Also in this Issue
- Silent Scream A series of teen rapes shocks local Hmong parents into confronting a new culture: their children. (Cover Story)
- Whitewater Affair The current investigation into rafting the rapids on Minneapolis's stretch of the Mississippi (City Beat)
- Clean Up or Ship Out Minneapolis police and housing inspectors join forces against litterbugs in their own homes (City Beat)
- More articles from this issue...
More News/City Beat Articles
- Infield Fly Rule A scrappy little league pitches its last run (Aug 5, 1998)
- The Great TP War During his stay at a Catholic Charities boardinghouse, Greg Scott complained about everything from bathroom tissue to medication practices. And he's not done yet. (Aug 5, 1998)
- Echo of a Murder An affluent Minneapolis-Edina neighborhood thought 18-year-old Henry Moormann's funeral would be the last of the 2-1 Click. The July 19 shooting of another teen suggests otherwise. (Jul 29, 1998)
- The Junge and the Restless DFL endorsement was su.pposed to catapult Ember Reichgott Junge to the top of the primary heap, but insiders say the AG candidate's campaign is sinking like a lead balloon (Jul 29, 1998)
- Hog Tide There's too much pork for just one fork in St. Paul's stretch of the Mississippi (Jul 29, 1998)
- Mug Shots The Minneapolis Police Department brings honor back to the trading-card business (Jul 22, 1998)
- The Gospel According to the Army A Minneapolis congregation that preaches sobriety surrenders to the Salvation Army (Jul 15, 1998)
- Not His Forte? Minneapolis's troubled Fire Department gets a new boss with some old baggage (Jul 8, 1998)
Email Newsletter
Stay up-to-date with City Pages. Signing up is simple, and you can opt out anytime. Give it a try...
The Loring labor fight takes an obscene turn
When Poetry Hurts
Let them eat verse: Union organizer Blake Harwell
Peter Rachleff says the evening "was like something out of The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie. If you stood on that picket line, and saw the cars that were being parked by valet parking--these are Audis and BMWs and Mercedes. It's a high-buck crowd at the Loring. And remember, the schmuck who owns the Loring and pressed this obscenity arrest is a guy who performs naked and presents himself as a radical."
Naked? "Yes, I have appeared on stage in the buff," confirms Loring Bar and Playhouse and Loring Cafe owner and former actor Jason McLean, "in Brimstone and Treacle and in The Elephant Man. But that was to an audience who bought a ticket for it. It wasn't shoved in their face. In a theater, people pay their money and take their chances." Whereas when they protest on the steps of his café, they take their chances on an arrest for reading "indecent" poetry.
But back up a minute--to July 31, specifically, when Rachleff and about a dozen other labor activists from the National Writers Union and Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 17 lined up outside the Loring for a "poetry picket." The gimmick was the latest round in an ongoing fight between McLean and the union, which last March lost a bid to represent Loring workers. HERE claims McLean used threats and intimidation to quash the union drive. McLean disputes the charges, but in a settlement brokered by the National Labor Relations Board, he posted an agreement that he would not engage in the tactics alleged by union organizers. As part of that agreement, the union is tentatively scheduled to hold a new vote next Friday; since most of the pro-union employees have quit their jobs, neither side expects a yes vote. Still, HERE has maintained a sporadic picketing presence at the Loring, to which McLean has responded by hanging a large banner reading "PICKETS UNFAIR" from his door.
On the night of the poetry picket--which fell into the opening weekend of the Fringe Festival series of performances at locations including the Loring Playhouse--the activists assembled on the sidewalk next to the café's outdoor tables. "After marching around for a bit, we decided that we would give our poetry reading," says Rachleff, a Writers Union member and labor history professor at Macalester College. "We used a bullhorn with a trigger. Some of us read from our own work and some of us from works we liked. I read from a collection called Poetry Like Bread of largely Latin American activist poetry."
Then came Jeff Nygaard's turn. Nygaard, a writer, odd-jobber, and sometime bike courier, read an original poem called "Elevator." "It's a poem I'd written a few years back after I had this conversation in an elevator in 1995 about a front-page article in the New York Times," he says. "A study had been released that the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. I said, 'What do you think?' to these two executives in the elevator. One of them said, 'It doesn't surprise me.' And the poem related that experience." Midway through the poem, Nygaard inserted what he calls a rant, a chronicle of his internal ravings against the executives:
WELL THIS ISN'T JUST A FUCKIN NEWS
STORY
YOU ASSHOLE THEY'RE TALKIN
ABOUT YOU AND ME
RIGHT HERE IN THIS ELEVATOR YOU
GOIN UP
TO YOUR FILTHY PIMPING JOB WHERE
YOU MAKE
25 TIMES MORE THAN ME
AND ME ME ME
ME DELIVERING THIS PACKAGE TO
YOUR RECEPTIONIST
PROBABLY ADVERTISING COPY
FOR YOU TO APPROVE
SO YOUR COMPANY CAN RAM
SOME NEW AND USELESS PRODUCT
DOWN OUR THROATS
THEN YOU'LL MAKE EVEN MORE
MONEY
"This was not the best poem read that night by any means," Nygaard admits readily. "There was a wonderful poem, much better than mine. But the quality of the poem was never the issue."
The issues, it appears, were language and volume. Shortly after Nygaard finished reading, a pair of squad cars approached the scene. "I called 911," McLean recalls, "because they were using a bullhorn to talk at the customers and using a lot of four-letter words. It seemed like they were stepping over the line. And it didn't strike me as an appropriate use of poetic license." McLean went out to speak to the officers along with a customer who'd complained about the performance's "foul language." But instead of Nygaard, the customer pointed the cop to Blake Harwell, a former baker and line cook at the Loring and an organizer for HERE.
Harwell's protestations--that he'd strictly been "observing, holding a sign, and taking pictures of the event"--didn't convince the officer, who issued him a trespass warning allowing police to arrest Harwell if he returns to the Loring within 90 days. Harwell also received a misdemeanor citation for disorderly conduct, which carries a penalty of up to $700 and 90 days in jail.
HERE intends to dispute both the citation and the trespass warning in court--not only to correct the mix-up, says Local 17 Secretary-Treasurer Jaye Rykunyk, but to establish a point of principle. "I'm a big supporter of outdoor restaurants," she explains. "But the right to serve the public on the public sidewalk does not mean that the employer's property has somehow expanded into the public space. Mr. McLean has confused the public property with his private property."
"Those tables are technically on public property," confirms City Council member Lisa Goodman, whose 7th Ward includes the Loring. "It's a great restaurant, but they don't have the right to stifle public protest. We're not going to take sides in this dispute, but we're going to protect the rights of the diners and we're going to protect the rights of the protesters."
What exactly that means could take some legal maneuvering to define. Harwell's trespass warning, for one thing, is a tool usually applied by police to chase unwanted visitors--prostitutes and drug dealers, for example--off landlords' properties. At the Loring, officers from the city's Community Crime Prevention/SAFE program last week told picketers that they could protest on the sidewalk, but not on a disputed triangle of land where some of the restaurant's outdoor tables are. "The bottom line is that the sidewalk is public," says Luther Krueger, a CCP/SAFE crime prevention specialist. "So long as they keep moving and are not blocking pedestrians, they can protest anywhere they want on the sidewalk"--even among the outdoor tables on the public walkway. No court date has been set for Harwell's citations.
Nygaard, for his part, has signed a statement avowing his authorship of "Elevator." "I don't feel bad about saying what I did," he says. "Excuse me, but I was standing on the sidewalk reading poetry. I didn't even think anyone was listening."
About Joseph Hart
From the Archive
- Echo of a Murder An affluent Minneapolis-Edina neighborhood thought 18-year-old Henry Moormann's funeral would be the last of the 2-1 Click. The July 19 shooting of another teen suggests otherwise. (City Beat - Jul 29, 1998)
- Chemical Imbalance How Paul Thelander turned radios into gold, wind into spirits, and chemicals into a cocktail that might have saved the world. (Cover Story - Jul 29, 1998)
- Let There Be Light A Minneapolis church and city leaders square off over windows (City Beat - Jul 8, 1998)
- Nobody's Perfect First the lawsuits. Then the bankruptcy, the divorce, the TV exposé, the attorney general's investigation. Before Dr. Harry Johnson knew it, his cosmetic-surgery empire was in ruins. (Cover Story - Jul 1, 1998)
- Anatomy of a Storm Why some trees stood their ground while others toppled (City Beat - Jun 10, 1998)
- Trunk Show Under the big top with the elephants and their keepers (City Beat - May 20, 1998)
- Room at the Bottom When Eisenhower-era civic leaders drunk on urban renewal laid waste to the Gateway district, they forever altered the topography of this town's hard-luck hotels and shot-and-a-beer saloons. (Cover Story - May 6, 1998)
- From 2-1 to Zero They Made their kids paint over the graffiti and throw out the gang clothes, and they thought they'd seen thelast of the 2-1 Click. Then one of their sons turned up dead in a richfield parking lot. (Cover Story - Apr 15, 1998)
- More articles from the Joseph Hart Archive...
