Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/author/paul-schmelzer/page/9/)
by Paul Schmelzer, 5/15/08 • One of the many challenges facing artists today (and always) is how to do what you love and be able to pay the rent. For my wife Mok and I, we’re rolling several endeavors together, under the aegis of Mok Studio, and they’ll all be on view this weekend at Art-a-Whirl, the three-day art crawl in Northeast Minneapolis.
Paul Schmelzer, 5/1/08 • A year of trying to reconnect with the people behind the products
I don’t have much to say about this project that GOOD hasn’t already said, but this is an idea I can get behind. And part of this blogging experiment is amplifying ideas I believe in. So, behold the Consume®econnection Project, in which New York’s Scott Ballum (founder of Consume®evolution magazine) spends his 30th year trying to reconnect with the people behind the products he consumes. He describes the project:
Paul Schmelzer, 4/30/08 • Print news is in such famously bad shape that Advertising Age is running “The Newspaper Death Watch,” which quotes an expert who gives an industry in “terminal decline” 20 to 25 years to live. In this context, it’s noteworthy when any publication decides to launch a pulp version: This week the Twin Cities culture magazine Rift, which ditched its print version not long ago for a web-only enterprise, announced that it’ll start producing a “newspaper style guide” to goings-on in the area. Continue Reading
by Paul Schmelzer, 5/3/08 • Dr. Steven Miles, an internationally known expert on medical complicity in torture at places like Abu Ghraib (and professor at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics), was scheduled to speak at St. Joan of Arc Church in Minneapolis before tomorrow’s mass. But when the anti-choice lobbying group Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life got wind of it, they called on the Catholic archdiocese to shut it down. They did — on grounds that, while Miles’ work on torture is exemplary, he doesn’t toe the church’s pro-life line. St. Continue Reading
• by Paul Schmelzer, 4/23/08 • I hope this woman — calm, polite, asking the kind of incisive questions often missing in our political discourse — is studying journalism at Knox College. Check out her question to the ornery former Attorney General on waterboarding (which Ashcroft says is is not prohibited by the Geneva Conventions because it leaves no “lasting scars”):
by Paul Schmelzer, 3/14-19/08 • Eyeteeth • As protests in Tibet over Chinese rule have left anywhere from 10 to 100 people dead, many are calling for a boycott of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Meanwhile, Reporters without Borders is campaigning for a boycott, too, calling the country “the world’s biggest prison for journalists and cyber-dissidents.” Its list of nine failings by China range from the jamming of foreign radio signals and blocking of websites to the jailing of internet users and reporters. Continue Reading
by Paul Schmelzer, Eyeteeth • 3/8/08 • In our last night in Chiang Mai, we gathered with artists and friends on the sixth floor of our guest house, a rooftop space not yet installed with windows or walls. Continue Reading
by Paul Schmelzer, 2/25/08 • While this kanom, a sticky-rice dessert with custard wrapped in banana leaf, was tasty, the more important part of this shot is the series of bands of string on my wrist. On Sunday, Mok and I were married in a traditional Thai ceremony, part two of a process that started with our October 2006 wedding in Wisconsin.
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While some of its local sympathizers are likely to stick around, the country’s largest remaining neo-Nazi group has officially pulled up stakes in Minnesota: the Hitler-inspired National Socialist Movement (NSM) has left its longtime Minneapolis headquarters and relocated to Michigan, according to a press release dated Dec. 29.
NSM head Jeff Schoep moved from Hutchinson to Detroit, bringing the group’s business operations with him, says Michael Brooks, a former Detroit resident who now lives in Toledo and covered NSM-sparked riots there for the Free Press two years ago.
Fifty-nine years ago today, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a radical document predicated on the belief that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Today, Human Rights Day, kicks off a year of commemoration — in which the UN will seek to raise awareness of its principles — leading up to the Declaration’s 60th anniversary.