The Beat

by Steve Downing

We recently had some feedback from a listener who wondered why I had read a poem by Shanthi Siva on The Beat---why not Shanthi, herself, reading it?

Fair question. Simple answer: Shanthi has no access to a recording studio and is perfectly happy to have other readers interpreting her work. She’s not alone. There are other poets in The Beat file right now who can’t provide quality recordings and have no qualms about someone else reading their poems on-air. It’s our preference to have writers reading their own work, but occasionally the overriding goal of getting someone onto the program will trump that preference.

By the bye, I heard from Shanthi after we ran her poem, and she loved how it sounded. So did her friends and family. Some of them accessed it from India, where Shanthi was born. The world is listening to The Beat.

Listen for The Beat after Best Wishes, between 7:30 and 8:00 Monday through Friday mornings and then again before NPR’s All Things Considered in the afternoon. The Beat is funded by Minnesota’s Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund.

Bears and Prairies

by Scott Hall


A conservation officer with the Minnesota DNR shot and killed a collared black bear on Thursday, Aug. 2, in Eagle Nest Township between Tower and Ely.  According to the DNR incident report, the bear had entered a garage where children were present and refused to leave the area.

The agency received a call from upset residents whose children were in their garage when the bear entered it. The residents reported they made repeated unsuccessful attempts to scare the bear away, including using an air horn, and that the bear snarled at them.

Two conservation officers arrived to find the bear still in the area. The bear appeared to have become accustomed to humans through hand feeding. After the bear refused to leave the residence, despite attempts by a conservation officer to frighten it away, the officer killed it.

This story with an unhappy ending got a lot of public attention statewide.  Bears are close to the top of my list of favorite wild animals in northern MN, and I understand the outpouring of sympathy for this bear.  But are we more concerned about this bear than maintaining habitats that insure healthy wildlife populations?  The easy answer is we have concern for both.   Easy to say.

Prairies aren't the preferred habitat for bears, but they are home for a lot of game and non-game wildlife like the prairie chicken (left).  Most of the native prairies in Minnesota disappeared a long time ago.  The DNR sent out a news release about a new prairie conservation plan the same week of the bear shooting, but the death of this single bear generated more headlines than the future of the state's last prairies. 

When corn and soybean (or timber) values go up, the importance of habitat takes a back seat. We expect public and private natural resource managers to maintain a balance, but in good and bad economic times there is the constant pressure to extract more.

Forget Ringing- Now They're Playing Videos

by Maddi Frick


I went out for lunch today, a pizza and salad buffet.  The restaurant was particularly busy, surprising us because we thought the insane construction in Grand Rapids would have deterred people.  I sat down after dodging my way through the buffet line (impatiently waiting behind a woman cherry-picking certain pieces lettuce from the salad bin).  


Ready to delve into my waiting crust pieces, I was disturbed by the sound of a cellphone.  It wasn't ringing, but was displaying a video to its owner.  And it didn't stop.  The restaurant was loud, so the phone's owner had turned up the volume to a jaw-clenching level to make it audible.  I know I'm particularly annoyed with noise pollution- just ask my parents about eating potato chips while I'm in the house.  However, I can imagine I wasn't the only one aghast as the phone's owner played the 30-second clip for the second time so her dining companion could watch.  


At one point, someone's cell phone actually rang at a different booth.  I felt no annoyance at the beeping sound.  Can you imagine?  It's 2012 and I'm not concerned with an interrupting cell phone ring as the early 2000's had predicted- because the cell phones can do things far worse now.  People with no phone etiquette can subject the rest of us to their personal choice of YouTube video, but only the audio bit.

Brad Swenson

by Scott Hall

We lost a fine, hard working journalist when Brad Swenson died on July 22nd.  During his 31 years at the Bemidji Pioneer Brad was a reporter, managing editor, political editor, and editorial writer.  He performed all those roles with the passion required to meet the civic purpose and high standards of journalism.  Brad earned the trust of his readers and sources which enabled him to do some of the best political reporting in northern Minnesota.  I had the chance to work with Brad on the political debates sponsored by Lakeland Public Television.  Brad had a command of the issues and the background knowledge to ask the best questions and he did it with a grace and ease that I admired very much. Brad was on KAXE a few times over the years, but his true passion was print journalism. We will miss him very much. 

Minnesota's Women?

by Maddi Frick

Last Wednesday, I went to the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota’s Status of Women & Girls in Minnesota Road to Equality Tour stop in Grand Rapids, hosted at the Blandin Foundation. 

That was a lot of titles with capitalized words, but to cover the basics, the event looked at information about women in Minnesota about economic, safety, health and leadership topics and compared the data to that of men and women in other regions. 

While I wasn’t up on the specific percentages, most of the data wasn’t surprising- 

• The wage gap keeps $1 million dollars from the average Minnesota woman over her lifetime 
• 33% of women in Minnesota report being sexually or physically attacked by mid-life 
• 55% of Minnesotan women are overweight or obese
• Only 14 seats of 72 new corporate board seats created in 2010 were filled by women, and those 14 were all white 

The room was packed.  The presenters kept us engaged.  The facts were often sad, but at times hopeful. 

But I have to admit, while fact after fact proved to me that women are still to this day not treated equally in society, there was something else that made me incredibly disappointed in the state of women’s affairs.  Two men came to the presentation.  I’m not complaining that men dared to show up, I’m complaining that only two men cared enough to show up.

This is the root of my frustration with being female in this region.  Feminism is a word that represents an aggressive know-it-all who doesn’t wear a bra.  We’ve moved past the blatant perception of feminism but haven’t replaced the understanding with a definition that suits 2012.  


This is a national problem, but I feel like our region is even more behind than the rest.  I’ve been forced to battle my own stereotypes on the differences between men and women the past few years and find it frustrating to return Up North.  I find more women critical of other women’s looks and more men who won’t clean the kitchen.

It isn’t enough to have equal opportunities in the workplace.  When you meet a little girl, don’t comment on how pretty she is or how cute her clothes are- ask her about her dreams and the books she’s read.  And do the same for little boys.  


A lot of our problems could disappear if we created a culture of knowledge, goals and a good attitude instead of one of segregated roles and stereotypes.

Beat Blog: The Beginning

by Steve Downing, Acting Producer of The Beat

In the first two weeks of The Beat, Northern Community Radio’s Morning Show poem-for-a-day, we’ve featured some very famous, very dead poets with Minnesota connections: Gregory Corso, a charter member of the Beats back in the 1950s; John Berryman, a highly acclaimed poet and teacher when he jumped to his death from a bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis in 1972; James Wright, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who taught at both the University of Minnesota and Macalaster; and Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota’s current Poet Laureate.

And we’ve included poets who are known (as poets) only to their families and friends.  In time, as this project heats up, you’ll even hear poems written and read by kids who don’t think of themselves as poets. There are really only two criteria at The Beat: 1) the poetry has to be good, and 2) Minnesota has to figure prominently in the poet’s personal story.

An RFP (Request For Poems) is floating around the state now, after a few strategic emails, and poetry is pouring in from everywhere, particularly from established, published poets who are well connected to each other and to the grapevine and who know what a unique opportunity The Beat is. We won’t be able to use every submission, but we promise to look carefully at everything, without bias as to where it came from.

Listen for The Beat after Best Wishes, between 7:30 and 8:00 Monday through Friday mornings. We’ll likely find other times to use it, too. We’re making this up as we go along, in true Northern Community Radio fashion, and the feedback is telling us we’re most definitely onto something

The Beat is funded by Minnesota’s Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund.

Culturology 7/19/12

by Travis Ryder

No one will be bored around here in the next few days unless they want to be.

Jennifer Nelson, Thrones and Easy Chairs

MacRostie Art Center in downtown Grand Rapids has a show of work from artist Jennifer Nelson.  She earned advanced degrees at Grand Forks and Mankato and has been showing her work for more than a decade around the country.  The series of drawings in the current MacRostie exhibition, Rest and Remainder, has been influenced by landscape and literature. Nelson’s current residence in the Great Plains appears through the openness of her compositions and the isolation of the subject matter. The drawings are intentionally spare to create a focus on the objects that are present. In addition, the works function as illustrations for absent stories, leaving the viewer to piece together the “how?” and “why?”  She likes to draw things on stilts and/or make their legs extra long. This morning in the 8:00 hour, we visited with her. 

Sena Ehrhardt Band.  Credit: Charles Walton

There is a music festival coming to the KAXE Amphitheater on Saturday.  We'll hear from one of the exciting, Minnesota-based acts on the Mississippi River Festival bill.  Blind Pig recording artist Sena Ehrhardt is a stunning blues singer by night and a full-time professional in the health care field by day.  She and her band (including her dad Ed on guitar) are touring beyond the Midwest now, propelled by a nationally-released album (the first in a three-disc deal) and a Best New Artist nomination in this year's Blues Music Awards.  We hear a phone interview with her this morning.

Thursday, July 19

The Plein Air project is happening in Aitkin through Saturday.  Paint anywhere in the county now through Friday and bring your work to the Jaques by Saturday.  Works will be displayed in local banks through early August. 

Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” is staged this weekend and next week at the Central Lakes College Brainerd campus.

The Mississippi Melodie showboat comes ashore with vaudeville-style entertainment in Grand Rapids Thursday through Saturday night at 9.

Tonight through Sunday, the Paul Bunyan Playhouse theater production is “The Dixie Swim Club”, about the lifelong relationships between a group of former college swim team members.

“Nunsense” is at the Minnesota Folklore Theater in Walker this weekend.

Friday, July 20

Poetry at the historic Last Turn Saloon in downtown Brainerd. Poets attending the 25^th annual League of MN Poets Woodtick Retreat in northern Minnesota will be performing their poetry. We welcome community to read their poetry also.  Starts at 7:30.

Saturday, July 21

The fourth annual Celtic Festival is in Brainerd, with musical performances from 11 to 6 at the Farm at St. Mathias.

Bemidji has Art in the Park Fine Art and Craft Festival this Saturday and Sunday.  It’s the 45^th year for the event, welcoming a hundred exhibitors and many more spectators to the Lake Bemidji waterfront.

The KAXE Mississippi River Festival is a daylong music event under the Rotary Tent next to our studios in Grand Rapids.  This year the featured acts are Dan Newton’s Café Accordion Orchestra, Ohio emo-country artist Lydia Loveless, Minnesota blues siren Sena Ehrhardt, and honky-tonk guitar master Bill Kirchen.

Sunday, July 22

Bemidji Area Community Band has a concert on the grounds of BSU at 7:00.

Monday, July 23

Rail River Folk School offers an environment-focused mural session.  Several local artists will lead the effort; bring your own painting clothes to the school in Bemidji starting at 5:30 Monday.  All ages can participate.

Minnesota History Datebook

July 21, 1820 Michigan governor Lewis Cass reaches what he thinks is the source of the Mississippi River. Today this body of water is known as Cass Lake.

July 19, 1967 Some of the inner-city unrest around the nation that summer reaches Minneapolis as a crowd throws rocks and sets fires, mostly along Plymouth Avenue.  The riot starts at about 11:30 P.M. and lasts for two nights. 150 national guardsmen are called up to maintain the peace, and the toll for both nights is three people shot, two policemen and one fireman injured, thirty-four people arrested, and four businesses burned to the ground.