News Cut: December 3, 2010 Archive

A handy film location, but would you want to live there?

Posted at 12:00 PM on December 3, 2010 by Eric Ringham

It's hard to remember a time when the high-rise apartment buildings once known as Cedar Square West were thought to look cool. But they were -- so cool that they became the exterior location of Mary's apartment in later seasons of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in the 1970s. They never fulfilled architect Ralph Rapson's vision of transformed urban life, and eventually took on a grim, East Berlin vibe. That made them a handy location for "Ana's Playground," a locally produced short film that's getting raves at film festivals.

The complex, now known as Riverside Plaza, has recently won historic designation, which should help it qualify for tax credits to support a badly needed renovation. Look for a return of the brightly colored random panels that were a signature of the buildings' design. They should make every bit as much sense now as they did then.

Back in 2008, All Things Considered host Tom Crann visited the set of 'Ana's Playground' to speak with director Eric Howell.

The CoffeeShop Chronicles: The painter

Posted at 3:38 PM on December 3, 2010 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

Everyone has a story that should be told about themselves, their neighborhood, or someone they know. Occasionally, I set up at a table in a coffee shop and interview people who stop in. Today, I set up at the SugaRush Coffee Shop on University Avenue in St. Paul. Here's another story:

Ken Fox, 75, of St. Paul keeps his passion in his pocket. Literally. He carries a handful of photographs of the portraits he's painted in his life.

"I was born in the Depression and I've been in it ever since," he says. He's currently unemployed, though occasionally he's asked to paint a portrait.

"I've always been drawing since I was five years old," the Air Force veteran said. "I came to St. Paul in 1960 solely to go to art school at the School of Associated Arts. He ended up teaching drawing, painting and sculpturing for 22 years.

"I pick up a portrait or two; right now I'm working on my dad's dad's farm in Iowa. It's all boarded up, but I'm painting it the way it was 12 years ago. The buildings are decaying."

"I like to paint old dilapidated barns. It's almost like a sentence. It looks like it's done to the viewer, but it goes on and on and on. I move things on it all the time."

Fox says he can't make a living painting portraits. "People aren't going to pay $300 or $400 or up to $1,000 for a portrait. That's why you always hear about the starving artist."

His last painting was about a year ago.

"People want them done, but I can't afford to do them for nothing." He has Social Security and he owns a house in St. Paul that generates some rent money. His unemployment runs out in 13 weeks.

But that will take him to the spring when he has another painting gig. He does maintenance work for Paddleford Boats on the Mississippi River, painting them inside and outside..

"If somebody said to you, 'I'll give you a fulltime job and pay you well, but you have to give this up, would you do it?" I asked.

"Oh, I couldn't," he said. "I need to be an artist. I'm just about dumb at everything. But if somebody asked me to paint a picture, I can do it."

CoffeeShop Chronicles: The sheriff of the Internet

Posted at 3:41 PM on December 3, 2010 by Bob Collins

Everyone has a story that should be told about themselves, their neighborhood, or someone they know. Occasionally, I set up at a table in a coffee shop and interview people who stop in. Today, I set up at the SugaRush Coffee Shop on University Avenue in St. Paul. Here's another story:

The fact that you're reading this on the Internet might have something to do with Bob Alberti of Minneapolis.

He says he helped invent the Internet Gopher at the University of Minnesota, the predecessor to the World Wide Web. He created the first commercial online roll-playing game, and now he's in the business of the online battleground. He's in Internet security.

"I'm cursed with the long view," he says. "I have the ability to see things coming. In the '90s when everyone was looking at the Internet, I said, 'this Internet thing is going to start with no rules, and then they're going to develop best practices, and then regulations, and finally laws. And this is going to take place over about 15 years. And the best place to be is going to be Internet security.' So I pinned a sheriff's badge on myself and made myself the sheriff of the Internet."

This week we've seen the Internet chase against Wikileaks. Alberti has seen bigger cyberwars.

"I worked for a large local retailer and they were opening offices in China and I had to write a memo to their board to alert them to things they hadn't considered," he says. "If you're going to open up a data center in China, you will have China intelligence officers working in it. You won't get the right to open up that data center unless they're confident they can do that. " China, he says, uses the computer infrastructure of foreign companies to launch cyberattacks on its own enemies.

Now, Alberti runs his own Internet security consulting business. "Denial is the primary component of our (the U.S.) defenses right now," he says.

One day in 1993, he was helping the the Star Tribune, now the most dominant Web site in Minnesota, set up its first Web server. He missed an important meeting in 1993 because of a phone call. It was his birthmother calling -- the one he'd been searching for.

"I didn't have any expectations. I assumed they were typical young people who had an accident and here I was," he said. "You always worry that someone is going to be a criminal or a drug addict, but my birthmother sold timeshares in Provincetown (on Cape Cod). She was wonderful, creative, and sad. She was the only person in her family that didn't die of alcoholism and she assumed wherever I was, I was probably alcoholic as well. She was happy to discover that I'm not an alcoholic."

"My half-brother. We're both in computers. Both atheists and we can both bend our fingers at the first knuckle (see photo)."

"I'm the eldest child of four different families."

His adoptive parents, he said, supported his search, "but I think in part because they didn't think I'd ever find, then when I did find, I think they were a little hurt about it. But they never met."

His birth mother has since passed away.

He chronicled his search here.

CoffeeShop Chronicles: "The quirky neighborhood'

Posted at 5:13 PM on December 3, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Everyone has a story that should be told about themselves, their neighborhood, or someone they know. Occasionally, I set up at a table in a coffee shop and interview people who stop in. Today, I set up at the SugaRush Coffee Shop on University Avenue in St. Paul. Here's another story:

Atom Robinson could easily be the ambassador of St. Paul's Frogtown neighborhood. Or he could be a rock star. He could probably do all that and still have time to fight for social, economic, and racial justice, which is what he actually does.

"Quirky people live in our neighborhood and do quirky things and because our houses are all close together we get to see it all playing out," he told me today when I asked him about his home neighborhood. "Directly across the street are three duplexes. On the corner are some Hmong families who have kids who play together on the front porch, playing the way I imagine our parents played. They just have old-timey fun and they're just adorable.We've gotten to know them over the years and they're fascinating kids who are nice and sweet. It's better than watching TV."

"In another neighborhood they'd be in the backyard with a big fence around them. You'd never see them."

"I like the guy who walks around the block 25 times a day and feeds every dog. I see him and that's soothing to me."

Robinson works for the Office of Social Justice at Catholic Charities. He teaches people how to be comfortable when talking to lawmakers and others.

"I always say I come by it naturally," he said. "When I was growing up, my family defined itself in clear ways: progressives, Catholics, and union people."

Somewhere between then and now, he was professional musician in Iowa. "I loved playing music," he said. "But it stopped being drinking beer and playing in dirty bars with your friends and ended up being a job." The band wanted him to move to Nashville. His wife, Annie, wanted to go to grad school in the Twin Cities.

The Twin Cities, and in particular his St. Paul neighborhood, won.

"I believe in everyone's human potential. My faith compels me to," he said. "People will surprise you. More communication is better than no communication. If you can do community building or advocacy conversations, that's positive, too."

And the future?

"I've got nothing else to believe in," he said. "I wouldn't have brought a daughter into the world if I didn't think we could make things better. I believe we have a responsibility to fix things; it's why I get out of bed in the morning."

CoffeeShop Chronicles: Leaving the bubble

Posted at 6:13 PM on December 3, 2010 by Bob Collins

Everyone has a story that should be told about themselves, their neighborhood, or someone they know. Occasionally, I set up at a table in a coffee shop and interview people who stop in. Today, I set up at the SugaRush Coffee Shop on University Avenue in St. Paul. Here's another story:

Erica Hunt had just landed her dream job about a decade ago. She loved being a student teacher of history at Central High School and now she was being offered the job full-time. Her husband had a good job at Bethel University. They were living a comfortable life in the Twin Cities, which is why she turned down the job and why they moved to West Virginia.

"We were feeling comfortable, but restless that we were living in a bubble," she said. "The real world isn't this comfortable. So I turned down the job. He left his job."

They moved with some financial help from family members who may not have quite understood why two people with college degrees would head to a small town of 50 people that time and the coal industry had forgotten.

For two years they worked for a Christian organization in the the town. She held after-school programs for kids, GED classes, and basic computer repair for adults. Her husband fixed up homes in the town.

"We were outsiders," she said. "The folks, rightfully so, don't trust outsiders very much there. The relationships were enriching, but it wasn't like we found real friends. It was a lonely time, too. And we realized we're city people."

So after two years and one child, they decided to move back to the Midwest to be close to their family. "We thought, how can we find an environment where we're still challenged with people who think differently, see the world differently, look differently, just have a very different life? How can we still find that environment here?

Hello, Frogtown!

"We were very intentional about choosing a neighborhood where we would meet a lot of different people, not just people like us," she said. "We're on a corner. You get a lot of people who take the bus walking back and forth to the bus. We've met a lot of folks just walking by."

And yet, she said today, they weren't really a part of the Frogtown community. They realized people in a community have to work at being people in a community.

"A few years ago we realized that we were living here and our relationships were taking us out to place like White Bear Lake. We found ourselves complaining about not being connected to our neighbors and then realizing we're not giving them a chance to know us or us a chance to know them. My husband is an extrovert, so he likes to just invite himself over for a beer. He rarely gets turned down. We were just being intentional about being outside and greeting people. It's been an effort, but not like so hard.... it's really been rewarding. A little bit goes a long way when you're genuine. We really care not just about this place, but these people."

She became a teen pastor at Woodland Hills Church on the Maplewood/St. Paul border.

"We talk a lot about identity," she says of her teenage charges. "Just know who you are and what makes you a valuable person? Is it that you can fit in that size jeans, or score points in a basketball game? It's OK to pursue things, but not put so much into that. We talk against individualism, which we think has corrupted the western church. It's not about 'me,' it's about 'us' and serving than being served.

CoffeeShop Chronicles: The artist who taught pilots to fly

Posted at 6:51 PM on December 3, 2010 by Bob Collins

Everyone has a story that should be told about themselves, their neighborhood, or someone they know. Occasionally, I set up at a table in a coffee shop and interview people who stop in. Today, I set up at the SugaRush Coffee Shop on University Avenue in St. Paul. Here's another story:

When I ask people to let me interview them, many assure me that they're not that interesting (they're almost always wrong), but that's not Melisand Charles. "I'm fascinating," she told me, just before she proved it.

She comes from a family of artists. Her father was the Dutch composer David Broekman, who scored the music for the 1930 Academy Award-winner All Quiet on the Western Front. Her mother was a sculptor and dress designer. She points out that neither graduated high school.

Charles moved to Minnesota to develop the Department of Cultural Affairs for the City of Minneapolis in 1975. Now, she lives in the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul.

"When I moved here it was a little rougher, but it's like a little farm town," she says. "It's quiet."

She was trained in fine arts painting and sculpting and printmaking , but she always wanted to make "moving paintings."

When computers became available, she studied "whatever I could, because at that time -- the 1980s -- there was very little." She learned how to use computers and system and then started teaching others.

She worked for Plato, which is now located in Bloomington. The company provides technical-based teaching tools. She was the art director and taught pilots how to fly planes by designing a simulator-like system.

"We had a joke," she said. "How many artists does it take to fly a plane? All of them."

One program she designed was to teach pilots what to do when things went wrong. "That was everything that could go wrong with an airplane. I never had any fear of flying up to that time, but once I learned about everything that could go wrong... I figure I've had a long life."

CoffeeShop Chronicles: The light-rail conundrum

Posted at 7:42 PM on December 3, 2010 by Bob Collins

Everyone has a story that should be told about themselves, their neighborhood, or someone they know. Occasionally, I set up at a table in a coffee shop and interview people who stop in. Today, I set up at the SugaRush Coffee Shop on University Avenue in St. Paul. Here's another story:

Emily Seru, a Washington State native, gives voice to the combination of trepidation and excitement that is accompanying the Central Corridor light-rail project on St. Paul's University Avenue.

She moved to Frogtown six years ago. "It's two miles from where I work and right on the bus line to the University of Minnesota, and Hamline, and it was affordable. We wanted to live in a neighborhood that reflected our (biracial) family make-up."

She says light-rail will bring "stability" to her neighborhood.

"Even in all of the planning and attention, I feel like there's been more of a focus on the neighborhood. More people care. More people know where I live when I tell them where I live. People are intentionally coming here. I feel like there's more attention being paid to the parks or the lack of services. There are people invested in solving things and seeing the potential. More people want to move here. More people are seeing that it's a good thing to live in a neighborhood that has a lot of different kinds of people that is affordable."

But...

"My political side that works with social justice is very aligned with the low-income and communities of color because they're on a fixed-income, they're renters, they're on a low income and they're worried they're going to be pushed out," she says. "On the other hand, I'm the kind of person who's going to move in. And it's hard to be told they don't want me there. The concerns of me and my husband are very different than theirs. We know we're going to be able to stay in our house even if the taxes go up."

Seru says people like her -- highly educated, middle-income -- are reluctant to voice concerns because they might trump the concerns of those for whom she fights on a daily basis. "Politically, I'm anti-gentrification, but at the same time, personally in my house I would very much like to have it. It's a conflict and it's a conflict within the organizations that are working on this. On the one hand, they advocated for more stops because they didn't want to be left out and they wanted the economic investment. On the other hand, they don't want gentrification and higher density. But what those stops did was ensure that there will be gentrification and higher density."

The answer, she says, is to ensure there will be affordable rental properties in Frogtown. She also favors a land trust for businesses "so small businesses can stay here." Many elderly people also live in Frogtown in houses they inherited from their parents. "I don't want them to leave." she says.

Seru left her hometown because there wasn't much choice.

"I grew up culturally literate," she said. "My parents are both writers and were living the off-the-land life in Port Townsend, they were part of the '70s wave of people coming into the region. It's kind of white, middle-class idealism, but not a whole lot of self-reflection in terms of class and racial justice. Part of Port Townsend is middle-class vibrant, liberal, writers and intentionally live simply and then surrounding Port Townsend, you had very poor, milltown, working class, kids of loggers, lots of trailer parks, and then you had the Indian reservations and those societies are very segregated and growing up you never heard anything but bad things about them. It's so isolated and self-righteous that they didn't realize what their own weaknesses were. It took coming to Minneapolis to see that, to see a truly diverse city that's so integrated."

Seru works for the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs, setting up internship programs for students with social justice organizations. Her job gives her optimism, she says, because she works with 19- and 20-year-olds who think they can make a difference.

"But I also see them get frustrated. I just had a group that worked for an organization that had safe-harbor bills to protect young children who are being prosecuted for sex crimes in the Twin Cities, or bills that would give a tenant bill of rights, and I see this turnover and see their staff literally falling away and organizations that have to shift their advocacy back to direct service because they know they're not going to be able to get anything done politically."

Seru, as you've perhaps figured out, is a progressive struggling with the movement's contradictions. "We have a really hard time getting on the same page. We have a really hard time with group-think because there are a lot of people like me who have discomfort with the party line, with having one party line. Part of the values are that we critique and we pick apart and we appreciate our differences and it makes the movement very big, but it makes it really difficult to counter a movement that has all its ducks in a row, that has a party platform crystal clear. I don't want to be like that, but I also see in the existing system, and even in major social change in the past, that's been part of it."

CoffeeShop Chronicles: The fighter for the kids nobody wants

Posted at 8:26 PM on December 3, 2010 by Bob Collins

Everyone has a story that should be told about themselves, their neighborhood, or someone they know. Occasionally, I set up at a table in a coffee shop and interview people who stop in. Today, I set up at the SugaRush Coffee Shop on University Avenue in St. Paul. Here's another story:

Good luck trying to label Dane Jorento. He's got a fair number of abbreviations after his name, none of which means "writer of children's books." He's published a few of them.

"Which one of these (abbreviations) is the real you?" I asked him.

"None of them," he said. He's a mental health therapist with a practice on St. Paul's University Avenue. He specializes in treatment for lower-functioning adults who have inappropriate sexual behaviors. "It's such a frustrating process because nobody wants to deal with them. They're the modern-day lepers," he said.

He has his victories. Just the other day, he said, he was working with a young woman who said her boyfriend was urging her to cut her dependency on her mother and depend on him instead. After questioning her more, he told her what the boyfriend was up to. He wanted to be her pimp. That's one less woman forced into prostitution.

It is, obviously, a frustrating line of work. Is he making a difference?

"I have two answers to that," he said. "One is I really don't care. It's like you have to live your life. But on the other hand, one of the kids I worked with... I get an e-mail from his mom saying, 'he just got married. He's doing awesome. And if it wasn't for you, he'd be dead.' It came at a time when I was wondering if I should just close the business because it's such a hassle to fight with counties, and states, and agencies, for people that nobody wants."

Then he thought again about what label applies to him. "Fighter," he said.

"I don't need to beat my head against the wall and fight this. But, I like it."

CoffeeShop Chronicles: Bicycle power

Posted at 8:45 PM on December 3, 2010 by Bob Collins

Everyone has a story that should be told about themselves, their neighborhood, or someone they know. Occasionally, I set up at a table in a coffee shop and interview people who stop in. Today, I set up at the SugaRush Coffee Shop on University Avenue in St. Paul. Here's another story:

Jason Tanzman, a Chicago native who's lived in the Twin Cities for the last eight years, is one of the people who runs the Sibley Bike Depot, attached to the coffee shop. It has a mission to develop community through bikes.

The shop offers a free open shop for people to fix their own bikes. It also runs the Community Partners Bike Library, which provides 220 bicycles to low-income and community members. Anyone who donates 20 hours a week in the bike shop, gets a free bike.

The Sibley Bike Depot was once located in downtown St. Paul, but moved to University Avenue in 2008. "Downtown, we were really hard to find. The space was dimly lit. It was disorganized and cluttered. People didn't feel very welcome and didn't feel very safe," Tanzman says.

"I came into this organization as a bike mechanic," he says. "Then I moved into teaching classes and I've always enjoyed teaching people how to fix their bikes and teach them how far a bike can take them."

Here's a video the Sibley Bike Depot provided:

What We Do from Sibley Bike Depot on Vimeo.