BabyBoomerBlog

FGafJaL in Star Tribune featuring drummer Kate

Music: She bangs the DRUM

Photo by Tom Wallace, Star Tribune

A composite photo made from three images of Kate in her kitchen sorrounded by band flyer and note to roomates.

Kate McNulty's tough reputation will be tested next week when all five of her bands perform on one night.

By Chris Riemenschneider, Star Tribune

 

TOUGH TOUGH KATE-A-THON

With: Tough Tough Skin, C. Doty Run, Fixed Gears Are for Jerks and Lesbians, Hey There Cowboy and the Laura Klinkerts.

When: 9 p.m. Thu. October 25, 2007

Where: Pi Bar, 2532 25th Av. S., Mpls.

Tickets: $5. 612-877-4368.

                                   

You could probably say Kate McNulty is making up for lost time. That, or she's still fighting the gender stereotyping that she claims kept her from playing drums in the high school band.

"My dad told me, 'Drums are for boys,' and he wouldn't let me play them," McNulty recalled. Replacing her sneer with a smile, the 22-year-old Minneapolis native added, "I wound up playing the trombone instead. At least it wasn't the clarinet. That would've been too girly."

Nowadays, being a drummer isn't even the least "girly" thing in McNulty's life. She's also a semi-professional football player with the Minnesota Vixens and works a rugged job as a bike messenger by day.

But playing the drums is what McNulty seems to love doing best -- or at least playing rock 'n' roll is. She's currently a member of five different bands, ranging from the poppy nerd-core band Tough Tough Skin to the cow-punk quartet Hey There Cowboy to the folky duo the Laura Klinkerts.

As if she needs to prove her toughness any more, McNulty is hoping to pull off the most audacious musical endurance test since Mark Mallman's 54-hour concert next week. All five of her bands are performing Thursday night at Pi Bar -- her own five-hour-plus marathon.

"The hard thing has been figuring out the order of bands," McNulty said. "I'm picking the order based on which ones can play drunk and which can't."

Talking last Friday night after a rehearsal by one of her groups -- Fixed Gears Are for Jerks and Lesbians, a feisty punk quartet that can play drunk -- McNulty said she never meant to be in so many bands. "They just sort of came along," she said.

Her first was another punky band on Thursday's bill, C. Doty Run, which she formed her freshman year at Southwest High School (so much for not playing the drums). As she neared completion of a sociology degree at the University of Minnesota last year, she said, she kept climbing aboard other bands "because they all had something different to offer.

"At this point, I want to learn as much as I can as a musician," she said. "What better way to do that than to play with a bunch of different people?"

The differences are both musical and personal. Three of her bands are otherwise made up entirely of guys, and two have other women. Two of them are openly and proudly queer, like McNulty herself, and the rest are just open-minded.

Two of the acts also feature McNulty on guitar: Hey There Cowboy (an offshoot of Central Standard) and the Laura Klinkerts ("I'm the 's,' Laura is the rest," she said).

McNulty's bandmates don't seem to mind her workload.

"I can't believe she can pull it off, but she does," said Eric Frame, guitarist in Hey There Cowboy and Fixed Gears.

"She's certainly not the flakiest person I've been in bands with," added Fixed Gears bassist Marc Cohen.

McNulty hopes to go to graduate school in a year or two, and thus will have to lessen her band schedule. But only just a little, she said.

"Me and my mom were talking about how I was never the kind of kid who sat around," she said. "I don't know why, but I enjoy being busy."

Asked if she wanted to prove anything with her five-band marathon gig, she replied simply, "Nope, I don't think I have to do that anymore. I'm just hoping to have fun."

U of Minnesota Prof. Emeritus wins Nobel Prize for Economics

This Article is from Minnesota Public Radio Online.

Leonid Hurwicz -- commanding intellect, humble soul, Nobel Prize winner

by Art Hughes, Minnesota Public Radio

October 15, 2007

This year's winner of the Nobel Prize for economics was a faculty member at the University of Minnesota for more than a half century. Leonid Hurwicz shares the award with two other economists who built on his work. The 90-year-old is known as a gentle and supportive soul with a demanding intellect. He built a reputation at the U that attracted international admiration, respect and fond remembrances.

Minneapolis — Leonid Hurwicz is renowned for his pioneering economic theory. But he is also known for his interest in a wide variety of subjects -- from linguistics to biochemistry to music. And he's been known to visit archaelogical sites in the Middle East.

Colleague V.V. Chari remembers the first time he met Hurwicz at a party, Chari got a detailed lesson on his native language from the Tamil Nadu state of India.

"Put simply, a Jew from Poland was explaining to a Tamilian what Tamil was all about. That was truly an amazing, eye-opening experience," says Chari.

Chari is an economics professor at the University of Minnesota and has known Hurwicz for more than 25 years. Like nearly everyone who knows Hurwicz, Chari uses the word "humble" to describe him.

"He took real delight in talking to students. He did all that because he treated everybody as his intellectual equal, even though the vast majority of us were not," says Chari. "He treated us all with respect for our intellegence, and an assumption that we knew what we were talking about."

Hurwicz was born in Moscow to Polish refugees of World War I. His family moved back to Poland shortly after the revolution that gave rise to Joseph Stalin.

At the urging of his father, Hurwicz earned a law degree from the University of Warsaw, but he had since found the subject of his lifelong academic pursuit in a second-year economics class. He entered the London School of Academics.

When Hitler invaded Poland, Hurwicz became a refugee, eventually landing in the United States where he continued his studies at Harvard and the University of Chicago.

Chari says Hurwicz's experiences and his ability to connect with ordinary people shaped his high-performing intellect.

"I think a lot of that just came from his humility, and his understanding that centrally planned systems cannot possibly function very well," says Chari. "He said, 'If I can't handle it, the odds anybody else will be able to handle it are pretty small.'"

Hurwicz first came to Minnesota in 1951 at the urging of Walter Heller, then head of the economics department. The two had nearly opposite approaches to their work, but proved to be a formidable team that cemented the University of Minnesota's reputation as an academic powerhouse.

Hurwicz taught graduate economics classes up until last year. Chari says he maintains a drive to connect with students.

"He was the antithesis of the 'publish or perish' mentality. For him, it was not important that a paper got published in a famous journal. It was really important that young people learned about it, and that's what he cared about," says Chari.

Like many notable intellectuals, Hurwicz prefers the exploration of heady concepts over the management of daily details. His university office and parts of his south Minneapolis home became an ad hoc library of research papers and other documents, piled roughly in the order they were arrived.

"Leo is the second most disorganized person I know, other than me," Chari says. "All the work he did, he did for the sheer love of it. I'm sure there are thousands of manuscripts that he's written, that he's simply forgotten to publish, hidden away in his drawers."

Hurwicz's life and career is a near unanimous collection of praise both for his work and his connection to those around him.

U of M President Robert Bruininks spoke to Hurwicz shortly after he learned he'd won the Nobel. Bruininks says Hurwicz characteristically downplayed his own accomplishments.

"He was surprised by the award, deeply appreciative of the recognition of this work. But he expected that he largely received this recognition because he outlived his contemporaries," Bruininks says. "He's a very humble person who took a deep interest in his students at the University of Minnesota. He was a wonderful, gracious colleague. But through his work, he has had a profound impact on the study of economics around the world." Bruininks says Hurwicz remained at the U of M despite numerous offers to teach at any number of prestigious institutions around the world.

When contacted, Hurwicz own first reaction was to credit other people he worked with.

"I realize there's a limit to how many names they can put on a prize, but I just wanted to stress it's not just my own accomplishment but the help, collaboration from these many other people," Hurwicz said.

When asked what he planned to do with the recognition the Nobel Prize will bring, along with his portion of the $1.5 million that he splits with two other scholars, his wife of more than 60 years answered for him.

Evelyn Hurwicz says her husband has been so busy talking with reporters and well-wishers he hasn't had any time to think about it.

FGafJaL in October Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine

Fixed Gears are for Jerks and Lesbians was quoted in the October Issue of Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine

From their Website

FGafJaL in MPLS/St. Paul Magazine
Current mood: bitchy

Category:  Goals, Plans, Hopes

   

We were recently interviewed for an article about bike culture in MPLS for Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine. Insanity followed. The article, as far as we were concerned, was full of lies and slander. Here's an excerpt:

"I meet the band in front of their practice space—curiously, in an on-the-market Kenwood duplex. "Oh, the drummer's mom is a Realtor," rasps the lead singer, who calls himself Jay Awesome. "We're just practicing here until she sells it." Drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, the stocky, baby-faced twenty-two-year-old runs his hand over his unwashed Mohawk and explains how the band's name came to him when a dude on a fixie beat him in an impromptu race to the corner. "Then I remembered one of Homer's lines from The   Simpsons: 'Public transportation is for jerks and lesbians.' "

FGafJaL Note: LIES! Jay won that "impromptu race to the corner" and he never even realized there's a line from the simpsons until Trevor told him! And that face ain't baby, it's fucking distinguished.

"The band doesn't really believe fixed-gear bicycles are for jerks and lesbians because (or although) two of the band's members ride fixies. The guitarist, Eric Frame, started riding one when he delivered sandwiches for Jimmy John's. (He now drives to work at the family industrial plasma torch business in St. Louis Park, and the band uses his car to tote their gear to gigs.)"

FGafJaL Note: Eric works in Crystal, not St. Louis Park. (But I totally make plasma torches!) At least I got this awesome myspace shot:


"Drummer Kate McNulty rides a fixie for her downtown messenger job. In fact, McNulty earned a reputation in the messenger community after coming in first during last winter's Stupor Bowl, a sort of orienteering-on-a-bike contest held on Super Bowl Sunday that involves slamming a beer or doing a shot at every checkpoint. Some messengers—there are only about twenty-five of them remaining citywide—are hired based on their performance at these events, known in the community as "Alley Cat" races."

FGafJaL Note: Kate rocks so fuckin hard!
   

"Earlier in the summer, the band organized Ride Against Patriotism. Fifteen dollars bought all the beer you could drink. "The reason I ride," Awesome explains, "is so I don't have to buy gas and support a stupid war." The band does write the occasional radical-bike-culture lyric, but for the most part, they stick to more general antiPope, anticop, anti-everything material. Marc Cohen, the bassist, points out one of the more compelling reasons for a punk band to ride bicycles. "It's just easier to avoid being called a hypocrite," he says. "Instead of riding around in the Volkswagen that Daddy bought you."

FGafJaL Note: Marc is sweeeeet. And kind of an ass. Also, fuck the pope.

 

"McNulty has been silently judging me from across the patio during the interview. "What's the point of your story anyway?" she asks. She suspects I'm out to write a hatchet job about how the hard cores are constantly trying to out-hard-core each other. In fact, she wrote a college ethnography essay on the subject. "I mean, in New York, only 10 percent of bikers are actually living the lifestyle." She refuses to let me read her paper."

FGafJaL Note: Good work, Kate.

Here's the Full Article,

"Whose Streets? Their Streets!