Jim Walsh, a former City Pages music editor and award-winning columnist for the Pioneer Press, writes about music and local culture. He is the author of the oral history “The Replacements: All Over but the Shouting.”
MinnPost photographed messages on shuttered storefronts and elsewhere across the city Saturday and Sunday, with many small business owners keeping a stiff upper lip for their bricks-and-mortar customers via store windows.
For funeral directors dealing with the day-to-day nuts and bolts business of life and death, the coronavirus and social distancing era has changed the way they help people grieve, and how funeral homes host celebrations of life.
“Music is critical at all points in time, but now it’s even more,” said Paul Babcock, president and CEO of MacPhail Center for Music in Minneapolis.
MinnPost took a tour of the marquees and storefronts of the ghost town that is the Twin Cities.
MinnPost talked to people on the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul on Monday — practicing social distancing of 6 feet apart all the while — about how the coronavirus pandemic has impacted their lives.
“We wanted to start a place that was accessible to everybody, regardless of age, income, physical ability, or skill level,” said co-founder Ellie Fregni. “We wanted to eliminate the barriers to participating in a music program.”
A group of about 100 poets, artists, and writers that make up Mehfil-ae-Minneapolis took to a stage in Chaska to “promote and advance the rich Indian and Pakistani traditions of kavi sammelans and mushairas (poems).
Kpop is known for its hyper-optimistic outlook, rigorous dance choreography and infectious beats. Its stars are hardly household names. But to a growing group of Kpop lovers in Minnesota, the music, videos and dances provide big fun and connection to community.
“’Exhilirating’ is definitely the word of the day,” said artist Kat Morgan, who spent her afternoon pedaling art lovers around on a tiny tour bus.
“Craft beer is a really easy way to bring people together and share culture and explain, ‘This is who I am,’” said owner Sergio Manancero. “‘This is our culture and this is what we do.’”
“This is the most joyful place in America tonight,” Rep. Dean Phillips said Saturday evening, as seemingly everyone in the entire Brooklyn Park Community Activity Center beamed hard-won smiles.
The 2,700-square-foot exhibit employs maps, rare artifacts, interactive screens, multimedia pieces, and historic and contemporary photographs to tell first-person stories of the history of Minnesota’s first people.
To celebrate the 550th birthday of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, the Sikh Coalition of Minnesota held an open house Sunday at the Sikh Society of Minnesota Gurdwara in Bloomington.
The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community hosted a first-ever Native American history, language, gaming, and culture day at the newly opened center.
Dan Wilson: “I have this philosophy about song ideas that not everyone agrees with, but I’m right and they’re wrong. Which is: I try to record every idea I have that I think is really good.”
For three hours at CLUES, a few hundred people expressed, in a burst of artful ways, their love for their Latinx community and gone-not-gone loved ones, and about the thin lines between this world and the afterworld.
Trump’s rally was easily the strangest thing I’ve ever seen at Target Center.
“For the same kind of reason I love Greta Thunberg, Sigurd was someone who had this sense of purpose, this sense of calling, that he couldn’t let go of,” said David Backes.
“SEEN” is presented by the criminal justice reform/storytelling project We Are All Criminals in collaboration with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
The Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundations’ Facing Race Awards have been acknowledging anti-racism activists in Minnesota since 2007.
