We couldn’t be more excited about this!
Lunch Buddies…
The kids are off from school today. We opened up the shop much to their excitement as they were ready to sell more of their drawings to the nurses and other workers from Alina. They have a rare capitalist gene I do not possess.
Just after opening, Mostafa – who runs a shop on the other side of the market – came in to make some copies. I was playing Nass el Ghiwane, much to his delight. “This is music from Morocco. Revolutionary music!” I could tell this was a rare time he’d heard his home country’s music in Minneapolis, let along music like Nass el Ghiwane. I told him how I liked them, but only knew a little bit about their history. I mentioned how I knew they were a very political group. “Yes,” he said, “they are people’s music. They risked very much, and even went to jail.”
We spoke of Morocco, and his family’s city, Fes, a place I have always wanted to visit. Louis gave him a Pokeman drawing.
All yet another reason why I love spending my days at the shop, and how much that love is energized, in good part, by everyone here at the Global Market.
About a half-hour ago I was sitting here in Beyond Repair with Steven and had a bit of a shock. Who stepped into the Midtown Global Market, looking around, confused, not sure where to go? None other than MPD Police Federation President, Bob Kroll. He soon walked off, looking for something. Intrigued, I left Steven in the shop and walked around the market looking for Bob. Was he searching for us? If not, was he hungry? Where would he eat?
It seems though, while I was gone, Bobby found his way to the shop. He came in, saw a stack of Sgt. Kroll Goes to the Office, took about four or five, and avoiding any eye contact or interaction with Steven of any kind, quickly walked out.
I’ve been extremely happy, and frankly somewhat surprised, at the overwhelmingly positive reception this action has elicited. Both from the public at large, as well as elected officials in MPLS city government. Furthermore, it seems the action has been effective enough to get back to Lt. Kroll, and drive him across town to what he refers to in the comic as our “shit-hole neighborhood!” But hey, art will compel you into worlds that, prior to exposure, one would never dare to venture. I congratulate Lt. Kroll for, once again, braving the wilds of South MPLS.
All this said, I feel it is important for me to make this public; after the release of Sgt. Kroll Goes to the Office many people have urged me to publicly state the fact that Kroll, MPD, and their allies could retaliate in some way. Maybe, maybe not. But I agree that it is important to state that this possibility is, in fact, logical to consider and on my mind.
As an example, after the production of the comic was made public, but not yet released, the car in the above photo parked directly outside our home one afternoon. Having constructed low-wattage radio stations in the past I was interested, but also confused, by the DIY antenna apparatus on the roof of the vehicle. Something was off with its construction and orientation. I took a photo and sent it to a friend who is far more knowledgeable in that area than I am. He stated that, while not definitive, his guess was that it was a “cell phone sniffer.” What’s that? Well, myself and the small group who organized the visit to Mayor Hodges house last November, on the night the police were cracking down at the 4th Precinct Shutdown, are well aware of what it is. Area journalists, through a FOIA request, were able to find out as well. It’s a device that can read your text messages and listen in to your phone calls. It’s a tactic that MPD used that night and what allowed them to meet us at the Mayor’s house in advance of our arrival. And who knows, maybe it’s what is on top of the van outside our home in this photo. Or maybe not.
All of this sounds terribly psychotic and paranoid. But paranoia often arises out of social landscapes that speak towards something larger than each singular, seemingly fantastical, worry or suspicion. A kernel of truth exists in each.
So, if I start getting pulled over a lot; if we suddenly have numerous coding violations on our home; if, god forbid, DHS and MPD knock down our door over alleged child abuse accusations (which happened not long ago to a friend here in town who is critical of the police and their tactics; if I happen to be walking home and have the shit beat out of me, well, we all know who’s hand is at play. (Hi, Bobby!)
And this goes for ALL the artists involved in its production, and everyone else helping with its distribution as well.
I was sad to miss Bob when he visited the shop. I genuinely would have liked to have talked to him about his actions and ours. I called the Police Union a short while after we missed one another, but he wasn’t there. So I left a message on his voicemail inviting him to call me back to talk about the work. Maybe even have a book signing at the shop?
So Bob, it’s apparent that you are, in fact, paying attention to all this. I invite you to talk about it, but please don’t hit me – or accuse me of anything, or fuck with my kids, or listen into my phone calls or read my emails – let’s just talk.
I’ll be at Beyond Repair noon tomorrow. See you here. I’ll buy you a coffee.
Sat, Oct. 15, 2016 ⁄ 2:00–8:00pm
Surround Sound: A Neighborhood Record Lathe Fundraiser
Join the folks who facilitate Beyond Repair, the 9th Ward publication experiment, for a day long festival of music, food, and more to benefit the refurbishment of a new piece of equipment for the shop: a mid-century record lathe able to produce vinyl records in real time. When up and running our lathe will, in just the same fashion that Beyond Repair publishes books, zines, and posters everyday, be able to lathe vinyl records. Moving around the ideas and desires, sounds and voices, of 9th Ward residents as well as compatriots further afield our lathe will assist in producing an ever expanding Anthology of 9th Ward Folkways! Noise! Mariachi! Cumbia! Dhaanto! Hip Hop! Voices and experiences that define our lives here in the ward together as neighbors.
Tiny Diner has generously donated the proceeds of food and drink to the fundraiser, and has opened their space for day long festivities. Among more to come, Eastlake Brewery has generously dontated beer for the occasion!
Current Beyond Repair resident Derek Maxwell will unveil and make use of his home-made sound system during Surround Sound, inspired by the early dub and hip-hop systems that brought neighbors far and wide together in celebration and resistance from Kingston to the South Bronx.
Long-time collaborator and neighbor Steven Matheson has organized a stellar and growing ensemble of performers, which so far include:
American Cream
IE
AD/VR
Steve Palmer
Paul Metzger
Bullhead City
Paul Fonfara
More news, ideas, and performers to come!
More fellowship… Manny needed a menu layed out and printed. Later he brought Lacey and I torta’s!
This is Willie. He was here in the market to have lunch and noticed our poster focusing on how the MPD took 61 seconds to kill Jamar Clark from the moment they arrived to the point of the shooting. Willie took a handful of posters to distribute to friends and family. Come in and grab some too. Let’s keep up the pressure. #byemike #justice4jamar
Not a non-profit, not started through the largess of some grant, Beyond Repair looks – and attempts to make transparent – the varying economies which can support a critical socially engaged art project within the marketplace.
One way we’ve been keeping the doors open is by doing print service work for people. For instance, a karaoke DJ came in not long ago and asked us to print his “karaoke bible” for him – done! We’ve printed wedding invitations for one the bartenders over at Eastlake Brewery next door to us, bound chap books for local artists, and are currently working on printing a book for a local children’s reading specialist organization.
If you have a small print project that you are looking to do, think about Beyond Repair doing the job for you. Not only are we fairly priced for artists, activists, and everyone else, your dollars go towards keeping a complicated, weird, political art project in plain sight.
Sun, Mar. 6, 2016 ⁄ 4:00–7:00pm
Beyond Repair… We Think we Might be Open Now
We’ve been open for two months now and we might just be getting the hang of it. So maybe it’s time to host a “grand opening,” right?
Come and see all the titles that have been published in the last two months. Learn about what’s coming up in the near future. What should one expect from such an occasion?
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We’ll have new work from Fiona Avocado, our first resident within our 9th Ward Publication Residency Program.
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A new publication from our head librarian at the South Minneapolis Society Library, Lacey Prpic Hedtke, entitled We Believe in Infinite Intelligence, a pocket guide overview of Spiritualism.
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The first release from Wooden Leg Print & Press and Uncivilized Books co-imprint on utopianism and utopian histories.
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The grand re-opening of the South Minneapolis Society Library. Get your library card today! Check out books!
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$2 off your beer at Eastlake Brewery with a purchase a book, $1 off with a purchase of a booklet.
If you haven’t been down to Beyond Repair, here’s your chance to come and say hello, learn about what our hopes for the project are, and imagine what we can build together with your involvement and support.
So far…
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We’ve hosted Emory Douglas and will be making a book out of our conversation with sales going to create programming and projects addressing the role and conduct of the 3rd precinct within the neighborhood.
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Each Saturday a pop-up portrait studio has materialized through Sean Smuda‘s project What’s Your Beauty and Will You Share it With the World?
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The Undercommons Reading Group has begun to meet each Saturday evening around Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.
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We’ve devised a “Rent Check” editions project with new artists making work based on our actual rent check each month as a means to sustain Beyond Repair and preserve its autonomy. We released the first Rent Check with an edition by Josh MacPhee in February.
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Three groups have begun to emerge (public defenders, food access advocates, and health professionals) all engaging the question, in one form or another, “What does a healthy neighborhood look like?”
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Oh, and we’ve been making lots and lots of books, with way more to come!
Hope to see you there!
Sat, Feb. 13, 2016 ⁄ 2:00–5:00pm
What’s Your Beauty and Will You Share it With the World?
“Thanks for participating in “What’s Your Beauty and Will You Share it with the World”! I’m hoping you’ll write a few sentences about your object and its beauty. Even better if you include something about the neighborhood, e.g. if you have a special spot of beauty you look forward to walking by, how you’ve seen the neighborhood change, story or rumor…. I ran the Shoebox Gallery on the corner of Chicago and Lake for eleven years and am planning a book about it. Your input would be a great help towards a portrait of the neighborhood!
Sincerely,
Sean Smuda”
Session #3 of , Sean Smuda’s 9th Ward portrait project again will set up shop within Beyond Repair this Saturday, as it will each Saturday for the time being. Join us accompanied by an object you find beautiful. Sean, in time, will be compiling his portraits, and his questions about the changing tenor of Lake St. over the last decade, into a book to be published through Beyond Repair.
Sat, Jan. 30, 2016 ⁄ 2:00–4:00pm
What’s Your Beauty and Will You Share it With the World?
You are invited to Beyond Repair in the Midtown Global Market to have your portrait taken and talk about beauty as you see it and its place in our neighborhood.
Along with your beautiful self, bring your favorite painting, drawing, photograph, video, dress, stuffed animal, etc, along with you! In time the accumulated portraits will be made into a book; a document of the Phillips/Powderhorn neighborhoods, its people, and their cherished objects.
An on-going neighborhood portraiture project by the Shoebox Gallery, the results will be made into a book. Participants will be given a free print of their portrait!
The Revolution in Music / The Music in Revolution
ed. by Anthony Romero & Matthew Joynt
Coming in early March, 2016…
To resist regulation, regimentation, and normalization is the struggle of what has come to be called free jazz, the musical and political culture which emerges in the United States in the 50s and 60s during a time of great social and political upheaval and experimentation.The immediacy and urgency of the art form provides us with, not just an experience, but a framework for thinking about collectivity, individualism, self-determination, and the many ways in which these processes and practices intersect with and enliven one another.
Make no mistakes about it, the implementation of alternative and radical politics, like those that can be found in and around the history of free jazz, at least within the United States, is difficult. Free jazz, like other social practices, is a difficult art. And it should be. NOW is no place for the passive, NOW is the time, and NOW is the place for difficult politics and difficult art.
A series of publications and audio releases, The Revolution in Music / The Music in Revolution faces this difficulty head on, summoning a constellation of ideas and regional histories that confront the relationship between free jazz and radical politics. Highlighting and advocating overlapping social and political practices, through booklets, books, records and more, the series makes current the past, and advocates for the political potentiality of the difficult.
I’m really impressed with the clarity amidst the complexity of Marlon‘s argument here. While cutting and to the point, its logic opens up a door for each encounter, each action, we take through a precise lens. In regard to so many aspects of power and acquiescence which we encounter daily, it’s exactly the type of question we should be asking of ourselves.
Marlon lives in the building above Beyond Repair, so considering I know he’s watching… MPLS folks, what do you have in mind? How can an expanded view of publication (as in The Act of Public-Making) strengthen anti-racist action and consciousness in the 9th Ward and further? Give it some thought. Have some ideas? Come down to the shop and let’s figure out what we can do to implement it.
Malik is a security guard here in the Midtown GlobalMarket. He’s incredibly friendly, and we often joke around about books we could make together about he and his co-workers experiences on the job. The other day he let us know he has a book that he does want to make, not a joke, but an oral history of the voices of Somali elders – folks his parents age and older – who were able to escape the civil war and come here to Minneapolis.
I’m so excited to help to get this book published. It’s a publication that our neighborhood, and Minneapolis as a whole, needs.
Sat, Dec. 19, 2015 ⁄ 4:00–6:30pm
Rad Dads: Local Writers on Fatherhood and the Radical Domestic
In celebration of Chris Martin (Poet / Co-Editor of Society) and his new book of poems, The Falling Down Dance (Coffeehouse Press) we invite you to join the authors below for a pint just down the way from the shop at Eastlake Craft Brewing, for a reading and conversation about verse and fatherhood. Readers will include:
Sam Gould
Steve Healey
Chris Martin
William Waltz
Patrick Werle
Clarence White
We’ve produced a chapbook for the occasion, entitled of course, Rad Dads. It’s cheap. Like $5.