Minnesota Independent:
A slide show of today's Veterans Against War protest, during which 9 people were arrested for violating the perimeter around the convention location. It includes photos of an elderly woman confronting and being handcuffed by a full riot squad. A nun and a person in a wheelchair were also arrested, according to other reports.
Michelle Gross has contributed video she shot during the Convergence Center raid as she lay on the floor.

Campaign Silo:
Two of today’s nine arrestees released, NLG attempting to have judge rule on 6 arrested yesterday
Legal groups file emergency motion to stop cell and camera seizures during RNC
Habeas corpus in Ramsey County, MN

The UpTake:
Police seize sustainable living bus
RNC Eve: Police make arrests, confiscate urine, feces, paint, old tires
Chuck Olsen reports from the protest at Lake and Hiawatha this afternoon. (Aaron tweeted its progress as well.)

Feministing correspondent Anne Elizabeth Moore: The FBI, the retired colonel, and the roomful of anarchists. Her Twitter feed is here.

The New York Times coverage remains minimal and buried in the Politics section. Evidently the sheriff’s office is refusing to return their calls.

Meanwhile, Canadians are starting to wonder why they’re not seeing mainstream media coverage of this.

Tags: rnc, rncprotests, stpaul

Posted at 6:53 PM | Permalink

If you’re curious about the “anarchist organization” the police are so concerned about, you can find the RNC Welcoming Committee page here. They describe themselves on the sidebar as “anarchist / anti-authoritarian” and their rhetoric is intentionally open, leaving room for a range of protest types. Violence is never specifically supported on their public page. Cold Snap Legal Collective, “an autonomous legal collective based in the Twin Cities whose purpose is to work in solidarity with other groups or individuals in order to educate, empower, and support the radical community by sharing knowledge, raising awareness, and developing a network of legal support and solidarity,” is on the ground providing legal support. They’re running a twitter feed with constant updates on the arrests.

On the local news, the police are proudly displaying buckets of urine for supposed urine bombs that were seized in yesterday's raid. FireDogLake is reporting that it came from an illegal apartment that was not equipped with a bathroom. (See here for a report on Denver's ban on noxious substances during the DNC. Also see relevant story in the Minnesota Independent section below, which reports that two of the three seized buckets contained grey water.)

In more positive protest news, see here for background on The Unconvention, a protest collective by various local art organizations, including the Walker Arts Center, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and UMN’s own Weisman Art Museum. The Twitter aggregation is here and the Flickr pool is here.

Momo has some well-stated thoughts that include this quote from an interview between Glenn Greenwald and local lawyer Bruce Nestor:

Glenn: I mean it clearly seems like it's clearly intending to intimidate. You break into a house with 25 officers with submachine guns drawn and put them all on the floor and handcuff them, it's clearly sending a message that they might want to think twice about participating.

Nestor: I do think....We're not in this country yet where we're having mass detentions of people like this, so it really is about sending a message. I think what it really is designed to do is to send a message to people who agree with some of the viewpoints of people organizing activity and to say - you know what? You can write an email, it's okay to write a letter, to vote, but don't go out in the street, don't organize public activity, because do you want us bursting into your house? Do you want to be associated with people who are getting arrested? It's designed to somehow say these aren't citizens engaged in the exercise of political freedom, but that they're kooks, they're freaks, they're dangerous, stay away from them, don't get involved.

Glenn: And there's been no evidence that any actual violence or illegality has been committed, this is all preventative right, it's all anticipatory?

Bruce: That's right.

Momo also links to this story that I wasn’t aware of last night: Snatch squads are picking up people off the street and charging them with ‘conspiracy to commit riot. Footage and transcript of the Greenwald/Nestor interview is in that last link, and it features a clear, yet lawyerly description of the flimsiness and rare usage of that charge.

Also from FireDogLake:
Dangerous environmental terrorists prevented from demonstrating solar panels at RNC
Inside an RNC Raid

Minnesota Independent:
City inspectors board up raided home for code violations. Once the police leave the premises, the city code people show up and start boarding up the houses, usually on the grounds that there is a broken back door (which, of course, the police just kicked in). Evidently, the city charges homeowners $6,000 for boarding up a home.
National Lawyers Guild: in pre-RNC raids, urine was not a weapon. The Guild says they will be “aggressively defending” the six activists who were arrested yesterday. (The rest of the detainees at each raid location were let go after a few hours.) The MPD can hold detainees without charging them for 36 hours, but weekends and holidays don’t count in the hour total. This means that those arrested can be held until Wednesday afternoon without any formal charges filed against them.
Police seize propaganda literature, staples, curtain rods, and caltrops from raided home on 17th Avenue. It seems that computers were also seized at most raid locations.
Pre-RNC police raids: reporter’s notebook notes that the local Quakers are providing sanctuary to RNC Welcoming Party members.

The Uptake has had time to put together some non-camera-phone, lightly edited pieces:
RNC Eve: “The police are acting like Nazis” Michelle Gross of Communities Against Police Brutality was detained by police along with her husband as they were on their way home from a meeting. When they got home, their garage and car had been ransacked. Nothing was taken, but documents and belongings were searched.
Inside the raided “RNC Welcoming Committee” Center
No Knock raid of house supplying food to RNC protesters
RNC Eve: The police raids begin

The national blog media is starting to pick up the story:
Crooks and Liars: The Republicans are coming to Minneapolis: quick, hide the bill of rights!
Bitch PhD has a correspondent in the area, so I suspect they will have ongoing reports: Twin Cities criminalize dissent, privatize public space, militarize police response. Nihilix has a concise roundup on Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher’s current corruption charges and the FBI probe into those.

When I looked at CNN.com at 8:32, there was still not a single mention of the raids. Neither is there one on the front page of the New York Times online edition. Salon, of all things, is on the job: Massive police raids on suspected protesters in Minneapolis. (Note: almost all the raids were in St. Paul, not Minneapolis. Just say “Twin Cities” if you don’t know the difference.) It links to the i-Witness blog, which details the raid on their house. i-Witness is a citizen journalism collective that documents police behavior at legal protests, most notably at the 2004 RNC.

Tags: rnc, rncprotests, stpaul

Posted at 7:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There have been at least five police raids on anti-RNC protester houses today, at least some of which appear to involve questionable warrant procedures, and one group of protesters was detained at the Canadian border. The producer for Democracy Now said in an interview (linked below) that once she refused police entrance to her apartment since the warrant was for two doors down, they entered the listed apartment and then went through the attic to her own residence, entering through the bedroom ceiling with machine guns drawn.

Since I’m not grabbing the cameras and heading out on the street, I figure the least I can do is link the ongoing citizen journalism reports of anti-activist and anti-journalist raids here to drive up the Google ranks and spread the news. WCCO briefly covered it on the 5 pm broadcast, along with a story on the National Lawyers Guild training program for citizen documentation of police abuse. But the national news stations — all of whom have correspondent teams camped out in the city — didn’t mention it at all, so far as I know.

The Minnesota Independent:
Protesters meeting space raided by Ramsey County
Ramsey County sheriff issues statement on raid
Sheriff anticipates arresting thousands during 2008 RNC
Crackdown begins: Food Not Bombs house among Saturday raids
Warrant at Food Not Bombs house sought bombs, feces, razor wire (The warrant covers such basic items as nails, screws, bricks, computers, “media in whatever form,” and digital camera equipment. All of which can be used in weapons in a protest, but also all of which are common household items. Which makes it totally permissible to raid pretty much anyone with this kind of warrant list.)
Police searches turn up weapons and other devices to disrupt traffic
Reports of additional Pre-RNC raids in St. Paul still arriving
RNC Welcoming Committee detained, denied entry at Canadian border
Anti-RNC activists respond to police raids; convergence space reopens
RNC Welcoming Committee unbowed by raids
Members of raided houses speak out
Oh no, the anarchists are coming: media scare tactics unfounded, Anti-RNC groups say

The Uptake’s reporters have been following the raids and streaming video live from their phones. You can find the Twitter feed here:
Police swarm Earth Justice bus in St. Paul
Police detain Democracy Now
Police enter house
Lawyers in handcuffs
Tour of raided protester HQ
Inside the RNC Protest Center
Police detain journalists
Police bust through attic to detain Democracy Now producer
National Lawyer’s Guild: police raid “preventive detention”
Police make no arrests after raiding RNC Journalist home
Police raid in St. Paul of Green Party Activists’ home
Police bolt doors at RNC Protest Organizing Center
Homeland Security vans head to RNC protester house raid in St. Paul

Twin Cities Daily Planet:
Big Green Bus arrested
Journalists targeted by FBI in St. Paul
Ramsey County sheriff raids homes in South Minneapolis
Police break down doors in night-time raid on anarchist meeting
Detained Glass Bead videographer on policing in the age of YouTube
It can’t happen here? It already has.

Tags: rnc, rncprotests, stpaul

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You may remember that back in late July, Mr. Husband and I got busted by private security for shooting in the Minneapolis skyway system. We had shot there before on various occasions, but the last guard explained since the RNC is coming to town, there has been some concern about the Metrodome being a terrorist target. (Never mind that the RNC is being held in St. Paul, not Minneapolis.) This was bothersome, since the skyways are city property and there is no city ordinance in place to support the security companies' actions, but since they were polite and made no moves to confiscate our gear or images, we left quietly and agreed between ourselves not to blog about it. In retrospect, I regret that silence.

Last week, six photographers were detained. Monday night, a former journalist was handcuffed for photographing police on the North Side. And then yesterday, members of the Glass Bead Collective who specialize in documenting police activity at legal protests were arrested very close to the UMN Twin Cities campus. They were detained and their gear, images, schedules, and notes were confiscated.

Last night, I was talking to a smart, socially active colleague who I like and respect about the rhetoric of fear that's permeated these past few years. When I mentioned the recent arrests of photographers, she said, “Oh, well that's just something we're going to have to get used to,” and dismissed it as a concern of hobbyists. I disagree. Once we lose the right to document the government’s actions or produce a casual history of the city at a moment like this, we lose much more than the right to wander around town with cameras. We lose the right to present anything other than the official version of reality.

Posted at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Miles driven: approx. 13,000
Damage to car: I’ve always thought that cars are meant to be used and a few dings don’t matter much, but jeez. Here it is: scratches on driver's side from attempted break-in in the Seattle Westin deck, two dings on the driver's side from whatever, keyed all the way across the back in Las Vegas (fixed), deep gash on passenger door from someone in a parking lot, rear bumper scraped on passenger side by one of us. Ungentlepersons of the world, please stop touching my car. I can mess it up all on my own. Your help is not required.
Summer Music: I’ve become convinced that Let It Bleed is the perfect August night driving record. And for some reason, there’s been an inordinate amount of Electriclarryland and Hairway to Steven. Perhaps it’s evident I haven’t been particularly interested in new music these past few months.
Photos made: Around 2,000. Which feels like less than last year, but it’s not. Almost 600 of them made it to flickr.
Courses taught: None. For the first time since I was 13, I had no summer job, since (with Mr. Husband’s encouragment) I turned down several. I really never anticipated how restorative this would be.
Trips to the Farmer’s Market: almost every weekend since we returned at the beginning of July.
Tomato sandwiches consumed: Innumerable. I am Harriet the Spy. Wheat bread, mayo, tomato, salt and pepper. That’s all you need.
Conferences attended: just the one, but it was my favorite.
Papers accepted for conference proceedings: one.
Conference proposals accepted: one, so I’ll be at C’s next year. Which coincidentally is in the right place at the right time for whale watching. I’m already working on rounding up a posse for that.
Non-diss books read: hardly any. The only ones I remember of that very short stack is Barrie’s Peter Pan and the Norton Alice in Wonderland. I was reading the latter one night and looked down to see that my outside committee member (the book history guy) is a footnote in it. I love that one of my committee used to work on this sort of text.
Pages written: A bunch.
Museums visited: The Walker, The Minnesota Institute of the Arts, LA County Museum of the Arts, the Norton Simon, UC Riverside, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, a book museum in Santa Barbara, the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette, the Milwaukee Art Museum. A lot of tiny local museums, like the 20 Mule Team Museum in Boron, CA.

This is the first summer in just about forever — my entire life, really — that I’m sorry to see the season finish. Here, there’s this weekend and next weekend, and that’s pretty much it. It’s been a difficult year, and there’s much I’m not writing about here these days, but it’s also been one of the deepest, most resounding ones. And this season has been particularly satisfying.

Posted at 6:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’ve read about fried squash blossoms for years and years, but never had them. The markets where I’ve lived generally don’t have them for sale, and I’ve never had the space to grow squash. But when C and I were wandering around the St. Paul market on Sunday, there was one huge bunch of blossoms resting over to the side of a vendor’s table, where it had been studiously ignored by the Minnesotans all morning*. We were prepared to shell out a bundle for it, but the farmer only wanted $2. We snatched them up, paid, and ran away fast before he could change his mind.

So last night I made fried squash blossoms, which turned out not to be as difficult as I'd always thought it might be. I mean, sure, you have to open the blossoms up and check for bugs, but that wasn’ so traumatic. I mixed some ricotta with fresh-milled black and white pepper, a wee bit of crushed red pepper, some garlic, and some olive oil. Next, I dumped all that into a ziploc, cut off a corner, and piped it into the blossoms. Then I twisted them shut, rolled them in egg, and then rolled them in flour that I mixed with a little salt and more pepper. Finally, I fried two batches in a couple of inches of smoking-hot oil.

When I bit into them, I did not see God, as promised in various written accounts of stuffed squash blossoms. But as I worked my way through the plate (Mr. Husband was having nothing to do with this), they grew on me. They’re very fresh tasting considering the fact that they're fried, and very mild — perfectly balanced with a mild cheese like ricotta that’s been spiced up a bit. Crunchy on the outside, creamy on the inside. I’m not dashing back out the door in search of more blossoms, but I might make them again sometime, particularly if I was having guests.

*One other table had local tomatillos, which you also don't see so often up here. The woman beside me was poking at them and asking the farmer, "But what are they?" Tomatillos. "But what do you do with them?" Make salsa. "What? How?" I loves the Minnesotans, but it seems to take quite a lot for them to step out of their usual habits when it comes to food.

This seems like a good a time as any for an inventory meme like the VGT Omnivore’s Hundred, found via Momo. Looks like I’ve been in my own food rut, since a lot of the missing items can be easily remedied in a couple of trips around town.

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

1. Venison. My friend Chad used to go hunting every year, and he'd bring me venison sausage biscuits when we worked the night shift.
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile. (Does alligator count? I've eaten alligator boudin and alligator pizza.)
6. Black pudding. In Scotland.
7. Cheese fondue, which Mr. Husband makes fairly frequently.
8. Carp
9. Borscht, which is a specialty of C's family.
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari, for forever.
12. Pho, which always reminds me of Emily and my old student Vong.
13. PB&J sandwich, which Compatriot G recently turned me back on to.
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart. In Chicago, no less.
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes. An old girlfriend of mine was partial to peach wine. Always a mark of quality.
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes, from the time I was knee-high to a gnat.
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans. Can you be Southern without making rice and beans?
25. Brawn, or head cheese, which Mom reminds me that I ate as a child at my grandmother’s house.
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper. I’m a wuss, and would probably only do this if it was the last thing left to close out this list.
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters. With the peach-wine-drinking girlfriend, who also had very good taste.
29. Baklava. This is a Mr. Husband thing.
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl. In Monterey. It is never good there.
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut. Always in the fridge.
35. Root beer float. (Momo, who doesn't like root beer? I forgive you, though.)
36. Cognac with a fat cigar. How have I not done this?
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O. I'm sure the current job market compadres will take care of this one.
39. Gumbo. (The last batch I made of this, on Oscar night, was just awful.)
40. Oxtail. At a Basque restaurant in Bakersfield.
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel. Frequently in the form of unagi.
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut. Not as fabulous as promised.
50. Sea urchin (but not for lack of trying in Seattle)
51. Prickly pear (found these in a local supermarket last week, and I’m so going back)
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone, which I totally meant to eat back in June and never did.
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin. If you've had Kaopectate, haven't you had kaolin?
64. Currywurst
65. Durian. C. reminds me in the comments that I have indeed had durian sticky rice with her.
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake. Funnel cake in Eureka Springs, beignets at Cafe du Monde.
68. Haggis. In Edinburgh.
69. Fried plantain. Very easy to make.
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail. Actually, I love escargot. Must get C back over to get some.
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict, which will always remind me of C, who whips them up all the time.
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers. See above!
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam. At the Spam Museum.
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish, most Fridays I lived in Arkansas.
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake. Rattlesnake.

Posted at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

(via onegoodmove, pointed out by the lovely Mister Husband.)

Posted at 3:10 PM | Permalink

Via Compatriot G, straight to my inbox and apropos of my interest in bots and agency. I’m filing it here so I can find it again.:

"As Descartes pointed out in the Discourse on Method, genuine language must be inventive and apt, capable of an indefinite number of utterances that suit the circumstances in which they are uttered. Hence parrots and all manner of parroting devices, from echo chambers to tape recorders, are disqualified from true speech. Descartes believed that language was distinctively human, a criterion for distinguishing anthropos from automaton" (Lorrraine Daston, Things that Talk 11).

Posted at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Say whatever you want about Keillor’s famous tone and subject matter, but there’s two things he’s undeniably a master of. One is media distribution across whatever mediums make sense at the time. The other is the less-glamorous but always impressive job of simply getting a lot of work done very consistently for a very long time.

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Via Scott.

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This purple plastic lawn chair mysteriously appeared on the grass outside my study window. It appears to have done so all by itself; I haven’t seen anyone actually sunbathing in it yet.

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It was right about a year ago that I started shooting muck, but I think shooting muck at night totally counts as branching out. I’ve been night shooting once before with the Lumix, but this was with the D80 and oh, holy hell. I have so much to learn.

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I didn’t realize until recently that I like to make these, or even that I’ve been snapping them since I first started playing around with a camera several years ago. I suppose it’s nice to be consistent, even if you don’t notice.

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