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Kitchen Window to Close, Uptown Dead Again

Plus students clash with school board, George Morrison gets U.S.P.S. recognition, and a Minneapolis cop is (mildly) reprimanded in today's Flyover.

2:20 PM CST on November 23, 2021

Kitchen Window

Aw, Man, Not Kitchen Window Too

Stephanie March said it best: “Well dang. Kitchen Window is closing in Uptown.” An anchor of the Uptown business district for 35 years, the kitchen supply store on Hennepin isn’t calling it quits because of “the crime” or bike lanes or any other hot-button trending topics. Nope, it’s just because 35 years is a very long time to operate a kitchen supply store. Thirty-five years! Hell, Prince probably shopped there at some point. (Can you prove he didn’t? Ha, didn’t think so.) “In our wildest dreams, we couldn’t have imagined what this store was to become and what it has meant to so many people,” said Doug Huemoeller, who co-owns Kitchen Window with his wife Lia. A 20% off liquidation sale begins on Black Friday, and the store will close in January. I just hope it’s true what they say: God never closes a kitchen window without opening a kitchen door. 

School Board Flees From Upset Students

Prior Lake-Savage Area Schools seem to have an issue with racism, which is not surprising since that school district is in the United States. After a recent video of racial slurs targeted at student Nya Sigin made the issue impossible to ignore, the school board held a special meeting, according to Bring Me the News. Some present and former students showed up to share their perspectives, and after the discussion heated up, the school board (with the exception of its one Black member) left the room, returning later only to adjourn. "You do not listen to anything we have to say,” Elizabeth Sigin, Nya’s sister, later shouted at the board. "Every day we have to struggle and you can just walk out of the room and not see what we have to go through."

Police Brutality OK If You Report It To Your Boss

Go ahead and hit people with rubber bullets—just make sure you leave a paper trail. That's the basic takeaway from the disciplinary action against Minneapolis police officer Oscar Macias. During the unrest following the murder of George Floyd, Macias shot two people with rubber bullets. He then failed to file a "use of force" report with his department. (Macias says he did, it was just lost due to a computer glitch). A year later, the swift hand of discipline swooped down and issued him with... a written reprimand, the lowest reprimand possible. Justice! As Deena Winters points out in the Minnesota Reformer, this is another infuriating example of the slow pace of accountability from the MPD. Macias is the second officer to be disciplined for action during the unrest, the other being Colleen Ryan, who was reprimanded for speaking anonymously to journalists about toxic work culture around that time.

Big Local Stamp News!

George Morrison’s art is going to appear on a series of U.S. postage stamps, the Star Tribune reports. An abstract expressionist and the founder of Native Modernism, Morrison was born in the North Shore village of Chippewa City, and was a member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. He studied in Paris, hobnobbed with the likes of Warhol and De Kooning in New York, and was the first native artist to have his artwork displayed in the White House. The Postal Service says his work "challenged prevailing ideas of what Native American art should be, arguing that an artist's identity can exist independently from the nature of the art he creates." Morrison died in 2000.  

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