Yesterday evening I attended the opening of this year’s Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival at the Riverview Theater in Minneapolis’s Longfellow neighborhood. A uniformed security officer stood guard conspicuously packing heat. The film — Midas Man, a biopic telling the story of Beatles manager Brian Epstein — was of course open to the public, but the film festival is notably “Jewish,” the name of the festival was included on the theater’s marquee, and the film attracted a largely Jewish audience. As in attending high holiday services, we were taking our lives in our hands, if you know what I mean.
I met up with Ron Butwin and his wife at the film. As a teenager in the sixties, Ron was the drummer for a few of the best Twin Cities rock bands. An incredibly entrepreneurial musician, he presented a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar to George Harrison at the press conference preceding their 1965 concert at Metropolitan Stadium with Brian Epstein in attendance. Ron had come up with the idea of the presentation as an employee of B-Sharp Music.
Rick Shefchik devotes the better part of a chapter to Ron in his excellent history Everybody’s Heard about the Bird: The True Story of 1960s Rock ‘n’ Roll in Minnesota (2015). As Shefchik recounts in the book, when Chuck Berry came to St. Paul in early 1964, Ron’s faux British Invasion band — this was their first gig — opened for him. There is much more to the story for which Shefchik did not have room. You’ll have to ask Ron.
Yesterday “Fridley man” Firomsa Ahmed Umar was charged with two counts of arson in connection with the late-night firebombing of a Minneapolis ice cream shop earlier this week. He allegedly struck late Sunday evening and again Monday afternoon. Once was not enough.
Umar’s motive remains unclear. Speculation ranges from the LGBTQ flag that the ice cream shop had affixed to the building and to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s residence with his family on the same block in a loft apartment. Frey is Jewish. Perhaps Umar was expressing support for Frey opponent Ahmed Fateh.
The LGBTQ flag thing seems like a stretch. There is no shortage of LGBTQ flags around town. Why pick on Fletcher’s Ice Cream and Cafe? Maybe Umar was protesting ice cream.
The adjacency of Frey’s residence also seems like a stretch. Umar went back a second time to target the shop. It is unlikely that Frey was his intended target.
Umar’s motive may have been overdetermined. Unfortunately, we will probably have to await word from Umar himself. But I was thinking about Umar last night at the film festival showing of Midas Man.
