June 2003

This Post Brought to You By "Anal Invaders XVII: The Midgets Strike Back"

Filed under: Imported

I was listening to Jason Lewis, Minnesota's "Mr. Right," on the drive home this evening. Not surprisingly the topic of discussion was today's U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding affirmative action and Internet censorship. For those not familiar with the opinions, here's the Cliffs Notes version: affirmative action at colleges (barely) survived and porn access for homeless men was severely curtailed.

(Okay, that's a bit of a simplification: for more intelligent analysis try here and here.)

Somehow Mr. Right's discussion of Constitutional law segued into a rant about the Star Tribune purportedly peddling lewd material to our children. (Well, your children anyway.) Specifically, Lewis was upset about a recent trend story revealing that gays and lesbians are coming out of the closet at younger and younger ages.

Now I won't vouch for the merits of the journalism. Trend pieces are, generally speaking, heinous pieces of crap spewed out by daily newspapers in an effort to prove that they have their fingers on the pulse of the public. But there is nothing remotely lewd or pornographic about the article.

What is Lewis actually offended by? Homosexuality. Duh. This will come as no surprise to frequent listeners of his show.

What really set my nipples tingling, however, was Mr. Right's next statement. He declared that daily newspapers are being "turned into rags like City Pages, where all they are are whores pimping their next porno movie."

Somebody alert Lou Gelfand!

But seriously, this revelation raises a few obvious questions:

1. Where are these films being produced?

2. Why am I always broke?

3. Where will LNW's vast public-library readership now turn for pithy and insightful commentary on current events?

Posted by Paul Demko at June 23, 2003 8:37 PM

Harry Potter Protest

Filed under: Imported

Posted by Paul Demko at June 20, 2003 3:52 PM

Borders Press Release

Filed under: Stories

June 20, 2003

Contact: Chris Conry at (612) 221-4852 or chrisconry2000@hotmail.com.

United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 789

Jason Evans at (612) 272-5790 or jason@supersphere.com.

Borders Books - Uptown

How do you make $150,000,000 disappear?

Employees ask Borders' CEO this question at Harry Potter release parties.

What: The Harry Potter Handbill

When: Friday, June 20, 2003 from 10pm to 1am.

Where: Borders Bookshop - Uptown - 3001 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis, MN

Employees of the Minneapolis Uptown Borders and their community allies will be distributing leaflets to customers who attend the store's Harry Potter midnight release party. Employees will be asking Greg Josefowicz, CEO of Borders Group, Inc., why he spent $150,000,000 on a stock repurchase scheme while refusing to pay sixteen employees $9.33 an hour.

Currently negotiating a first union contract with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 789, these employees are demanding that Borders Group, Inc. pay the City of Minneapolis' living wage standard of $9.33/hr. In meetings on June 18th, attorneys for Borders Group, Inc. refused to budge on wage rates and offered employees the rates they currently get with increases set at the employer's discretion.

UFCW Local 789 President Don Seaquist explains, "The proposal was totally unacceptable. What Borders offered us was essentially the employee handbook in different language. The issue here is not one of money, but of priorities. The money is there; it's just a matter of who gets it. Should it go to the institutional shareholders or should it go to the people who do the actual work?"

On May 20th, 2003 Borders Group, Inc. authorized a $150,000,000 expenditure to allow the corporation to repurchase its own stock on the open market. This one-time repurchase scheme is a give-away to shareholders designed to drive up the company's ailing stock price. While investors, by and large, remain unimpressed by the move, its impression has been felt locally: For CEO Greg Josefowicz, mutual funds are more important than Minnesota workers.

# # #

Posted by Paul Demko at June 20, 2003 3:35 PM

'Every Revolution Starts With Some Drunk Fucks'

Filed under: Imported

So sayeth The Hangdogs, who have been schlepping around the country in a van for roughly a decade now, playing angry, booze-sodden country rock. Their stellar fifth album, Wallace '48, is named in honor of the late vice president and Progressive Party standard bearer. After two albums on Shanachie, the Hangdogs are back to putting out their own music.

The New York-based band plays Lee's Liquor Lounge this Saturday evening. I spoke with lead singer and songwriter (and author of the hillarious Hangdoggerel newsletter) Matthew Grimm on the phone last week about music, politics--and taking it up the ass:

Paul Demko: What happened with Shanachie?

Matthew Grimm: They fired us. What do you call it? I guess they're still calling it a recession. Except we're out of it now. Everything's swell now economically in the country. It was a couple months after the September 11th thing, a full two years after the recession had begun, and they bombed the city so that gave everybody the excuse to downsize and we got downsized. I don't think we sold a lot of records for them either. I think that was an issue. I could get into some of the other issues on why we didn't sell a lot of records for them but I'd probably be broaching certain libel issues.

PD: You're originally from Iowa, right? Whereabouts?

MG: A little town called Stanwood, near Cedar Rapids. Unless you have a real detailed map of Iowa it will not be on the map.

PD: The song "Monopoly on the blues" [from the Hangdogs' debut disc Same Old Story] is about Stanwood?

MG: Yep. All the stuff referenced in there is pretty much Stanwood. There's a hardware store that went out of business. There was a real Don's Grocery. And there is indeed Wal Mart in the county seat, which is Tipton, about nine miles south of town. So all that shit is very true, and for some reason that song went over apeshit in Texas. Everybody thought it was just a metaphorical story about their town and blah, blah, blah. And that's because it's happening everywhere. There's a professor at Iowa State who did a sort of hard metric survey of the effects of Wal Mart. It shows that Wal Mart is this event horizon of a sucking black hole and it like fucks up towns for 20 miles all around. I'm actually working on, or I've actually just done a half assed outline and written a few chapters of Hangdoggerel, the book, and that kind of figured into one of the chapters.

PD: Hangdoggerel, the book? Did I hear you correctly?

MG: (Laughs) Yes. Somebody in the publishing industry who gets our newsletter said, 'You guys should do a book.' I'm trying to figure out how to weave something together that actually addresses all this shit of why we're being fucked up the ass every day of our lives, but do it in a fun way.

PD: Why write about Henry Wallace?

MG: I wrote that song during the last Nader campaign. We really have no choices politically and that was smacking me in the face daily. I bought The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry Wallace in some used bookstore in the south and had read that. It kind of occurred to me as I read that--not the '48 campaign, but actually 1944 when he got ousted from the vice presidency at the convention in Chicago and they put Truman on the ticket instead of him--that things could have been really palpably different had a man of vision, by some lark, inherited this vast groundswell consensus that FDR had amassed, especially given how powerful the country was coming out of World War II.

I read about all these musicians and artists who got behind the Progressive Party campaign in 1948. There was an organization called Sing Out! that was formed around then and a bunch of songs were written, like stump songs. Wherever he went there would be a folk band that would bring him on stage. So I started looking around for those songs, and of course the only place you can find them is on a Bear Family compilation. And of course it's like an eight-cd compilation and it costs you $500 at the cheapest. So I said fuck that, I'm going to right my own song. I tried to write it in that kind of street corner stumping style.

PD: Do you have any regrets about supporting Nader now that we've had two years of Bush?

MG: Well, no. Rob's a democrat, the bass player in the band. So he's the right-wing voice of devil's advocacy on that. Yes, it's Nader's fault if history is completely mono-causal--and it's not. There's not any way that trying to advance the cause of the best candidate for the job is the wrong thing to do. I want the Democrats to be the party of progressive politics. As long as they continue not to be, then they're not earning my vote. Al Gore has to be a dynamic, trust-busting guy who tells the Democratic Leadership Council to take the corporate dick out of their ass and go fuck themselves. And he's got to live up to all that environmental bullshit that he cloaks himself in. The worst plague of locusts couldn't happen to George Bush from my point of view. Don't get me wrong. It couldn't be more apparent that you need something distinct, that you need a different voice and a different way as part of your message against this particular status quo. If in fact the Democrats do what they did in the early '90s and say, 'We have to move close to that in order to beat it,' then they're defeating the whole purpose of political discourse and they're selling us all out to boot.

PD: Why do you guys keep coming back to Minneapolis?

MG: It's a good town. I like Lee's. I like the Turf Club. It seems like it's a good music town, even though we've had good nights and bad nights there. What are the towns that maybe a) will have a predilection for this kind of music, and b) would support it on a semi-regular basis as long as you get the word out. We're old guys who are still trying to break down those fucking walls so it's kind of incongruous in that regard because it's not like we've got our whole lives and careers ahead of us to make those inroads for people.

PD: What's your motivation at this point in time? Presumably you're not making a ton of money doing this?

MG: No. Especially if you don't qualify a ton as any. I don't know. I ask myself that every fucking tour. Because you know, for two hours a night you actually control something in your life. I hate to give the morose psychological answer. It's still fun as fuck to play a great show. It's still fun as fuck when people you've never seen before and have never heard you before move into the middle of the room and start dancing. The older I get the more I kind of appreciate that there are very few moments of liberation in this life, and that Friday and Saturday nights are those. It's part of why I drink. It's part of the festivity of the ritual, even if it is just a weekly ritual and not particularly pregnant with spirituality. But after awhile, call it a drunk's gross rationalization, but there is a spirituality. There is a spirituality to the union of people who are--going back to the old catch phrase--fucked every day of their lives, and you've got to do something together to sort of collectively reaffirm that you are not completely insane for bending over and taking it every day.

PD: How do you pay the bills?

MG: I'm a freelance writer. I write for American Demographics, Brandweek, which is the magazine I used to edit, and I recently did something for Cable World magazine. Most of it on media issues. I know that, in juxtaposition to everything I just said, those may sound like really weird outlets for my polemics, but they actually do let me write shit.

PD: So are you excited about the FCC ruling that just came down?

MG: I'm just picking up the Brandweek magazine that just came out this week. I'm going to read you the first sentence of my new column: "Michael Powell did his part to destroy civil society last week, according to news reports." My kicker is: "In other news, Leni Riefenstahl turned 100 last year. Maybe she needs a job."

You read about the Jessica Lynch thing right? That it was stage managed and everything? I think that story was reported a week or two weeks before this whole Powell thing. There are so many news resources in this country for people to actually do their jobs. But instead they took this canned, stage-managed thing and plastered it everywhere. You could not escape. It monopolized people's consciousness. And that's under the current ownership system. Which is maybe twelve golfing white guys who set the standards and practices for all those news gathering organizations, most of which are already in bed with the Pentagon. So that twelve golfing white guys is gonna go down to five golfing white guys and that's gonna be good for the discourse in the country? Right.

Posted by Paul Demko at June 18, 2003 7:47 PM

U.S. v. Turkey

Filed under: Imported

The U.S. plays its first match in the Confederations Cup Thursday (not Tuesday as erroneously reported earlier on LNW) against Turkey. Unfortunately, it's only being aired on Direct TV and Galavision. 

In the past, my attempts to locate soccer-friendly Twin Cities bars have not gone well. (Although Tortorello and I did commandeer a TV at Tubby's in Northeast for one match.) But never fear footy geeks, the Big Soccer boards present a couple of possibilities.

Any other ideas?

Posted by Paul Demko at June 17, 2003 3:57 PM

The Perils of Slo-Pitch Softball

Filed under: Imported

Washington City Paper's Dave McKenna is one of the finest sports columnists in the country. McKenna fills in the cracks that the daily sports pages miss: duckpin bowling, black punters, white Hoyas, Pat Robertson's racehorses.

This week, in the wake of Sammy's corked bat, McKenna unravels The Great Slo-Pitch Softball Bat Scandal of 2002. Here's a snippet:

The brouhaha broke after an investigation by the Amateur Softball Association of America (ASA), which is the nation's largest sanctioning body for slo-pitch, with affiliates in every state and the District of Columbia. For years, the ASA had been hearing that, because of advances in bat technology, recreational softball players were walking into batter's boxes with implements more lethal than anything the coalition of the willing has yet found in Baghdad.

Posted by Paul Demko at June 13, 2003 4:58 PM

Super Chikan at Whiskey Junction

Filed under: Imported

I've always found Fat Possum Records to be a lot more interesting on paper than disk. Sure, it's fascinating to learn that when T-Model Ford was 11 years old his daddy beat him so bad he lost a testicle. Or that he once did time for stabbing a man to death. Or that T-Model's drummer, Spam, lost several fingertips to a jealous girlfriend wielding a box cutter. Or that one of T-Model's many witty aphorisms is, "Every town shall furnish its own women."

But as for the music that T-Model and Spam create when they're not dead drunk or trying to kill each other? Interesting--for about a half hour. That is, until you realize that every one of these gritty blues numbers sounds pretty much like the one that preceded it. 

Of the Fat Possum albums that I've heard, only one lived up to the hype: James Louis "Super Chikan" Johnson's What You See. This 2000 gem is plenty weird. Super Chikan yodels, clucks, grunts, and screams. He plays a guitar fashioned from a gas can (a "chicantar"). And most of his songs mention chickens at least once. But the album's also funny as hell, and ridiculously catchy. Super Chikan's inspired fusion of blues, country, and R & B manages to bring to mind both Jimmy Rodgers and Howe Gelb.

Super Chikan is in the Twin Cities Saturday night at Whiskey Junction, and--as best I can tell--has managed to avoid getting any press whatsoever. Click here for a Super Chikan Q & A.

Posted by Paul Demko at June 13, 2003 4:27 PM

Billions for Charity

Filed under: Imported

The Pioneer Press ran a story on Sunday headlined "Nonprofit Boom Goes Bust." The piece, written by Kermit Pattison, detailed how Minnesota charities are struggling to stay afloat in the midst of government cutbacks, a drop-off in individual contributions, and an increase in demand for social services. Here's the nut:

As a result, the face of the state's community of more than 4,600 nonprofit groups is being reshaped through program cuts, staff reductions, mergers and closures. Catholic Charities has trimmed jobs, and Boys and Girls Clubs have cut hours; the Science Museum of Minnesota has laid off people, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra has shortened its season.

"There's nothing like this that's ever hit, at least in my time," said Nancy LeTourneau, executive director of St. Paul Youth Services who has 25 years of experience in the nonprofit field. "It's not just a scare. The cuts are real. It's already happening, and the worst hasn't even hit."

Pretty sobering stuff. But what if there was an additional $4.3 billion that could be doled out to nonprofit groups each year without raising taxes one penny?

I'll explain this potential windfall momentarily, but first you have to suffer through a little background information. Under current law, private foundations are required to spend, on average, five percent of their assets on charitable purposes each year. However, under existing regulations, grantmakers have wide leeway as to what they can count as charitable expenses. Salaries, legal bills, rent, and travel costs are all routinely booked as charitable disbursements. (For a particularly blatant example of this practice see my recent City Pages cover story about the Northwest Area Foundation), 

Legislation currently pending in the U.S. House of Representatives, however, would eliminate this dubious accounting practice. Under a bill sponsored by Republican Roy Blunt and Democrat Harold Ford, Jr., foundations would only be able to count grants to nonprofit organizations towards their five percent payout requirement. In addition, the legislation would drop the current excise tax on investment income earned by foundations from 2 percent to 1 percent.

Now about that $4.3 billion. In anticipation of this proposed change to the tax laws, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy--a Washington-based watchdog group--undertook a study to examine exactly how it would impact foundations. The NCRP determined that in 2001 private grantmakers counted approximately $4.3 billion in administrative costs as charitable expenses. In other words, if that money had been been dispensed to charities it could have provided grants of $100,000 to 43,000 organizations. Furthermore, the NCRP determined that in 2001 the 100 largest grantmakers in the country spent, on average, 8.2 percent of their charitable payouts on administrative costs.

Private foundations--through their lobbying mouthpiece the Council on Foundations--have long maintained that any changes to the tax laws would threaten their future existence. (Council president Dot Ridings recently began a letter to the organization's members about the pending legislation with this ominous warning: "Our field is in danger.")

However, the NCRP report points out two recent studies that clearly show these doomsday predictions to be unwarranted. A 1999 analysis by DeMarche Associates, Inc, found that grantmakers could have paid out 6.5 percent of their assets annually from 1950 to 1998 and still grown their assets by 24 percent. This heretical report was commissioned by ...The Council on Foundations.

In another study, conducted in 2001, Harvard University researchers Akash Deep and Peter Frumkin examined the finances of 290 of the largest foundations over a 25-year period. They found that, on average, the foundations paid out 4.97 percent of their assets annually, while receiving an average investment return of 7.62 percent. In other words, over the long haul, foundations steadily increased the size of their asset base.

Sloan Wiesen, communications director for the NCRP, says that the study clearly supports the changes sought by Reps. Ford and Blunt. "It seems that all the handwringing over this, that the sky is falling, is misplaced," he says. Wiesen emphasizes that foundations will never be able to compensate for the steadily eroding government social safety net at both the state and federal levels--but that they could soften the blow. "The upshot is that it can make a significant difference to America's charities that are really struggling at this time." 

Posted by Paul Demko at June 9, 2003 5:29 PM

Jerry Bust

Filed under: Imported

It's not very often that you get to witness one of the wealthiest men in the world being humiliated and robbed on national television. But that's exactly what transpired on last night's Travel Channel dispatch from the World Poker Tour. The victim of this prime-time crime was Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss.

First a word for those of you horrified to see the words "poker" and "television" in the same sentence. I first found myself watching televised poker on Thanksgiving night of 2000. I'd made the mistake of insisting that it didn't matter if I spent the holiday alone, even turning down turkey-day dinner invites from Roland Amundson (don't ask) and my blonde-haired, six-foot-plus, dairy-farming relatives in Wisconsin (again, don't ask). So by nine that evening I was half drunk on cheap red wine, wallowing in self pity, pining for my late grandmother's flavorless stuffing--and watching Texas Hold 'em on ESPN.

This tall, scrawny, scraggly haired guy was thoroughly decimating the competition. Every time an opposing player would bet, the scraggly haired guy would stare at him with a look of disgust so profound that you'd think the guy had been caught slipping tongue to a corpse. This staredown would continue for minute after excruciating minute, until I could hardly stand to watch the TV screen. Then suddenly, without hesitation, sensing some sign of weakness or strength in his opponent, the scraggly haired guy would bet or fold.

All night long he never missed a call. Somehow--darting eyes, trembling lip, sweaty brow--the guy was able to read his opponents as if their cards were displayed on their foreheads. It was fascinating cutthroat psychological warfare. 

Now back to last night's televised garroting of Mr. Buss. The tournament took place in Los Angeles. Therefore plenty of B-list celebrities were on hand to banalize the proceedings: Dom DeLuise, Meat Loaf, Kato Kaelin.

Fortunately, the only Hollywood type who made it to the final table of players was Buss. Through luck--and stubborn refusal to bet unless he had the stone cold nuts--the multi-millionaire was one of the last two players standing. Unfortunately for him, the other guy with chips remaining was Layne Flack, a 30-something South Dakota native and two-time winner at the World Series of Poker.

What ensued was not pretty. From the outset Flack remorselessly antagonized Buss, daring the 70-year-old to bet and then ridiculing him when he did. The most astounding aspect of this display of chutzpah was that Flack's luck was absolutely atrocious. He consistently had crap cards: 7-4, King-2, 8-4. Yet he bet and bet and bet--and bet some more. More importantly, with this unceasing show of bravado, he induced the visibly flustered Buss to repeatedly toss out winning hands.

The end result was never in doubt, but Buss held on for an excruciating hour. Watching him fidget and fret was like seeing a seven-year-old go into meltdown at a piano recital.

For those who enjoy scrutinizing rich people in agony the episode airs again Saturday at 1 p.m. on the Travel Channel.  

Posted by Paul Demko at June 5, 2003 6:31 PM

Futebol

Filed under: Imported

Alex Bellos's book Futebol: Soccer, the Brazilian Way opens in the Faroe Islands, a God-forsaken, snow packed, volcanic hiccup midway between Iceland and Scotland. In this unlikely outpost Bellos tracks down a handful of comically miserable Brazilians who have traveled to the country to play professional soccer.

Rio it is not. Their matches take place in sub-freezing temperatures before spectators who refuse to leave the warmth of their automobiles. "Once the wind was so strong that the referee ordered all the players to crouch on the ground so they were not blown off the pitch," Bellos writes.

Despite having traveled halfway around the world to play soccer, the Brazilians aren't particularly adept at the sport. In fact one of the players, Robson, is so incompetent that he plays just one match for his new club. Robson stays on in the Faroes anyway, finding work in a fish factory and marrying a local girl.

Such tragicomic vignettes crop up throughout Futebol, just published in paperback in the U.S., Bellos's dissection of Brazilian culture through the prism of soccer. In the century since the game was first introduced in Brazil, it has come to permeate every aspect of society and--as evidenced by the hapless Faroese exiles--developed into one of the country's primary exports. Of course, Brazilians are also the best soccer players in the world, having won an unprecedented five World Cup Championships.

Bellos is a correspondent for the Guardian and Observer newspapers. He arrived in Brazil just five years ago. Despite this short gestation period, Bellos proves an adept, engaging tour guide. He criss-crosses the country, picking through the cultural detritus and sketching sharp, funny portraits of the many eccentrics who have impacted Brazilian soccer. Bellos concerns himself with the nuts and bolts of the game only in as much as it provides a window into the larger culture. In fact, it's not until page 274 that he describes a live match--and even then the action lasts for just a page.

Nothing better exemplifies the country's obsession with soccer than the collective psychosis that afflicted it following Brazil's 1950 World Cup defeat to Uruguay. In the ensuing decades, the loss has become immortalized in Brazilian minds as a tragedy on par with Hiroshima. Consider the fate of Barbosa, the losing goalkeeper. "Barbosa was never allowed to forget 1950," Bellos writes. "Before he died, virtually penniless, in April 2000 he said that the saddest moment in his life was twenty years after the match. A woman in a shop spotted him. 'Look at him,' she told her son. 'He is the man that made all of Brazil cry.'"

Not even Bill Buckner has been abused in such a manner.

Manuel Francisco dos Santos, better known as Garrincha, suffered an even more ignominious fate. While even non-soccer fans the world over are familiar with Pele, Garrincha is largely unknown outside of Brazil--even though many consider him the greatest player the game has ever seen. Garrincha's most distinguishing physical characteristic was that his legs were crooked--the left curving outward and the right inward. He led Brazil to World Cup championships in 1958 and 1962, dazzling defenders with his dribbling expertise, before crippling injuries forced him out of the game in his early thirties.

Off the field Garrincha was a hapless goof. He lived in squalor, had a penchant for crashing cars, and fathered scads of children. After leaving the game he spiraled into suicidal alcoholism and died in 1983 at the age of 49. In a particularly heartbreaking passage, Bellos tracks down one of Garrincha's daughters, Nenel. She's living in a tiny, fetid apartment with her grown son, the two of them seemingly subsisiting entirely on beer. "Nenel lives ten miles from the beach," Bellos notes. "Yet she has never been."

Such intrepid reporting and telling details make Futebol worth reading--even if you don't give a rip about soccer.

Posted by Paul Demko at June 3, 2003 5:43 PM

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