The Rake Magazine

Tag: police

  • Mayhem at Mickey's Diner

    Let me start off by saying, I’m not a particularly political person. I care, don’t get me wrong, but I just prefer to do what I do best, staying in the pretty bubble of art, music and what-have-you. I am an A+E Editor, after all, not a political commentator! I rarely watch TV, but when I do I often assume it’s an extra-violent news day, even though deep down I know that’s the way the world is, and I subsequently shut it out of my mind. It might be ignorant of me, but hell, my brain can only hold so much information, and the battle I’ve personally chosen is one of making sure you know exactly where to go to see the coolest art, music, and performance – and trust me, it’s not that easy of a job!

    However, I do appreciate passionate people; people who are so into whatever they are doing that it basically takes over their life and becomes their identity. I think it’s impressive and endearing (and only once in a while, creepy). My decision to cover the scene in Downtown St. Paul was fairly innocent – I not only wanted to see a massive throng of people coming together to stand up for something they believed in, but I also wanted to see what they were wearing. Yes, it’s true. After watching the Liberty Parade this past weekend, I had a feeling plenty of sassy nut jobs in outrageous get-ups would be out in full force. I was definitely right, but what I didn’t really bank on was getting tear-gassed by the end of the night.

    It was my definitely own fault for insisting on staying with the unruly masses when they came to a halt in front of Mickey’s Diner on West 7th, after a generally peaceful 4-mile march through the city to the foot of the RNC. I just couldn’t help it though. The photo ops were just too good.

    After following the some 5,000 or so protesters up from the RNC gates to the street, I was at the tail end of things, having stuck behind to snap pics of some guy who looked like Jesus swaying in front of a line of cops with a miniature rainbow flag on a stick. The scene up at Mickey’s Diner was pretty ridiculous. About 150 cops in full riot gear flanked all sides of the street, trying to herd the protesters all in one direction. One cop sat perched on the top of Mickey’s, others stood on squad cars in bad-ass RoboCop poses.

    While the majority of the march had shuffled off so as not to aggravate the cops, a core group of about 200 or so stayed behind and basically just stood there, chanting and talking smack to the lines of police. Honestly, I think both sides were looking for a fight of sorts. The cops were practically vibrating with excitement at the thought of getting to kick the crowd’s ass, and the protesters seemed to want them to do it, and were basically asking them to do it by not moving after the three warnings police gave, ordering everyone to disperse via bullhorn.

    Dumb as I am, I stayed right up at the front of the police line somehow thinking they wouldn’t actually do it, I mean, no one was threatening them, maybe they would just pepper spray a few rowdy punks and everyone else would walk quickly away, virtually unscathed. Not so much. I heard a loud pop and saw billows of tear gas start rising up in the middle of the crowd. Numerous more pops and the streets were filled with screaming protesters running aimlessly as lines of police advanced on us. I turned tail and began booking up the street, veering away from the thick line of cops liberally dousing retreating protesters with huge arcs of pepper spray as flash grenades and tear gas canisters fell all around us. People were writhing on the ground crying and screaming for medics, and while everyone ran, the police seemed to be shooting things directly at our backs. A tear gas canister whizzed by about a foot away from me, bounced off an electrical box right into my line of retreat and started seething smoke. I jumped over it with my scarf covering my face and kept on running. At some point a boy that looked to be about 16 or 17 asked me to please help him and I just yelled at him to keep running and yanked at his sleeve, dragging him on. I saw a crying girl stumble too close to the police line, which was met by a douse of pepper spray that was so extreme that it literally splashed off her face, downing her instantly. Another young kid was balled up by the doorway to an office building, clawing at his eyes and bawling while other protesters screamed for someone to help him. I’d never seen such a thing. It was like a war zone, minus the actual killing of course. Eventually I ducked around a corner and got out of the fray, coughing and rubbing my eyes until I found a bus stop bench to sit down on, regroup, and let my panic meter go down.

    I had lost my friends Stephen, Dylan and Paul, and upon calling them I found they were locked in a freezer at the Dominos Pizza place across from Mickey’s, where they had gone to get a bite to eat after the main protest dispersed. When the mayhem broke out, tear gas had apparently begun to seep in through the closed door of the place to the point that all the employees and customers had retreated to the freezer until the smoke cleared out. I think they got free pizza out of it, so that’s at least one positive.

    After about an hour of trying to cross multiple police lines that had positioned themselves all around the area, I was finally reunited with my posse, who had been on the opposite side of the line. We were forced by the police to take the long way around to the Capitol and up to Paul’s car, which was parked on University. Along the way we passed by at least 500 cops in full riot gear, traveling in menacing packs all over downtown and at the Capitol. It was quite intimidating, and a little bit shocking, considering the sheer numbers. As the protesters had been chanting all night, "This is what a police state looks like!"

    At any rate, you probably won’t be getting any more play-by-play coverage of police riots from me. I’m still jumping at loud noises, and have had enough of the smell of hippies and crust-punks to last me for quite awhile. Here’s my advice for future protesters: start running before they start shooting tear gas – it does not feel as awesome as you’d think!

    Click HERE to see even more pics snapped by both myself and Stephen from the protest and our day Downtown. We don’t have anything from the actual confrontation, as we were busy running/ hiding in freezers. Strangely enough, videos of the melee taken by Kare 11, that were up on their website just last night, are now down; however, they do have some good still shots HERE.

  • The Paintings Have Been Drinking (Not Me)

    Travel back with me, if you will for just a moment, to those happy, halcyon days of the year 2001. Oh, what a time to be a young American artist it was!

    The world waited breathlessly for the final bombshell in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster film cycle to drop (spoiler: Gary Gilmore did it!), and your hipper, richer, better-looking friends were cashing in their trust funds and moving en masse to some sort of Italian-speaking suburb of Manhattan called Williamsburg. Fashionable young men were rapidly perfecting the art of ironic facial hair, and their female counterparts had finally harnessed the unstoppable power of the knee-high boots/vintage skirt/wrinkled Mogwai t-shirt combination.

    Oh, what a time to be a young American artist it was!

    Amidst all of this excitement and bustle, your humble correspondent was an apple-cheeked 21-year old BFA candidate in Louisville, Kentucky, learning the twins arts of oil painting and quoting Foucault in the course of casual conversation (the latter being a skill set I still have yet to master). Like the rest of my newly-legal art school peers, I typically spent one or two Friday nights a month out viewing challenging video installations and half-baked performance art in the upstairs loft of a decrepit Clay Street warehouse or a little Frankfort Avenue storefront (the former being a favorite target of the Louisville Metro Police Department for repeatedly violating local noise ordinances).

    What was it that brought me out to those openings, weekend after weekend? Was it the thrill of newness? The excitement of being part of a community? The chance to hobnob with successful young emerging artists? The opportunity to meet prominent local gallery owners eager to display my crappy paintings of cigarette butts?

    Well, sort of. But not entirely. Truthfully, I was there mostly because these spaces usually served free Falls City Beer at their openings. I expect many of my peers were also there for the same reason.

    Now of course this isn’t the only reason I went to art openings in college. I was there to see some art, too. But if you’ve been involved in the art world in any capacity, you know this scenario well. It’s not Louisville, but maybe it’s Northeast Minneapolis, maybe it’s Lowertown St. Paul, maybe it’s Chelsea, maybe it’s whatever the arts quarter of your college town was called; but wherever it is, you know it.

    This is one of the first magical lessons of college: dude, they totally have free beer at art openings.

    If it’s not free beer, it’s free wine. And if you’re lucky, it’s free liquor. If it’s not free, it’s cheap. And if it’s not cheap, your friend working the bar will slip you a cup anyway. The point is, if you have an artsy bent and like to have a few drinks in you, there’s no better place to be than an opening on a Friday night. Openings and alcohol go hand-in-hand, like Gilbert and George, like Andy and Edie, like Jeff Koons and the feeling of wanting to punch Jeff Koons in the face.

    I began thinking about this after some rumblings in a few art blogs last month following the arrest of New York gallery owner Ruth Kalb during an opening at her gallery in the East Hamptons. The charge was violating liquor laws and entertaining without a license. Normally the goings-on of the Long Island art world have little interest to me personally, but this is really a universal theme. How many art openings have I been to that have been shut down by the cops for this very reason? Not a lot, but certainly a notable handful.

    Moreover, how many openings have I been to where someone got a little too drunk on the house wine and wanted to start a fight outside about the relative merits of shooting digital vs. Super-8? Or where the gallery owners had to kick someone out for sloshing their drinks a little too close to the artwork? Or where the aftermath of the night’s festivities was a catastrophic scene of discarded beer bottles, crumpled plastic cups and sticky spots on the floor? More than a few.

    Then again, there have been the many times when I’ve thanked the booze-soaked ghost of Jackson Pollock that I had a little cup of wine to look at the art with. Openings can be awkward, stifling affairs. People go to openings to see art, sure, but they also go for a multitude of non-art related reasons.

    People go to openings to see who else will be there. People are there to impress their friends and confound their rivals.

    People are clustered in unnatural little conversational groups – you’re spending a half-hour talking to that sculptor whose name you never remember, an adjunct professor you once had, your younger brother’s fiancée and that girl that works at the co-op, all at the same time. None of them have met each other. They all expect introductions.

    People are nervous. People want to look good because they may be photographed by The Minneapoline and get their pictures on the Internet. People want to look good because their ex-girlfriends will be there with their new, hotter boyfriends.

    Galleries can be stuffy and overheated in the summer and drafty in the winter, and a lot of the time it’s impossible to even see the art, much less form a coherent opinion about it because people are so crowded around it. If there is music, the music is loud and you have to shout over it. Even worse, the music may quite possibly be "experimental" in nature.

    You often have to seem smarter and/or cleverer than you may actually be.

    Needless to say, a little beer or wine in this context can be a godsend.

    It gives you something to look busy with if you’re by yourself, and gives you a little bit of impetus to talk to people with whom you might not otherwise think of much to talk about. It’s a scientifically-established principle that alcohol makes you smarter, or barring that, at least more confident about seeming smarter. Standing in front of a canvas with a little cup of wine in your hand feels right. It feels natural.

    From the gallery’s perspective, it can be helpful, too. It draws people in, for one. Healthy attendance numbers look good on those grant applications. If it’s a commercial gallery, a little libation gets people in the mood to buy. If the alcohol is donated, the gallery can even cover some additional costs in the process. No huge profit margins, obviously, but enough to make it worthwhile.

    I talked to the directors of a few Minneapolis galleries to get their take on the subject. Was serving alcohol at openings worth it? The general consensus, of course, was a qualified "yes." But within that consensus, there were a range of opinions. Everyone I spoke to wished to stay anonymous, for obvious reasons, so you’ll have to use your imaginations.

    There are some legal issues involved in serving alcohol, of course. Obviously, you can’t sell it without a license. Actually, legally, you can’t really even serve it without an entertainment license (you can read all the statutes yourself to your heart’s delight here on the city’s website). What you can do, though, is suggest a donation, and so this is the way most of the gallery
    owners I spoke to went about things. A lot of it really seems to be semantics – most galleries you’ll go to will have a posted sign asking for donations, and that covers some of the liability, anyway. Everyone was careful to stress that they run a clean house as far as underage boozing, outdoor drinking and slopped-out jerkiness are concerned. Young-looking types get carded, people aren’t permitted to wander around the street outside waving their beer bottles, and troublemakers get the boot. This generally keeps police and city inspectors away. As one owner pointed out, the cost of a license is a piddling little amount compared to attorney’s fees. Another even went so far as to regular hire off-duty cops to keep everything nice and legit for larger, more heavily-attended openings.

    Legal issues aside, there are also the behavioral and trash disposal issues. Most owners here, as well, had specific strategies for making sure people have fun without landing everyone in the drunk tank or the Broken Bottle Fight Injuries Ward at HCMC. Openings occur for a specific and set amount of time, end before the neighbors start complaining, and filter out collectively to neighborhood bars afterwards so people have somewhere to go and finish the conversations they started. Everyone I spoke to recycles bottles and plastic.

    Basically, all gallery heads reported back to me that their crowds, though they do love the beer and wine, are pretty reasonable, intelligent people that aren’t there to bankrupt the gallery, start fistfights or urinate Phillips vodka on the video art set-ups. Mostly they come to see art, meet up with friends, and generally have a good experience. The setbacks are far outweighed by the benefits. An art opening is, in the end, about the art – if it was just about boozing, all of our local gallery runners would be nightclub entrepreneurs instead. This is as it should be. Because let’s face it: Minneapolis, to her eternal credit, has much better galleries than it does nightclubs.

    So enjoy your beer and/or art this weekend, and just make sure the empty bottle makes its way to the recycling bin.

  • POWER: Yes, there is a PRICE YOU PAY

    I used to think that having POWER meant a better night’s rest and less worrying. I was again Wrong.

    In MY life I get to see a lot of things that most people don’t get to see. And there are times when I am so grateful for that window of lights, cameras, action — and other times when I am just at a loss for words.

    Yesterday, I wanted my daughter to see something to which I have been privy much of my life — a dignitary parade of sorts — and get her perspective. Oh, I got it all right, but not what a Mom wants to hear from her teenage child who, like her mom, has seen too much — The Truth.

    As we sat outside, watching town cars round the bend, my daughter fell silent, stunned by the production, by the number of people it takes to transport one dignitary to a private event, and by the way any resident’s needs or comfort falls to the wayside in these circumstances. What happens to a man when he no longer has his caravan? And what of the seemingly wasted man hours? — so many people just standing around.

    I spent many years chasing stories in the same way that everybody else in the media does — trying to make sure I was asking the questions that the viewers wanted answers to. Now that line between asking the wrong and right questions — and taking a story too far — have become even more blurred. This is my life. And I have people to protect, just like the dozens of agents standing around.

    I am a human being, right? And I eat, work, and use the restroom like everyone else, right? So what is the difference between me and, say, the Secret Service, the State Trooper, and the cop who makes a living protecting what the public should know and not know?

    What makes me different from these people is that They, as PUBLIC SERVANTS, pay a hell of a price for their Jobs. Imagine waking up in the morning, saying goodbye to a family that you love and protect, leaving your home, and saying hello to people you are PAID to protect — only, instead of a hug or kiss you get complaint after complaint after complaint.

    Yesterday, the story wasn’t inside, with the dignitaries (where the cameras would be, if only "they" knew), it was just outside, where I was
    standing. It was in the herds of people Paid to Protect.

    As Melinda Jacobs from "Action News" discovered, these people are nothing short of Heroes. Despite having to spend their day in idleness, they were wonderful and kind ALL day, hour after hour. (Only one Female State Trooper gave me "the look" on property that is rightfully mine.) And I could do nothing but be nice back.

    "We finally got some nice weather today."
    "I am going to get some coffee. Would you like some?"
    "Are you hot? Because I would be happy to run and get you some water."

    That is all that I could do with MY Power, but with Their Power they looked me in the eye with a nice smile and gave me that extra feeling of security that comes from being in the hands of people we as taxpayers are LUCKY as HELL to employ. This truly makes me glad that the harder I work, and the more money I make, the more money goes to a workforce of people that Deserve to wear their badges proudly, turn on their sirens, go through stop signs (because they Have to), and put on a uniform that carries the power of life or death.

    If only more of my tax dollars went to the workforce that serves and protects, and less to the ones that abuse freedom… Oh, I would sleep so much better.

    To the Republican Party: I have evidence that I will protect in a safe place.
    To the Democratic Party: I have evidence that I will protect in a safe place.
    To the Independent Party: I have evidence that I will protect in a safe place.
    To those who are undecided: While you fight it out I will be at Dairy Queen having a turtle sundae.

    COPS ARE MY ROCK STARS!

  • Tweak Locally, Think Globally

    Green is the new watchword for consumer products and goods.
    We can track our carbon footprints, find out how many miles our food traveled
    to our plates, and make a point only to have toe-curling
    carnal gymnastics with Prius drivers     — so why do we insist on persecuting
    those entrepreneurial souls     trying to provide a local option to area
    pot-heads, tweakers, and cuddle-puddlers?

    Despite law enforcement’s best efforts, as much as 80 percent
    of drugs in Minnesota arrive from warmer
    climes, especially Mexico.
    This, of course, begs the question as to why illegal immigrants are demonized
    while most of the folks causing cross-border shenanigans are happy to leave the
    country upon making their deliveries, with a stop in Tijuana for a relaxing day
    at the spa, and perhaps a donkey show. It also represents a vexing conundrum.
    In a world where we supporting our local farmers is a nigh-Stalinistic
    directive, where people trade in their SUVs for effete gas-sipping roller skates,
    and where food labels have become nightmarish non-Euclidean landscapes with
    organic designations and seals of approval handed down by eldritch beings older
    than time itself, why do people not pump more money into our local economy by
    tweaking locally as well?

    Instead of jailing these entrepreneurial souls, where
    they’re more than certain to make recreational pharmaceuticals for penal
    distribution from a slurry of toilet water, Kool Aid, powdered laundry detergent and tears, we should be celebrating them. Don’t look at it as 18.4 pounds of illicit narcotics. We should view it as 18.4 pounds of premium Minnesota agriculture. And not only do these enterprising young men
    reduce the carbon footprint of Minnesotan addicts, but they also contribute to
    geopolitical stability. If we choose local drugs, we reduce demand for narcotic
    happiness from Mexico.
    In turn, this reduces the power of Mexican drug kingpins, allowing police in Northern Mexico to have something vaguely resembling hope
    in their war on drugs. On the other hand, anything
    that keeps chubby prepubescent boys gainfully employed     while getting some
    exercise can’t be all bad.

    Regardless, this new sustainable approach to drugs will
    yield benefits all around. The quality of product will likely rise, as the meth
    flowing through the border is only about 70 to 75 percent pure — American
    craftsmanship always wins out in the end. It’s better for the environment, as
    shipping is dramatically decreased and trucks won’t be crashing through
    pristine wilderness areas during high speed chases with the border patrol or Captain
    Planet    . Plus, it keeps money in the local economy. Millions of dollars that
    once flowed south will stay in Minnesotan coffers, enriching Best Buy, Target,
    local liquor stores, chemical supply warehouses, and local weapons dealers
    throughout the metro area and beyond.

    Not to mention another benefit — with increased need for
    drug enforcement, Minneapolis and Saint Paul will have more reason to exercise
    the loopholes in the new
    property tax cap     that allow the cities to raise property taxes beyond the
    limit to pay for new police officers. This call for additional peace officers
    reduces unemployment and underemployment, plus provides more news for the
    ailing newspaper industry to cover, what with the increased prevalence of
    neighborhood meth lab explosions, police shoot outs and high speed chases.

    And with the plight of the family farmer constantly in the
    news, this push for a more sustainable drug trade couldn’t come at a more
    opportune time. Ready access to fertilizer, ample tillable land and isolated
    homesteads with few nosy neighbors investigating odd smells mean huge windfalls for
    enterprising farmers looking to capitalize on the new craze. Buffalo,
    MN could potentially be Minnesota’s next boom town — reaping not
    only economic benefits, but rapid increases in diversity, local entertainment,
    and notoriety.

    Of course, these benefits would not be without drawbacks.
    The surburban traffic that once passed through Minneapolis’
    less savory neighborhoods in search of their fix would move north to Buffalo. And if there’s
    one thing no man should wish on his neighbor, it’s an influx of people from
    Lakeville.