A few weeks back we hosted Lisa Schonberg and Anthony Brisson – who perform together as Coordination – for a performance on the Midtown Greenway under the Bloomington Ave. bridge. We didn’t have permission to do so, but we did it because it felt right. It felt like sharing, not taking. Sharing should be encouraged.

Lisa is someone I’ve known for a long time. We lived around the corner from one another back in Portland, and she helped take care of Esme and Honora in the six months between the time they were born and we moved from Portland to Minneapolis. Lisa and Anthony were in town visiting Anthony’s family and since they’d be around we decided to do some work together. This turned out to be them creating a graphic score – a semi-sequential drawing to be played along to – which we printed at the shop, to be handed out on the Greenway as Coordination performed.

I was really interested in not simply setting up a show with Lisa but finding a space within the neighborhood which, however briefly, we could slightly, creatively disrupt and then, through our packing up and going home, leave the way we found it. Nonetheless, leaving the traces and residue of our convergence and trespassing, our reconfiguring of the space around us by altering its possibilities; bike lane, sunset stroll, weirdo setting up a generator and playing abstract compositions under a bridge. Yeah, why not? This sort of action was something, as kids in our early twenties, Lisa and I learned to adapt to, and find agency from in the pre-hipster Pacific Northwest.

Anthony and Lisa brought some equipment with them and borrowed a few items from Anthony’s father, an electrician out in White Bear Lake who also makes time to play music. Derek Maxwell, Beyond Repair’s current “public-maker in residence” helped source a drum set and a generator.

As we lugged the generator down the steps off Bloomington a small crowd began to gather. People asked us what we were up to as Lisa set up the kit. The sun, slowly began to set, lowering under each bridge, getting closer, and darker, one by one until all that was left was the light of the nearby buildings and the halogen lamps dotting the Greenway landscape.

To lessen the noise of the generator from interfering with the music, Derek and I moved it down the Greenway a bit, which shut it off with our jostling it back and forth. When I tried to start it again, the rope broke off in my hand. This led to our delaying the performance about an hour as, one by one, we went to one another’s houses looking for the right socket to unbolt the housing that would allow us into the start to re-spool the rope. The trouble didn’t end once we found the right socket. The generator didn’t fire up right away, and subsequent attempts broke the rope on multiple occasions. In the middle of this I had an idea. Our neighbor Jess had skateboarded down with her husband Tom and their kids. Jess was wearing running shoes with nylon laces, which to my estimation, were unlikely to break. In due time, tying Jess’s shoelace to the remaining rope and handle we got the generator back up and running and soon the performance began.

The crowd had dwindled a bit, but it didn’t really matter. It was the experience between us – all the folks who decided to take part in creating this convergence – that interested me most; a convening of intent and a question shared between us – “Well, what do we do after this?”

About three quarters into the performance a police cruiser rolled up. Both Lisa and I, from those days back when – in parks, basements, warehouses – figured we were packing it up. But Lisa and Anthony kept playing. The cop got out of his car, and walked over to the other side of the Greenway to watch and listen. I walked over to say hello. He asked what was going on, and I told him. We began to talk and he seemed interested in what we were up to. This looped into a long conversation about public space, performance, and simply folks getting together in the neighborhood to convene and make use of the vast, yet all too ofter underused, social and environmental landscape around us. Just as the cop was about to walk away I notice his badge – “Thunder.”

“Oh, wait a moment,” I said, “Officer Thunder, you’re our new beat cop, aren’t you?”

He grimaced for a moment, “Oh, yikes. What have you heard about me?”

I mentioned how I’d seen news about his new post, and that I was happy to see him out and about in the neighborhood, saying hello, checking up on things, and frankly, doing what a beat cop should be doing, in my mind: making their presence known and looking out for how to help and how they can be a part of the neighborhood.

I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to Officer Thunder. With all the tumult of late, it was kind of amazing to have an unguarded and thoughtful conversation in public with a cop.

I wondered that night, and in the days following, what could be learned from that interaction, so different than any I have had in a long time. When was the last time I saw a cop smile at me, or anyone else for that matter? Not immediate become defensive, or keep their hands close to their weapons? Maybe I’m in the wrong company, but this often seems to be the case.

Officer Thunder opened up another idea of what police in our neighborhood could look like.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Panther Paper

Almost here… the first edition of Publics and Publication Nº1; Emory Douglas. Rumor has it that our neighbor, Marlon James, is going to write the forward to it as well!

Here’s a bit of a primer to Emory’s genius.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

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Our old friend, Helena Keeffe, came into town the other day to celebrate May Day and, simply, hang out. I first met Helena, and her then boyfriend, now husband, Joseph Del Pesco here in Minneapolis when Laura and I were visiting Laura’s family way back in 2001. At the time Joseph was the curator at the Soap Factory here in MPLS.

A few years later Helena and Joseph moved out to San Francisco so that he could start attending the curatorial grad program at California College of the Arts. Not long after that I started teaching at CCA in the newly formed graduate department for Social Practice. As I was still living in Portland I’d fly down for the times I taught and Joseph and Helena were always around, knocking on the window of our friend Jen Rhoads’s house – their neighbor who I’d introduced them too – asking if I wanted to go down the road to get a breakfast burrito at our favorite West Oakland taco truck. All said, we’ve always kept in touch, experienced one another’s ideas and projects in various states both at home and out in the world.

When Helena was in town it made me think, “Oh, can you paint the shops sign?” Of course she said yes. I knew I couldn’t do it as I hate looking at my hand-writing all day. So, I cooked dinner for her and Laura and the kids while Helena sketched out the measurements for the lettering. After the family went to bed we stayed up as Helena painted our new signs and we talked into the night.

I bring all of this up as it represents exactly the type of work and exchange that form around affectionate relationships – you don’t think of it as work, and you certainly don’t feel you are “giving something away” through the exchange. It’s people coming together to make one another’s lives happier, easier, and more appealing. When I say “affectionate” I mean both kindness and care and love, but I also mean “affect,” the way that all of those qualities change you when you allow people and the world to make you who you are, when you allow yourself to be changed through proximity to others.

All of this could seem slight, and in some ways – quite wonderfully – it is. When it gets to the point that it is reflexive and organic, mundanity can seem like symbiosis. When considered more deeply, even these small moments – making a sign for a friend, cooking for one another; a simple exchange of skills and values – can seem, and be, mutual aid as Kropotkin thought of it, or like Morris’s ideas of fellowship.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Sun, May. 15, 2016 ⁄ 4:30–6:00pm

Food Enough? – Soil Lab

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Since the beginning of the year a group of 9th Ward neighbors, environmental explorers, and urban farmers have been meeting together with the Twin Cities Agricultural Land Trust at the experimental publication site, Beyond Repair, in the Midtown Global Market. We’ve called our get-togethers Food Enough? We’ve gathered to discuss ideas and possibilities around truly equitable food land use in the Twin Cities and how the meeting of like minded yet disparate skills and knowledge can help put into place a landscape that is more abundant and fruitful than we’ve yet to imagine.

On May 15, at 4:30pm, we invite you to bring a handful of soil to explore, and talk with the conveners of the Soil Lab project and neighbors interested in our relationships with soil. What lives in the soil here? What can we learn from soil about ourselves and our surrounding systems, and therefore what can it teach us about equity and inequity, about our neighborhoods and societies?

We invite you to join us, add your thoughts, and broaden the ideas and experiences within Food Enough? towards future conversations and actions.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

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The Walker Art Center just published this really great piece about the shop and the theories and interests of the project in full. Check it out.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

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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

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Fri, May. 6, 2016 ⁄ 5:00–7:00pm

Walter Benjamin: The Sonnets

Benjamin Sonnets Poster

Publication Studio – Troy and Translator Carl Skoggard visit Minneapolis with a book of little-known sonnets by German philosopher and culture theorist Walter Benjamin. Together we will hear these challenging but beautiful “sonnets of mourning” read aloud in their original language, and then again in Skoggard’s superb English translations. This is the first time Benjamin’s 73 sonnets—the most significant literary pursuit of his young adult life, written mostly during and just after World War I—have been available to readers of English. Come and enjoy the under-appreciated poetry of a singularly influential European modernist thinker, brought over into our weird New World tongue! Carl will happily engage in open conversation following the reading and fresh books will be available for purchase.

 

 

Carl Skoggard was trained as a musicologist and for many years served as an editor for the music bibliography Repértoire International de la Littérature Musicale (RILM), New York, where he was responsible for German materials. More recently he was also the staff writer for Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, an award-winning magazine created by his partner Joseph Holtzman.
Over the last decade Skoggard has prepared translations with extensive commentary for the three major autobiographically-oriented writings of the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. His bilingual edition of Benjamin’s Sonnets has made this little-known but important body of poetry available to readers of English for the first time.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Calling all 9th Ward neighbors (that’s Powderhorn, Central, Phillips…) and Twin Cities residents interested in our neighborhood: Beyond Repair has started a Publication Residency called 9W / PRP. If you are interested in forming a public around ideas and issues within the 9th Ward, reach out to us so we can help you realize your ideas through the tools and processes available within the shop.

 

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· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Sun, Mar. 6, 2016 ⁄ 4:00–7:00pm

Beyond Repair… We Think we Might be Open Now

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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?
  • We’ll have new work from Fiona Avocado, our first resident within our 9th Ward Publication Residency Program.
  • 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.
  • The first release from Wooden Leg Print & Press and Uncivilized Books co-imprint on utopianism and utopian histories.
  • The grand re-opening of the South Minneapolis Society Library. Get your library card today! Check out books!
  • $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…

  • 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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Sean and Sign

 

  • 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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Hope to see you there!

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Sat, Feb. 13, 2016 ⁄ 2:00–5:00pm

What’s Your Beauty and Will You Share it With the World?

MErrilyn for SAm

“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.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Sat, Feb. 13, 2016 ⁄ 6:00–8:00pm

Undercommons Reading Group

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“In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.”

Can we ethically release ourselves from a social moment that we find reprehensible? What about those we leave behind? Politically, socially, ethically can an individual be in two places at once? How do we live within contradiction and feel empowered, not hypocritical?

The Undercommons Reading Groups meets each Saturday evening from 6 – 8, usually followed with some beers and tacos at Eastlake Craft Brewing.

Free “bootlegged” paperback copies are available at Beyond Repair. For those yet to attend, a PDF is available here.

All levels and interests of inquiry welcome, from the theoretical to the deeply practical and local.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Already today we’ve had people come in and talk about the role of design in helping us ask questions about ourselves; how maps devised by artists can help us see and imagine a future social landscape differently; whether we can print their zine; if we could help them devise a questionnaire to distribute around the neighborhood asking neighbors what sort of police relations THEY want to see.

All in all I’d say that’s a really good day.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

The Revolution in Music / The Music in Revolution

ed. by Anthony Romero & Matthew Joynt

Bag Space

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.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Watching the process of what, I assumed, was the dismantling of the entire house into a vacant lot, I couldn’t help but be upset. It seemed that this, all this, the suicide of our neighbor in the midst of the fear of losing his home; the continued harassment by the city of our former neighbor, political “yard artist” Andrew Moore, to the degree that, after dozens of code violations he did in fact lose his home; the proliferation of abandoned, yet privately owned, properties around the neighborhood that the city seemed to care little about; all of this felt too aggressively normal. By the book to a degree that its disregard for human life became absolved through bureaucracy.”

– from Trash: An Afterlife of Voiceless Objects by Sam Gould (coming soon in the Tools for Remediation booklet series)

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Sitting in the shop and thinking about the various ways that Beyond Repair, as a project and not simply a site, needs to utilize publication to move ideas around a neighborhood. For one, when thinking about publication, it’s important to be light on your feet.

Publication, within these circumstances can be both object and / or action, noun and / or verb. Publication acts as the tool to move ideas around. This could mean a book, a zine, a parade, or a protest.

Lasting publications serve the publics they wish to energize and purposely avoid formalism for the sake of promoting agency.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

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.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

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.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Esme, Sam’s daughter, says: “Every animal needs a break, every one… except for books. They’re like, ‘Keep reading! Keep reading!’ “

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Bakunin…

“No state [or republic], however democratic can ever give the people what they really want, i.e., the free self-organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every state, even the pseudo–People’s State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, from a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves …” – Mikhail Bakunin (Statehood and Anarchy)

· Resident Weirdo· ∞