BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Welcome to the new Southside Pride column Resistance Persistence. We will offer a summary of the past month’s progressive resistance activities across the Twin Cities and note upcoming actions in near future months. We welcome feedback, including corrections or suggestions. The Twin Cities political scene is…
BY ED FELIEN It happened in less than a minute. I got on the elevator at City Hall on the third floor to go down to the parking garage. Jack Baker got on with me. Jack had been president of the university student association, a very out gay. He’d just…
BY ED FELIEN He’s their useful idiot. They’ve been playing him for 30 years. In March of 1986, Dubinin, the Russian Ambassador to the U.N., with his daughter, went up to the Trump Tower to meet Trump. According to his daughter, in an article for Komsomolskaya Pravdanewspaper, he told Trump,…
BY ED FELIEN You had a great Super Bowl party, and the Downtown Council honored you at a fancy luncheon. But you work for us, not Jimmy Fallon or Tom Brady, not the Downtown Business Council or the StarTribune. We hired you to run this City, and we expect progressive…
BY DEAN ZIMMERMANN Annie Young lived life to the fullest for 75 years. I feel lucky and blessed to have known her for the last 45 of those curious, remarkable and productive years—and, to call her my best friend for much of that time. Friends tend to come and go,…
The purpose of this letter is to comment on the conversation about Poverty between Joe Selvaggio and Elaine Klaassen. To be sure, they did not find the answers on how to solve Poverty, even though they seemed to wax eloquently around the subject. Selvaggio had one very astute observation on…
BY ED FELIEN It won’t happen fast. We don’t want it to happen fast. It’s an important educational experience. It should take time and it must be as public as possible, so nobody freaks out and thinks it’s a trick or unfair. They won’t bust him for collusion with the…
BY ED FELIEN This year Valentine’s Day fell on the same day as Ash Wednesday. They always happen around the same time, right after Groundhog’s Day on Feb. 2. What a strange collection of holidays. What could they possibly have in common? Perhaps they’re all a riff on the ancient…
BY ED FELIEN One of my more ambitious projects was to try to take over the electric company. It had all the romantic allure of Castro and Che sweeping down from the hills to take over a radio station and declare the Revolution. In Minnesota more than 146 municipalities owned…
BY TONY BOUZA I first heard the word a couple of years back. Its utterer seemed to be in possession of some unique verity. Profound. I was on my annual, solo pilgrimage to Cape Cod, where I’d spend January in splendid isolation. A friend—Jeff—called and said he had a video…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Fika Cafe American Swedish Institute 2600 Park Ave. 612-871-4907 fikacafe.net Fika (the name means coffee break in Sweden) is the hypermodern, innovative and esthetic cafe, bakery and cocktail bar of the American Swedish Institute, which has won accolades under all three of its chefs since its…
BY DWIGHT HOBBES Got media? “There’s a dire need,” says Brendan Kelly, station manager at fledgling KRSM-Radio For All (www.krsmradio.org), “to better represent the diverse communities [comprising] South Minneapolis, Minneapolis in general.” For that matter, he points out, “this country.” An idea began as the recurring brainstorm of Main Street…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN I think about my white privilege. First of all, both my maternal and paternal grandparents OWNED farms in southwestern Minnesota, that is, they were in control of land that was stolen, but if they ever had a passing thought about it, it probably went something like this:…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Thirteen years ago, within a period of 18 months, Mary Bergerson’s losses were more than anyone could imagine. Her mom died of brain cancer, her soldier husband took his own life, her youngest brother died suddenly, her step-children were taken away because her disability eliminated her right…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN Many years ago a little piano student of mine wanted to play a scary Halloween song. When we couldn’t find anything he liked, I wrote him a simple piece about the howling wind, the gusting, cracking wind, a windy Halloween night, when the trees groan and rattle…
