A remembrance BY ED FELIEN I went to see him just before he died. He said, “The problem with dying is it takes too long. And it’s boring.” The first time I met Tony Bouza, he was chief of police. It was at a demonstration against Honeywell anti-personnel bombs used…
BY TONY BOUZA A TV crew traveled all the way from Paris, France, to interview me for over an hour about Malcolm X, who was killed in February 1965. Huh? How can this be relevant? I’m not sure but it is somehow contemporaneously relevant. I struggled with the question and finally…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Stuffed full of culture – Minneapolis’s Cedar-Riverside (the West Bank) With numerous theaters, music venues and more, Cedar Avenue’s northern stretch from Washington Avenue to Franklin Avenue is a cultural corridor like no other. There’s Minneapolis’s oldest community theater, Theatre in the Round, at 245 Cedar…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Summer is for parks and nature Summer in Richfield is a time to get out and about in your city. Richfield has a lot of options for outdoor activities. The two largest city parks, Veterans Memorial Park, at 6335 Portland Ave., and Wood Lake Nature Center,…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Highland Bridge development I made a couple of reconnaissance trips to Highland Bridge, the development in Highland Park headed by Ryan Companies. There are people living there and the parks are mostly finished, but overall it still has an “under construction” feeling of raw newness. Here’s…
BY ED FELIEN To socialize: “to make someone behave in a way that is acceptable to their society.” Carol Becker was a member of the Minneapolis Board of Estimate and Taxation from 2006 until Dec. 31, 2021. She is a respected conservative voice in Minneapolis politics. She wrote a very…
BY CRAIG WOOD On May 19, author/activist and cofounder of the anti-war group Code Pink, Medea Benjamin, had her phone knocked out of her hand by an angry protester she was videotaping at a South Minneapolis event where she’d been invited to speak. When she told me, “They’ve got my…
There was a lovely retirement party on Wednesday, June 28, for Warren Hanson, president and CEO of the Greater Minnesota Housing Fund. He began the GMHF in 1996. For the last 27 years, Hanson has led GMHF and worked closely with state and local governments, philanthropic organizations, institutional investors and…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN I’ve started going to two writing groups that have sprung up in our neighborhood. I go every time because I love words, language and people and that’s what these groups are about. I consider myself quite limited when it comes to imagination and since I wrote factual…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Openings and closings Most of the interesting new openings right now are in St. Paul. There are three that catch my eye, although some have been in the news for a couple of months already. The first one is Juche, a newish Korean restaurant and bar…
BY ED FELIEN The music just carries you away. “Can’t Take My Eyes off of You,” “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man,” “My Eyes Adored You,” “Oh, What a Night,” “Working My Way Back to You, Babe,” “Dawn, Go Away I’m No Good for You” – those…
BY WYATT MILLER From Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Libya, to Vietnam, if there’s one lesson to be drawn from modern-day U.S. wars and interventions, it’s that they don’t help! No matter how bipartisan the call, no matter how morally urgent intervention was portrayed as being, in retrospect we know these…
BY ED FELIEN Kieran Knutson held onto the door to the meeting with Medea Benjamin, threatening to disrupt the meeting. Members of Vets for Peace stood behind the door blocking his entrance. Dave Bicking asked him to leave. At least six officers and an MPD sergeant showed up. Eventually, Knutson…
BY KIERAN F. KNUTSON, PRESIDENT OF CWA LOCAL 7250 On May 19 Medea Benjamin, the famous peace activist/celebrity, brought her book tour to south Minneapolis – and a modest protest of veterans, peace activists, Native Rights defenders and anarchists met her outside. Why would anyone be protesting a famous peace activist?…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE I am a member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and I have been since 1986. In DSA, we like to debate something called the Dirty Break. This is premised on the decades of tension between the Democratic Party and the left outsiders, with the leftists…
