Month: June 2007

The Providence, R.I.-based MC Sage Francis hops topics with a cerebrally voracious fervor reminiscent of Slug. It’s no surprise, then, to see Ant (Slug’s cohort in Atmosphere) laying down the beats on the sports-themed “High Step” from Sage’s May release, Human The Death Dance. While it’s more autobiographical and less overtly political than his previous three recordings, Human retains the ingeniously whorled phrases and dense vocabulary that made Francis a champion of freestyle contests, and a slam poet at heart. But it’s the production’s flourishes, like the strings on “Waterline,” that make the biggest difference here. Still, I expect that the bulldozer force and nonstop flow of “Keep Moving,” the career primer “Underground for Dummies,” and the blues-drenched “Got Up This Morning” (for which he cut a video) will be more the emphasis at First Ave. 612-332-1775; www.first-avenue.com

Ever since Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers essentially invented it, bluegrass has been the soul music of white people, and the outfit known to fans as AKUS is a worthy heir to that tradition. Exquisite soulfulness is pervasive in the God-fearing religion they wear on their sleeves and keep in their hearts; it’s also omnipresent in the sublime, string-driven braid of fiddle-dobro-guitar that girds Krauss’s angelic voice on the group’s hoedowns, hymns, and hair-tingling ballads. Purists sniff that they’re too slick and commercial, especially since the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? movie soundtrack made them a dorm-and-apartment—if not exactly household—name. But listen to Krauss, on fiddle, and dobro maestro Jerry Douglas trade licks on “Unionhouse Branch” and then show me bowers and pluckers in any Appalachian holler who are more pure. 612-624-2345; www.northrop.umn.edu

This is it, apparently. With the seventh and final installment in the series (list price: $34.95), the Harry Potter gravy train finally lurches to a halt. That, of course, means this will be a bittersweet occasion for J.K. Rowling’s legion of fans—adults and whippersnappers alike—and perhaps even more so for the publishing industry, which has been stumbling along and inhaling the powerful Potter fumes for nearly ten years. The phenomenon continues to fascinate on any number of levels, even for those who’ve never cracked one of the books or quite managed to understand what the fuss is all about. Surely the magical lad is all grown up by now, so might some of us hold out hope that “the Deathly Hallows” refers to Potter’s long-overdue, drug-fueled Beat odyssey? Probably not.

Agee has always been a fascinating study, as well as refreshingly free of literary conceits and pretension. She has a distinctly Midwestern, blue-collar sensibility, and is fearless (or perhaps heedless) when it comes to her subjects; this is a woman, after all, who somehow managed to publish a collection of stories built around automobile racing, and that topic provides plenty of apt metaphors for Agee’s fiction: breakneck speed, unexpected twists and turns, and spectacular flameouts. Her latest novel is a gothic family saga set in Missouri’s Bootheel region, and features, among other plotlines and hard-boiled entanglements, river piracy. 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-822-4611; www.magersandquinn.com

Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Dirda is something of an endangered species: a professional book critic. At a time when daily newspapers are shrinking their book sections or eliminating them altogether, Dirda soldiers on at the stalwart Washington Post Book World. His criticism has always been marked by real passion for reading—that’s maybe too fancy; the guy obviously just loves to read—and his reviews and essays are thoughtful, expansive, and occasionally digressive in the best possible way. He’s also the author of a number of books (including Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life), all of them offshoots of his literary rambles. 300 Nicollet Mall. 612-630-6174; www.friendsofmpl.org

Milt Helmer comes off as a happy salesman—all smiles under a thinning twist of salt-and-pepper hair—but the retiree glares through his square glasses if he thinks somebody’s trying to pry hard-earned bits of wisdom out of him. “What should the daily newspapers do to remain viable? Let them figure that out for themselves. I’m not here to solve their problems,” he says.

The former publisher of The Shopper/Free Press, a free weekly owned by his family for fifty-one years, knows that newspapers across the United States are having a hard time. He’s heard the stories of lost advertisers, declining circulation, and brutal personnel cuts. But The Shopper/Free Press Company—now run by Helmer’s nephews—isn’t just surviving in today’s cutthroat environment, it’s thriving.

Helmer’s parents, Clayton and Gertrude, founded their own newspaper, The Reporter, in 1940, the same year the couple opened a printing business in their basement—but closed it in 1968 as their free paper, The Shopper, took off.

That The Shopper has grown from a single ad-laden paper with a few thousand circulation in the Ellsworth, Wis., area in 1956 to a seven-paper chain—the Hudson Free Press, Baldwin Shopper, River Falls Shopper, Miss-Croix Shopper, Ellsworth Shopper, Hiawatha Valley Shopper, and Hastings Free Press (with a combined circulation of 60,000)—is even more surprising when you see its headquarters. The operation is run out of an office building that was Helmer’s childhood home in the tiny western Wisconsin village of Beldenville. As each new paper was started, farmhouse rooms were converted into offices, and aluminum-sided additions grew off the back of the house and spilled down a backyard hill.

“Bigger subscription papers used to think of free papers as throwaways or junk,” Helmer said. “Now we’ve taken the lead. Free newspaper circulation across America in the last five years has eclipsed dailies. More people are reading free papers than paid dailies.”

According to industry audits, he’s right. The latest figures from the Circulation Verification Council show free weeklies sending out 66.8 million copies a week.

Subscription dailies are sending out 55.3 million copies a week, and are on the decline. The numbers reflects not only a continuing downward trend for traditional newspaper circulation, but their means of delivery: The free newspapers usually go to every door in their coverage area, while subscription papers only go to those who buy them.

“This is not a business for the faint of heart, but it can be done quite well,” said Joe Green, president of the Independent Free Papers of America trade group. “The Helmers have done quite well when the markets are strong and have survived multiple downturns. People who survive when it’s tough, they’re generally successful.”

Green attributes the success of free papers to the fact that, like the Helmer papers, most are family-run by folks who “show up every day and work twelve hours.”

Helmer’s papers are just a handful of the seventy-some free “shoppers” and community newspapers delivered across Minnesota, the southeast corner of South Dakota and the southwest corner of Wisconsin, according to the Minnesota Free Paper Association. These publications are heavy on ads and light on news. The eight or nine paid columnists in each issue don’t focus on what the New York Times might classify as current events. In fact, traditional hard news—Tornado kills 20 or Council votes to raise taxes—doesn’t usually make it into the shoppers.

In one edition of the Hastings Free Press, for example, a columnist ruminates on the possibility of a man-rabbit hybrid: “Could he run fast? Could he hear better? Would he snack on carrots at work?” Another writer speaks directly to the person who stole his deer-hunting tree stand: “The individual who stole [it] knows nothing about nobility, respect, or ethics.” A grandmother writes film reviews and rates each one in baseball terms: Flushed Away got a two-bagger, while Running with Scissors only garnered a base rap.

If paid dailies aren’t about to throw in the towel and become free and community papers, they’ve at least adopted some of their strategies: In recent years the industry has introduced weekly editions focused on individual suburban regions, and is implementing plans to focus its daily coverage on local news. In 2004, the Pioneer Press created separate editions to focus on Dakota and Washington counties, the north metro, and western Wisconsin; several large newspapers, from the Los Angeles Times to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have lately endeavored to add advertising revenue by purchasing and running smaller community papers.

Helmer doesn’t worry about encroachment by the competition. The company’s seven papers are entrenched in their communities. “There’s generations that don’t know anything else,” he said. “There’s a part of our community that hasn’t read anything else. In fact, when they say they read it in the paper, they usually mean us.”

“We’re going to get booted out of there pretty quickly,” one of the bunch predicted. With that, the full implications of our parking squat—the Twin Cities’ first, as far as we knew—became clear. Inspired by similar actions in New York, San Francisco, and even a city in Sicily, we were going to lay claim to a metered parking space in Minneapolis with multiple flesh-and-blood bodies instead of the impassive steel and plastic of a single automobile. The point was to draw attention to the enormous amount of public real estate reserved for cars via roads and parking spaces—and how thoroughly we accept this arrangement. Why should cars exclusively rule the roads, anyway?

Nothing on the City of Minneapolis website explicitly limited the space at a parking meter to cars, but we suspected that a resourceful police officer could find any number of reasons to harass, fine, or even jail us. The general public, too, might not take kindly to a parking squat—especially in our targeted area near the Metrodome in Minneapolis, on a Twins game day. Partly for these reasons, we decided to bring along an infant and a seven-year-old; the presence of children, we figured, would help diffuse any hostilities.

Our core group of nine squatters set up on a gorgeous Friday afternoon at a prime, partly shaded parking spot at Park Avenue and Fourth Street. We were within sight of the light-rail line, and directly across the sidewalk from a “No Trespassing” sign protecting a vast parking lot. We brought large potted plants to offset the concrete and asphalt surrounding us, plus a variety of folding chairs, and cold drinks and snacks. As the baby napped in his car seat, the older child played on his father’s laptop. He had settled in the gutter, lounging on top of a dismantled tent. (If things went well, we could stay til the early morning—we had an eight-hour meter.)
When a friend strolled over from Orchestra Hall, one of our group went down the street to fetch an extra chair from the car. “Hold on a minute!” he said incredulously. “You drove a car to a parking squat?” Actually, we had driven four cars. Our friend had uncovered a contradiction, it seemed; on the other hand, we weren’t protesting the existence of cars—only demonstrating that humans deserve equal consideration. Besides, it would have been difficult to carry chairs and potted plants on a bike.

Other participants arrived at the squat, trickling in among the crowds of Twins fans headed for the 7:10 game with Washington. The plan was to engage the public with free lemonade and peanuts, all the while educating them about our parking-squat statement.

We quickly found, however, that offering lemonade to strangers made us look creepy. We resorted to toasting ourselves with paper cups: “Yay, parking squat! Woohoo!” Although a few people stared surreptitiously (and looked away if we acknowledged them), for the most part we were roundly ignored. Suddenly, dozens of bicyclists appeared among the cars on Fourth Street. It was the monthly Critical Mass ride, known to sometimes engender antagonistic reactions from motorists. We yelled out to them in solidarity with their concern about the predominance of the automobile in our culture—“Parking squat! Parking squat!”—but received only puzzled looks as they pedaled on their way.

One of our ranks decided to get more direct. He walked to the corner, where groups of game-goers were waiting for the light to change. “Do you guys know what a parking squat is?” The traffic noise apparently made it hard to hear. Some thought he was an imbecile—of course they knew what a parking spot was. One young man thought he was selling pot, and inquired whether it was hydroponic. But mostly he was treated with as much disregard as the scalper across the street. He persisted: “See right over there? We’ve taken over this parking spot to show how much public space we devote to cars.” The sole reactions came from two women. One said “Cool! Have fun”; the other said “I think I have an issue with that,” but she didn’t break stride, much less summon the authorities.

Finally our guy tried a different tack: “Hey! Did you guys know that you can plug the meter at any parking space and have a tailgate party without even having a car?” He received a few patronizing nods but mostly just averted gazes.

Eventually, we gave up. Several police cars and a fire truck had cruised by without so much as slowing down. An attempt to make a statement about public space had turned into a lesson about public indifference. Though we lacked beer, we settled in to have fun anyway, inventing a game called “Peanut in a Cup.” Said with a certain tinge of lasciviousness—“Ladies! How about a game of Peanut in a Cup?”—it was possible to really get people to hustle away.