.

As for Stephenson, he’s now a copywriter at Minnesota Public Radio, the downtown St. Paul offices of which he bikes to every day, and where he plays the “enthusiast/everyday biker kind of guy” on “Pedal Hub,” the Chris Roberts-produced MPR bicycling podcast.

“A lot of people who participate already bike every day; that’s their primary transportation, and I think it gets them to bike more than they would, just because there’s this excitement around it,” said Stephenson. “Then there’s people who have had their bikes away all winter who are learning how to make the bike a lifestyle form of transportation. I saw one tweet from a guy who said, ‘I didn’t realize how close the supermarket was.’ It’s like it changes your perception of distance between things.

“We’re not anti-car, and that’s an important distinction. That’s too divisive, and I find that attitude kind of regressive and doesn’t help the cause of biking. We’re not ‘30 days of biking without your car,’ we just want you to get on your bike once a day, even if it’s just riding it around the block. If you need to use your car as a tool, do it, but the biking is paramount during this month.” 

On May 16 at First Avenue, some of the twin towns' most influential musicians will gather for what’s being billed as a “Longhorn reunion” in honor of the long-gone but seminal music club that was Jay’s Longhorn. It sat at 14. S. 5th Street in downtown Minneapolis and acted as ground zero for the original rock scene’s first wave of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

As class reunions go, the one featuring the Longhorn classes of ’77-’81 is guaranteed to be one of the more enjoyable bashes of the year, bringing together as it promises to many of the players, now in their 50s and 60s, who were once upon a time part of what Wikipedia calls “a punk rocker’s paradise.”  

Adding to the buzz around that night is the news that the Longhorn’s story – as told by members of the Suicide Commandos, Flamingo, the Suburbs, the Hypstrz, and many more – is currently being captured on film for a forthcoming documentary by Minneapolis musician, historian, and first-time filmmaker Mark Engebretson. Over the past year, Engebretson and his cameraman/collaborator Jack McTigue has interviewed over 40 musicians, many of whom speak reverently about the place where the likes of Elvis Costello and the Attractions, the Police, Talking Heads, Blondie, the Buzzcocks, the Only Ones, Gang Of Four, and the Replacements all played their first Minneapolis bar shows – though it’s also true that, as one of the era’s main chroniclers, Martin Keller, once wrote, “It didn’t matter what the occasion; there was something essential to see and hear just about every night of the week. ...”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Mark Engebretson, at home with Jay’s Longhorn ephemera.

Last Sunday afternoon in his South Minneapolis home, Engebretson – lead singer in bands the MORs, the Whole Lotta Loves,  and his current vehicle, the Silverteens – sat down with MinnPost to talk about the enduring lore of the Longhorn, the organic community that happened around it, and his as-yet-untitled and in-the-works labor of love:

MinnPost: What is your history with the Longhorn personally, and what compels you to want to make a documentary about it?

Mark Engebretson: The first time I went to the Longhorn was with [the Hypstrz/Mighty Mofos co-founders] Billy and Ernie Batson, in 1977. I went to see the Ramones [at the Ramones’ first Minnesota appearance, at Kelly’s Pub in St. Paul] with the Batsons, and like a lot of people it changed my life kind of, I guess. I met them through a mutual friend right after I graduated from Mounds View high school, and they introduced me to the Longhorn.  

My first time, we went down to see a band called Harlot, a heavy metal cover band, not an original band like what the Longhorn [is renowned for]. Then the next time it was Thumbs Up, and the first song, “Please Please Me” just blew me away and I still remember [guitarist] Bob Dunlap sitting at the bar before their set, and he gets up and he walks on stage and I thought, “Man, that guy’s really cool looking.” I later formed a band with Bruce Browning, the MORs, who played there a few times, but we were small potatoes compared to everybody else.

MP: You say small potatoes, but you were part of something, and did the MORs not come out of a passion from going to see bands at the Longhorn and you deciding, “I want to do this,” right? Had you sung before that?

ME: The Batsons were in the Hypstrz at the time, and they were playing the Burnsville Bowl every Monday night, and I got up to sing with them one night, probably Halloween ’77, and Bruce Browning was playing sax with the Hypstrz at the Longhorn, and somehow we connected and he asked me to be the singer. We put out a couple of records; we played the Longhorn maybe five times, always opening somebody. Whole Lotta Loves started in 1981, but we never played the Longhorn.

MP: Playing there obviously had an impact on you, and the place is considered the launching pad for what we know now as so much of today’s original strains of rock and roll and punk rock in this town. What was it like for you?

ME: It was great. We had a standing ovation the first time we played, probably because all of our friends were there. The size of the club was the perfect size for a club, and the lay out was great.

Photo by Justin Meredith

Curtiss A being interviewed by Mark Engebretson.

MP: Since then, it’s taken on the role of being such an important part of this town’s musical history. What are you finding out, talking to everybody? What did it mean to them? Give us some perspective on why the Longhorn was important and how people are testifying about it.

ME: To me, it was this great club that burned so bright for a very short period of time – maybe three years at its height. I think it’s in danger of being forgotten. Nobody’s going to forget First Avenue;  it’s been around so long, and the Longhorn was before that. You’ve written the story about people trying to create a scene back in the mid-‘70s; “Let’s find a club and start a scene like in New York here.”

It turns out that Jay Berine started the Longhorn. Nobody asked him that question, he did it on his own. Even though [former Minneapolis writer and New York Rocker founder] Andy Schwartz and those guys were meeting about this scene, nobody actually approached Jay about doing it, he was doing it anyway, and it filled that void they were looking for, coincidentally.

For that time, it was the only place for original music until the [7^th St.] Entry and Duffy’s opened, where original alternative rock bands could perform. It’s so different now. As [Twin/Tone Records co-founder and influential Longhorn deejay Peter] Jesperson said, it’s almost flipped now. Now it’s unusual to see cover bands everywhere; now almost every club you go to, they’re original artists who might do some covers. For younger people, it’s probably hard to imagine how difficult that would be, to find a place like that.

For people who were there, it was really a community. It fragmented a little, and it wasn’t uncommon for people to have sort of camps – “I’m a punk rocker, I don’t like power pop,” whatever – but there were so many local bands and national bands coming through with such a variety of musical types, but yet every single night, as far as I recall and from what people are telling me, people came down to the Longhorn to listen to the music, see their friends, and support those bands.

Photo by Tim Beaufoy

Peter Jesperson being interviewed by Mark Engebretson.

MP: What kind of an artist makes something like this happen? These people are pioneers, to me. They were all four, five, six years older than me. They were my big brother’s age, who I loved and respected so much about music, and from afar sort of I watched these guys and was just in awe. They were trailblazers, making it up as they went. Have you found, is there anything similar about them? A particular bent or personality type that sticks with you from your interviews?

ME: They love music. That’s one thing that attracted me to doing this, as well, is how many of these people are still playing, or starting to play again, and it’s because most of them are songwriters and they want to write, and [in the Longhorn] they finally found a place where they could do that and it was accepted. So many of the bands, like the Commandos and Flamin’ Ohs, talked about how they would sneak their originals in at clubs before the Longhorn. [Flamingo/Flamin’ Ohs leader Robert] Wilkinson actually started crying when I asked him how important it was to play original music, why it was important to have a club where you could play original music. He kind of broke down a little bit and got a little teary and talked about how all he did as a kid was write songs; when I interviewed him, when I was setting up lights, he was writing a song then. So these people are just driven by music.

I think that everything that’s come since then owes a debt of gratitude to those people. The Replacements, Hüsker Dü, the Gear Daddies, whoever else, they’re all great and they might’ve done what they did anyway, but it all got started not just at the Longhorn, but by Peter Jesperson and Andy Schwartz and all those people. They’re who got it going.

Photo by Miranda Taylor

Flamingo/Flamin’ Ohs singer/guitarists Robert Wilkinson, left, and Johnny Rey being interviewed by Mark Engebretson

MP: This is your first foray into documentary making. Where are you at with the production process? How many interviews have you done, and is it getting overwhelming?

ME: It’s a little overwhelming, but I’m taking it one step at a time and trying to enjoy it. I’m editing now. I’ve interviewed over 40 people, and every time I interview someone, they tell me I have to talk to someone else. There are five or ten more people who are key who I need to interview.

For me, what’s been so fun about it is that I was 19 when I first started going there. I’ve always been kind of a shy guy, except when I’m on stage, and even though the Batsons are my friends, these guys were like heroes to me, right? So now to be able to go interview them is so much fun. It’s just a blast to be able to talk to people about what they did, who they are, and what they’re doing.

MP: What is your elevator speech about the film, and the club, for potential investors at Cannes? What is the story about the physical structure and its lifespan and Jay Berine’s story?

ME: He managed Scottie’s on 7^th in downtown Minneapolis, and he somehow wanted to start a rock club and he knew some people who knew Flamingo, and they all said, “Let’s start a rock club downtown.” I think Flamingo was the first band to play there, in June of 1977. It was a jazz club before it was a rock club; Jay left in 1978, and his cousin Hartley [Frank] took over the club. People have different views of Hartley. He could be a nice guy, but he could also be a jerk. The overwhelming message was that he didn’t care about music, and that he considered the Longhorn a business, which was a huge change from Jay, who was all about music. They changed the format and the name of the bar to Zoogie’s sometime in 1981, and it closed not long after that. So it was about a four-year [run].

The building is still there. Xcel Energy leases it and has their supplies and stuff there. I interviewed [label founder/producer/engineer/record store manager] Terry Katzman and [Suicide Commandos] Dave Ahl and Chris Osgood there, and that faux stone wall right at the entrance is the only thing that exists from the Longhorn.

Photo by Mark Engebretson

Chris Osgood, Terry Katzman and Dave Ahl outside the old Longhorn building.

MP: The footage of all these people will be so invaluable. Your day job is as director of communications for the University of Minnesota library system, so you know how important it all is. That’s got to be a driving part of it, right? You’re a fan, and an historian.

ME: Yeah, I guess so. I wanted to do this before everybody’s gone, and now there’s pressure. People are excited about it, they want to see the finished product, but it’s going to take a while to edit it. And that’s one of the challenges: It’s not just about one band. It’s a bunch of bands, and you don’t want to leave anybody out. I don’t want to forget anybody.

Record Store Day takes over the entire free world Saturday, and one of the more creative – if under-the-radar – events is “Music & Lyrics,” a poster art show at Hamilton Ink Spot in downtown St. Paul next to Eclipse Records. Curated by co-founders of Hamilton Ink Spot Monica Larson and Bill Moran, the show opens Saturday and runs through the end of the month. The limited edition hand-printed beauties are all for sale ($20-$30, with all proceeds going to the artists) starting Saturday at the opening reception (1-5 p.m.), and MinnPost got a preview:

Poster artist: Samuel Anderson
Musician/Song: David Bowie, “Under Pressure”
Inspiration: “I chose lyrics from ‘Under Pressure’ because the show coincides with Record Store Day; I believe that commercial holidays present an opportunity to show others love through gift-giving. Love and individualism is more important than consumerism, which is the concept beneath my print: A record placed in a shopping bag that reads ‘Give Love’ instead of ‘Thank you!’ Music is meant to be heard, shared, and loved; that’s why records are so awesome. In the past, when I was low or needed someone, I would listen to David Bowie sing, ‘Why can’t we give love?’ and wonder the same thing. I still listen to the song and find solace in it to this day.”

Poster artist: Morgan Hiscocks 
Musician/Song: Missy Elliot, “Work It” 
Inspiration: “The song was and is one of her biggest hits; it’ll forever cause a room to surrender to the dance floor. This verse in particular speaks volumes. It promotes cognizance, feminism, financial independence … the ‘do what you go to do’ attitude is commonplace for many demographics, I think. Everyone needs an income to live; with life’s hardships come sacrifices. This verse is rooting for the human condition. Be smart. Be safe. Play the game, don’t let the game play you.”

Poster artist: Molly Poganski
Musician/Song: Mother Maybelle Carter, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” 
Inspiration: “I grew up in Kentucky, and I am a big fan of old-time Appalachian music. The Carter Family were pioneers in mountain music, and they traveled extensively to remote areas of the mountains to collect and learn songs from the locals. They recorded and performed these songs for nearly 30 years, laying the groundwork on which modern country (and therefore, rock) music has been built upon. Mother Maybelle Carter learned to play music at a young age and innovated her own style of guitar picking in which she played the melody and rhythm simultaneously. She was an incredibly talented musician and one of my musical heroes, yet many people have never heard her name.”

Poster artist: Ian Kolstad
Musician/Song: Bob Dylan, “I Shall Be Released” 
Inspiration: “As a fan of Bob Dylan who wrote ‘I Shall Be Released,’ and countless others who have performed it, it felt right to create a poster to commemorate the song. The poster takes its visual cues from both the literal interpretation of the song, being confined in a prison, as well as the spiritual connotations.”

Poster artist: Jeremy Lindvig aka Cletus Snow
Musician/Song: Beach Slang, “All Fuzzed Out”
Inspiration: “I use the line ‘You are how the Smiths sound when they’re falling in love.’ I’ve always been a huge fan of the Smiths since a friend’s older brother recorded me two of their albums when I was in junior high in the fantastic ‘80s. The lyric really stuck with me and I couldn’t get it out of my head as I flipped the record over and over. Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe it’s the fact the members are my age and that I can identify with the feelings and emotions of the lyrics. Maybe it is just trying to figure out what the Smiths would sound like when they do fall in love. I’ve done a gig poster for Beach Slang in the past so they were cool with me using the lyrics. If you like the Replacements, you’ll dig these guys, from Philadelphia: 

Poster artist: Andy Nelson
Musician: Edith Piaf 
Inspiration: “I painted the bright organic watercolor to try and convey the energy and passion that Edith Piaf had when she sang. Each print is unique because of that aspect which I thought was fitting for her voice and character. I also included a quote by her which translates [in English] to, ‘Singing is a way of escaping. It’s another world. I’m no longer on earth,’ which is perfect for listening to her but also for listening to music in general. The little sparrow I drew and printed over the top to pay homage to her nickname, ‘The Little Sparrow.’”

Poster artists: Tim Cronin and Jeff Hnilicka aka Husbands 
Musician/Song: The Smiths, “This Charming Man” 
Inspiration: “Riffing on Morrissey’s signature cheekiness, the poster shows a furry body taking a selfie. In the figure’s chest hair you see the lyric, ‘I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear.’ The poster makes a contemporary nod to the song’s original comment on gay social interactions. Putting the text on an image suited for Grindr or Scruff, the selfie evokes a gay culture rooted in machismo, vanity, and alienation.”

Poster artist: Sara Parr
Musician/Song: Louis XIV, “Paper Doll” 
Inspiration: “I chose the lyric ‘If you want clean fun, go fly a kite.’ I love Louis XIV for their general irreverence, particularly on the album ‘The Best Little Secrets Are Kept.’ Their royal badness is so infectious! In choosing something to represent the song visually, I went literal. I did some research on paper dolls and came across a set of Bettie Page paper dolls, which seemed perfect – everyone’s favorite pin-up girl with a streak of innocent naughtiness. My intent is to encourage open exploration of the feminine – sex and all. Women should take the opportunity to learn what gets them off and feel free to enjoy it.”

Poster artist: Jason Yoh 
Musician/Song: Built To Spill, “You Were Right” 
Inspiration: “One of my favorite aspects of working in print shops is the communal atmosphere of being with other people with shared interests. Music has always been a big part of that. I have a lot of associations of music and printmaking overlapping, but one specific memory that sprung to mind was the time a co-worker turned up the shop stereo to play this song. The soaring guitars begged air guitar accompaniment and I loved the way the lyrics quoted a list of cynical classic rock anthems spoke to my feelings of that time and place so perfectly that it earned a top spot on my personal print shop playlist.”

Poster artist: Derek Huber
Musician: John Lennon 
Inspiration: “I chose the Lennon quote, ‘a dream you dream alone is only a dream/a dream you dream together is reality.’ It’s just a beautiful statement from the man that inspired us all to imagine. The Beatles’ music was a constant fixture in my art classes as a kid, so you could say that Lennon’s words of sharing your dreams were critical in the development of my creative process.”

Poster artist: Mary Bruno 
Musician/Song: Amy Loftus, “Work To Do” 
Inspiration: “I first came to know this song from another printer pal of mine, Lisa Beth Robinson, who teaches art at East Carolina University of Art & Design in North Carolina. She sent me a mix CD and this song was one of the many tunes I got hooked on. I kept playing it and singing it over and over and then the words sunk in. It’s one of those songs that has it all: the perfect mix of dreamy sing-songy melody paired with mic-dropping content.”

Poster artist: Lucas Richards and Sam Smith 
Musician/Song: Type O Negative, “My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend” 
Inspiration: Richards: “I listened to Type O Negative quite a bit as a late teen/early 20-year-old and this is one of the more bizarre songs I’ve heard in my life. We thought it’d be fun to make a beautiful and, more importantly, sexy poster for that song.”

Poster artist: Steve Senger 
Musician/Song: Songs Ohia, “Alone With The Owl” 

Inspiration: “I have always felt a strong connection to many of the works of Jason Molina/Songs Ohia. The majority of the songs carry a dark tone accompanied with honest lyrics and a quiet hope. To me, ‘Alone With The Owl’ is one of deep introspection. Taking time to look at one’s life and be honest that something is not right and asking the questions, ‘Do I need to keep on this path? What is keeping me on it?’ The lyrics, ‘While I lived was I a stray black dog? While I lived was I anything at all? Did I have to live that way?” painted a picture just like that: A stray dog wondering, searching for an answer.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

The ultimate freedom movement was moving a little slow Saturday at the Cambria Suites in Maple Grove. On a glorious sunny spring weekend, about 60 people attended the 2015 Libertarian Party of Minnesota State Convention, which took place in a couple of dank motel rooms and a conference room where motions were heard, issues discussed, and representatives elected via a microphone that cut out early and often.

“Andy, where is everybody?” one unimpressed first-time volunteer whined early Saturday afternoon to LPMN executive director Andy Burns, who shrugged happily and kept his eye on the revolution ball, all the while encouraging the scattered dozens to check out workshops of the day on the likes of “Start Your Agorist Business Now!,” “Taking A Bite Out Of The Surveillance State,” and “Turn On Tune In Drop Out.”

Carl Bernstein wasn’t kidding when he recently told a Minneapolis audience that the political system in America is broken, but from the looks of things Saturday, the alternative the Libertarians offer hasn’t gained much traction since the party’s inception in 1972. Still, what the conference lacked in cohesive passion it made up for in the evergreen notion that real change can happen when individuals seek something more, and something to belong to.

“It’s a good group of people and the best collection of misfits you’ll ever want to hang out with,” said attendee Robert Stewart. Some snapshots:

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Edmund Contoski: “I am one of the co-founders of the Libertarian Party of Minnesota way back when it started in 1972, and I was its first state chair. The Libertarian Party was formed on the basis that the two major parties aren’t getting us anywhere; they’re Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Libertarians believe in political freedom, which is not the freedom to oppress others through government. It seems sort of futile to try to elect just a few people; they aren’t going to be able to change things, the whole system has to change, and I talk about that in at least two of my books. I think ultimately that the only solution is going to be to call another Constitutional convention, and many of the states are already in agreement on this.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Mary O’Connor: “I’ve been the treasurer for the Libertarian Party of Minnesota for about 12 years. I believe Gary Johnson will run for president [as the Libertarian candidate], so I’ll be behind him. We’re hoping he can get in the debates with the Democrat and Republican candidate so people can hear what he has to say. He likes freedom and liberty and he doesn’t want government telling us what to do and he wants to get us out of foreign wars and give us our freedom to make our own decisions.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Nick Hechtman: “As a citizen the Patriot Act kind of concerns me, so that’s my main reason for being here. I know the Libertarian Party wants to repeal the Patriot Act, and I think that’s a good idea. I think the government should go back to the Constitutional way of life and be more set on that; I think it’s time to shrink the size of government. There’s cameras everywhere you go, and the privacy is just not there anymore like it used to be, and I think it’s way out of hand, almost to the point where it’s a mixture of socialism and communism. Spying on innocent Americans is not a good idea.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Andy Burns, executive director of the Libertarian Party of Minnesota: “We’re fiscally responsible and socially accepting and we don’t believe we should be getting into all these foreign wars, where we keep aggravating these situations. We’ve stood on the side of legalizing marijuana and gay marriage since 1971, when the party started. People have a lot of Libertarian Party tendencies, even if they don’t know it. They do understand that government doesn’t actually know best. The Libertarian Party actually offers solutions.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Cara Schulz, LPMN board member and chair of the convention planning committee: “We have workshops today on food freedom, because there are so many ways that the act of feeding yourself has been criminalized. Or the act of feeding others. If you want to give a sandwich to a person on the street who’s hungry, in most areas of Minnesota, that’s actually illegal and you’d be fined because you didn’t prepare that in a proper kitchen. Also, we have the panel on alternatives to Obamacare: How can you care for yourself and how can you be a healthier person while still operating outside of the Obamacare mandates? People should have more choices in their medical care, not less. We are looking for people to step up and run in 2015, and we’re looking for local candidates, and we’re having success with that.” 

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Justin Lundquist and Mallory Olson: “I’m doing a presentation today on protest safety,” said Lundquist. “The Libertarian Party is good because it’s a little more middle of the road. It’s the ‘leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone’ kind of deal that is never a bad thing. Trying to break away from the two-party system is always a good thing, because the more options you have the more likely you are to actually find a candidate that you agree with more, rather than just not that you don’t like the other person.” 

“I’m here to support him,” said Olson. “I’m more for independent parties, but I’m not super into it.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Heather Biedermann: “I’m an independent, but I agree with a lot of what the Libertarian Party has to offer. I believe in small government and I’m an anarchist librarian. For me, I’m very interested in free information and I don’t want a society where the news covers things up. The two-party system feels very corrupt to me and I like having options and I like having groups who call out the parties when they’re doing wrong. It seems like the Libertarian Party is going on the right path and it speaks to me.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Olga Parsons and Alicia Ascheman: “I believe in the principals of individual liberty,” said Ascheman. “I think with legalization of marijuana, both [major] parties are talking about it, but neither have taken a strong stance. But the Libertarian Party has. They’re also not addressing the police state that we’re creating, which can prove to be very dangerous, as we’ve seen throughout history. Legalization of Sunday liquor sales and fireworks and allowing people to live as they see fit is important.”

MinnPost photo by Jim Walsh

Justine Peters: “I’m 18, so this will be my first year voting. I’ll definitely be voting for Rand Paul because we definitely need to do something new with our government because it’s not working. I find it really annoying that the government has a lot of spending that’s unneeded. I feel like a lot of people are getting left out, and I feel like along the Libertarian lines, we can fix our government and fix the economy.” 

In her work as a labor and delivery nurse at Regions Hospital in downtown St. Paul, Kriss Zulkosky deals with hundreds of young mothers every year. One encounter last fall with a patient she names only “Jessica” had a profound and lasting impact.

“It was just a devastating story, just remarkably sad,” said Zulkosky last week, sitting in the kitchen of her family’s home near the St. Paul railroad yards. “I met her briefly for a few weeks. She had been sex trafficked since she was 11 or 13, she had two separate pimps, and this was her second child. She’d lost custody of her first because she had addiction issues and homelessness issues and mental illness issues, and even though she had people helping her and even though she had hope and had kicked her addiction, she lost her second child. She came in a number of times, and it was just horribly sad.”

Prior to meeting Jessica, in 2013 Zulkosky organized a Haley Bonar-headlined concert at the Amsterdam Bar and Hall to benefit the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, which launched the pioneering MN Girls Are Not for Sale campaign in 2011 to end sex trafficking in Minnesota through convening, grant-making, research and public education. The campaign helped pass Minnesota’s Safe Harbor law, which went into effect last year. The law decriminalized child victims, implemented the statewide No Wrong Door model, increased housing and services for victims, and provided training dollars to law enforcement and prosecutors.

“Thanks to the Safe Harbor law, [‘Jessica’] is no longer [considered a] perpetrator; she’s a victim now, and the pimps she was working for both got over 20 years in prison,” said Zulkosky. “The Safe Harbor law has really started having an effect on the real perpetrators of the situation.”

This year, Zulkosky wanted to do more. With printing and graphic assistance from Hamilton Ink Spot, and recording and distribution assistance from House of Mercy Recordings, she set about organizing the benefit CD “Voice: Words & Songs for Those Who Are Silenced,” which brings together 18 of Minnesota’s most respected musicians and recording artists, including Bonar, Dessa, Chris Koza, Holly Hansen, Charlie Parr, the Ericksons, We Are The Willows, the Prairie Fire Lady Choir and John Hermanson, who deliver a capella and stripped-down tunes, many of which are as haunting and soul-ripping as the topic they seek to shine a light on.

Fittingly, the CD is dedicated “to Jessica and all victims of sex trafficking.”

“I decided to make a buzz and create a conversation among my cohorts, and I thought music would be a good way of doing that,” said Zulkosky. “The benefit concert was really successful, but that’s only one night, and I wanted something that would be more lasting. The music scene in Minnesota is so strong, and the community is so tight, that the more people who listen to it and who want to participate in it will create a conversation that will last much longer than a single night. I basically sent out emails to 75 or 80 people, and everyone was just ‘Yes, yes, yes, I’m all in,’ and people started offering up their services.”

So much so that tentative plans are being made for a follow-up CD and even more exposure for the good work being done at the Women’s Foundation. For Zulkosky, it all started a few years ago when she attended an informational meeting at the home of Kate Kelly, a WFM trustee and co-chair of the MN Girls Are Not for Sale campaign committee. The evening proved to be pivotal.

“Kate had [Women’s Foundation president and CEO] Lee Roper-Batker and [St. Paul police officer and sex trafficking expert] Grant Snyder and others talking about the campaign, and I was overwhelmed with how young these children are, and how prevalent it is in Minnesota, and how much it’s going on in these places that are just normal stomping grounds, like North Minneapolis and the Mall of America.

“It was overwhelming. They were talking about launching all these initiatives, but to me it was evidence that people in my cohort weren’t even aware of it. I started asking my friends, ‘Have you ever heard of this? Did you know that this is going on all around us?’ And they were floored.”

Almost immediately, Zulkosky went to work. She created a MN Girls Are Not for Sale T-shirt and soon after organized the first benefit concert. This week sees the bow of “Voice,” whose CD release party is May 10 at Bedlam Theater, with a kindred-spirited poster show May 7 at Hamilton Ink.  

“It’s perfect, because the CD release show falls on Mother’s Day, and that’s such an integral theme,” said Zulkosky. “We really need to be parents to these kids, even if they’re not ours. We need to treat everyone as our kids and offer all our services to all of them.”

Over the years, David Letterman has featured dozens of Minnesotans as special guests, including Louie Anderson, Lea Thompson, Josh Hartnett, Larry Graham, Mitch Hedberg, Eleanor Mondale, Paul Molitor, Tom Arnold, Craig Kilborn, Thomas Friedman, Kevin Garnett, Jonny Lang, Diablo Cody, Al Franken, Jesse Ventura, Kirby Puckett, Lindsey Vonn, and, infamously, WCCO-TV’s Don Shelby and Amelia Santaniello, as part of a Minnesota-themed special in 1997.

Most important to Minnesota musicheads, the retiring “Late Night” host, whose 32–year run concludes Friday, has been a great friend to Minnesota musicians, bands and songwriters, several of whom made their way to Rockefeller Center and the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York to perform for Letterman’s estimated 4 million nightly viewers. With his trademark, “Kids …,” Letterman introduced national television audiences to local heroes like Paul Westerberg, Soul Asylum, Tapes 'n Tapes, Atmosphere, Semisonic, Lizzo, Trampled By Turtles, Jeremy Messersmith, and more. In honor of Letterman’s swan song, MinnPost presents a mixtape of Dave’s Greatest Minnesota Hits: