Author Archive
Minneapolis Edible Boulevards Seeks Your Input
By MICHELLE SHAW Join Kelly Shay for January’s Zoom cooking class where you’ll learn how to make a delicious Loaded Veggie Chili. Source: Edible Boulevards Ring in 2023 by joining us for our free January cooking class! This month Kelly Shay of Harmonious World and Wellness will teach us how to make something delicious on Zoom. You can find the registration link and grocery list (for those who also want to cook!) on our Minneapolis Edible Boulevards’ Facebook and Instagram pages. If you don’t have either, feel free to reach out to minneapolisedibleboulevards@gmail.com. Minneapolis Edible Boulevards wants to hear from you! It’s essential to not only have resources available for our neighbors, but also to listen to community members in our partnering neighborhoods. What’s important to you? We have a survey on Instagram and Facebook to capture those thoughts and ideas. As a City pilot for the past 3 years, we've also been advocating to change the City [...]
SOMETHING I SAID: The Animal Factory
Book Review By DWIGHT HOBBES Dwight Hobbes Rule of thumb goes, the book’s better than the movie. Edward Bunker’s The Animal Factory (St. Martin’s Minotaur) and Franchise Pictures is a tossup. Both are brilliant. The novel’s narrative is fluid, with compelling immediacy. Co-screenwriter John Steppling teams with Bunker for an ingenious adaptation. Bunker (Education of a Felon: A Memoir /St. Martin's Griffin,) made his way from the wrong side of the law to a career as screenwriter-actor (Animal Factory, Straight Time). He was “Mr. Blue” in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Franchise Pictures The Animal Factory protagonist, 20-something, privileged Ron Decker is slapped in prison so the judge can stand hard on white offenders, not just criminals of color. Never mind that Decker, no angel for sure, dealt weed and coke, but this is his first bust. He’s a politically correct scapegoat. Street spawned, veteran of incarceration Earl Boen takes him [...]
Artifacts and Curios (and a Piano)
Tales from Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery: 206th in a series By SUE HUNTER WEIR The caretaker’s cottage is a wonderful place. The two front rooms were built in 1871, which means it may well be the oldest existing stone building in South Minneapolis outside of Fort Snelling. The back room was built during the Great Depression by workers employed by the Works Progress Administration, a program designed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to create jobs for displaced workers. But it’s not just the structure that’s interesting. The inside of the building is something of a way-back machine. There are artifacts and relics dating back in some cases to the 1870s. None of the items are of any great monetary value, but they capture a piece of Minneapolis’ history that might otherwise have been lost. The Layman family, the cemetery’s original owners, were prodigious recordkeepers. There are dozens of ledgers in which they recorded the sales of cemetery plots, some for as [...]
