The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Every winter in our fair state, the subtle tang known as desperation permeates the air. Match.com and eHarmony fill with the profiles of Minnesotans scrambling to find someone with whom to warm their long winter's nap before the season's icy grip on the region's nethers prevents any chance of companionship altogether. But this season is different. That subtle tang has become an overwhelming stench wafting from the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area, and that desperation signals a mightily dangerous time for our cities.

I was recently talking to a Minneapolis artist who was, as many Minneapolis artists of a certain generation are wont to do, rhapsodizing about the glory days of the Warehouse District art scene in the 1980s.

Here's the headline from yesterday's Strib: "Girl, 6, is grazed by bullet, leaving community hurt, too."

It's tempting just to let that stand as one more blob in the insipid lump of goo that is the Star Tribune. OK, I will, but with just one comment: Doesn't every bullet that hits a six-year-old hurt our community?

The idea of a footrace in North Minneapolis seems to inspire two reactions from residents of other neighborhoods: incredulity and concern. “Do you want to get mugged?” “Are you wearing a flak jacket?” And, of course, the simplest question: “Why?”  

Viewed through the prism of memory, some years take on a character, a distinctive tone. In 2006, crime reclaimed its place on the front pages of newspapers across the United States, including the Star Tribune. And in this year of murder, Courtney Brown and Trevor Marsh were like twin poles on a violent globe. Brown died on a Saturday night in September, while walking with friends near the intersection of Lyndale Avenue North and Dowling Avenue. He had been playing basketball.

The Minneapolis City Council proved itself to be more politically adept than the Minneapolis Library Board in early December when it warded off the pleas for permanent funding of the Minneapolis Library system. Instead of the hoped-for permanent budget increases that had been dangled before the Library Board, the Council instead gave them one year’s worth of funding to keep open three libraries that had been proposed for closing—that and the promise from Mayor Rybak to lobby the Legislature for more. 

The dorm house where Khan Moek works is on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. It is run by the Returnee Integration Support Program (RISP), a venture supported by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. The program offers a number of support services to help Cambodian felons who are deported from the U.S. learn to live in a country where they are nominal citizens, but utter foreigners in every other way.

The sound of the well-made gun is precise. If you pull the slide back smoothly, the sound of the hammer locking back echoes with a sharp “clock” through the hollow grip. Slap a magazine into the grip, pull the slide back a little more and let it go. The sharp “smack” tells you a bullet has seated in the chamber. The tiny pin sticks out in front of the hammer to confirm the bullet is in place. If you pull the trigger, the next sound you hear will be considerably louder. While the boom reverberates on the range, you will hear the next clock-smack. The gun will fire again.

Editor's Note: In May 2005, The Rake ran a story by former KSTP-TV reporter Dean Staley about Clancy Prevost, the man whose suspicions about his flight student Zacharias Moussaui led to the apprehension of the "twentieth hijacker" behind the 9/11 attacks. Before our story hit the street in print, but after it was posted on our website, the StarTribune, in an attempt to discredit us and Prevost, (and to take credit themselves for the story of who caught Moussaui) ran a front page story the day before