The Rake Magazine

Month: November 2002

  • Minnesota Landscape Rocks

    The idea that other regions of the country contain more grandiose beauty per acre than does Minnesota is hardly to be disputed [Good Intentions, October], but the sublime vision lauded in the review of the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s show is also distorted and pretentious. As a landscape artist who’s chosen to live here precisely because the beauty of the upper Mississippi takes a little more soulful inspection and reflection than does the Grand Canyon, I’d remind everyone that nature’s beauty is universal. The subtle Taoist plain can be as thrilling as a ruined mountain top. Not only has Minnesota inspired its own bouquet of native impressionists like Alex Fournier and Seth Eastman, natural realists, but the work of our contemporary painter Mike Lynch stands beside the finest work anywhere in the nation. Like unseen poetry, there’s always an aesthetic pay-off if you’re calm enough to really appreciate it.

    Michael McKenzie, Minneapolis

  • No Gophers in South Dakota!

    What is this we Dakotans hear about you folks wanting to move your football team to South Dakota [“Gopher Football: New Stadium or We’re Moving to Yankton!”, The Rake’s Progress, October]? Don’t we have a say in this? We don’t want your team. You may be having a good season but it will probably be followed by probation and embarrassment. Not only that, but you’d probably send the Vikings along with them. Why not think about a new home in Canada and leave us alone?

    Barry Hoover, Sioux Falls

  • Put a Lid on It

    To avoid the static of a wool ski cap, I bought a black, small-brimmed fedora. My friends greeted me with “Hey mafioso!” An Italian friend of mine had the opposite reaction. “Hey Tex! Ciao Cowboy!” he said. Obviously, we have become a hat-illiterate society.

    John F. Kennedy wore a silk top hat to his presidential inauguration. But when he rose to give his inaugural address, he left his overcoat and hat on his chair. Americans were shocked at their hatless president. Many spectators were surprised simply because it was so damn cold—22 degrees. Army units supposedly used flame-throwers to get rid of more than nine inches of snow around the Capitol building earlier that morning.

    While Jackie still wore her Sunday bonnets through most of her husband’s presidency, JFK’s hair flowed in the wind, giving him that daring look Charles Lindbergh had perfected decades before. The king of Camelot had removed his crown.

    Kennedy’s fashion statement was also a salvo against class segregation. Up to his time, brimmed hats—from fedoras to bowlers—distinguished a white-collar man, someone who sat at a desk and left his lid on the rack. Blue-collar workers wore caps, and lower-class women wrapped their locks in a kerchief. Going hatless wasn’t an option. What you wore on your head was an advertisement of your social status, at least until this class cue was forever nixed by JFK.

    As sales plummeted, many hat stores closed their doors for good. In the Twin Cities, few hatters remain, except for several small boutiques with unbearably cute names like “Whatahat” and “Hats Meow.” Meanwhile, back in the mainstream, hats have been relegated to sports and war—baseball caps and helmets. Neither hipsters nor Alberta clippers seem to be able to affect a real resurgence in hat-wearing. You’d be surprised how many “sensible” Minnesotans avoid wearing a hat even in the dead of winter. “Hat head” is an especially uncool affliction.

    The search for the perfect hat brought Europeans to Minnesota. At about the time Westerners first explored the Midwest, there was nothing more chic in the salons of Paris and the pubs of London than the beaver-skin hat. One of the Voyageurs’ most important errands was transporting beaver pelts to hat-makers back East.

    The other day, I dropped off a Borsalino beaver-skin fedora at Hamline Cleaners. The Snelling Avenue shop is the last in town to clean and block hats. Joe, the hatter, was thrilled. He exclaimed, “This is the second Borsalino I’ve had in two weeks! I usually only get a handful all year round. The best hat made is the Borsalino.”

    I asked Joe, Who still wears hats? “Older guys, mostly. And the black clientele wears a lot of Homburgs and derbies. They take pride in what they wear. Not to say that white guys don’t, but they usually have them blocked for sentimental reasons—maybe the hat belonged to their grandpa.”

    Oddly, Joe doesn’t wear a hat. “I’ve just got big ears, that’s why I don’t wear one,” he said.

  • Consumer Confidence

    It’s easy to be cynical about certain holiday traditions—especially the one where we’re expected to buy presents for a list that begins to read like the phone book. What’s more, we must stay ahead of increases in the cost-of-giving index by which we quietly measure ourselves each year. (What is the minimum expected for a present between adults? Do I stop at second cousins twice removed? Will I still respect myself Christmas morning?) In this contrarian household, there are strange fellows all snug in their beds—religious fanatics and secular cranks, visions of charcoal dancing in their heads. They complain in unison: Isn’t the holiday about something more than crass consumerism?

    It is not. Or at least it shouldn’t have to be. Ever since the babyboomers were in diapers, consumerism has slowly but surely replaced the isms of a more traditional confession. Shopping has become our civil religion. True, many of us still go to church, synagogue, or mosque. Eight in ten Americans still express a preference for some specific denomination, while five in ten are dues-paying members. But if spirituality is about putting your most sacred beliefs into action, we spend a lot more time with the gospel according to Visa and Master Card than we do with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

    It’s no great paradox that our spirituality, our patriotism, and our consuming habits are so tangled. Just a year ago, we were measuring both our economy and our spiritual health by how many big-ticket items we could afford. Success in life is measured not by calculating the distance between our moral goals and achievements, but between our financial ones. In a foot-race with human nature, idealism is easily lapped every time. We don’t mind boosting the underdog, but we do get tired of booing the capitalist spirit. For better or worse, buying Christmas presents is not antithetical to American spirituality. It’s critical to it.

    We don’t need Max Weber to tell us that financial worries today sting worse than the prospect of Hell’s fire tomorrow. Last year was the worst in a decade for holiday revenues. This year, consumer confidence is once again clanking around in the empty tin bucket. Do Americans stop buying and start praying when times are tough? Probably. Then again, we doubt that a reward in the next life really trumps one in the next recovery.

    This year, the downtown council is promoting its 11th annual Holidazzle—the daily parade on Nicollet Mall from Thanksgiving to the New Year that crassly celebrates the glory of Christmas consumerism. Sure, it’s populated by storybook characters, and Disney-like artifice. Sure, it generates as much as 4,000 pounds of food charitably donated to local food shelfs, and as much as $30,000 for good, if seasonal, causes. On top of all that, shoppers who spend at least $150 downtown will be rewarded with tickets to the “Hot Seats” section, the heated grandstand at Orchestra Hall. It doesn’t exactly count as a trip to church. But in the American context, you can scarcely find a better way to prove your mettle.

    For a half-million locals, there is no more fitting ritual than Holidazzle. No matter what you think of it, or how you pronounce it, the word is etymologically perfect. Holidays are holy days, but the gods don’t dazzle the way they used to—or if they do, then they’re not in Heaven but downtown.

  • Something About Mary

    If Christmas marks the birth of Jesus, then you know who deserves most of the credit. As interest in Mary increases among the unwashed masses, the Church has more trouble trying to manage her image, her meaning, and her legacy.

    Anne and Joe were a typical couple. They married young and drove hard for success, and Joe’s career in animal husbandry eventually made them wealthy. After two decades of marriage they were still so in love that friends could only envy them. All but for one thing: Their marriage was infertile, and they ached for a child. There were no effective medical interventions, so they had little more than a hope and a prayer of parenthood. When Joe overheard a client’s off-color joke about his sterility, he finally hit the breaking point, and instead of returning home from work that night, he took off toward the outskirts of town and collapsed on a dusty hillside. He lay there for days, broken and wild with grief, blaming himself.

    Meanwhile Anne grew frantic. Joe often traveled for work, but she’d been expecting him home days ago. She stared outside at the birds building their spring nests and felt numb with sorrow. It was in that moment of utter despair that she was seized by a sort of paranormal vision that left her with hope for motherhood and a desperate urge to go looking for her husband. Joe had a similar experience on the hillside, and he immediately sped home. The two met up at the city limits, where they were stunned by each other’s accounts of what they could only describe as a divine message. Flushed with the heat of hope and desire, they raced home. The next morning, Anne was pregnant.

    Nine months later she had a healthy baby girl who proved to be exceptional. She could walk seven steps by six months of age, and when she was three, Anne and Joe presented her to their priest. He predicted big things for the girl.

    Sometime between her 12th and 14th birthdays, the girl was ready to follow in her mother’s footsteps toward an early marriage. The priest summoned a handful of eligible bachelors. One of them was a carpenter named Joseph, an older man and a widower. As the group convened, a dove somehow emerged miraculously from Joseph’s staff, and perched on his head. The priest pronounced Joseph to be the one God had chosen to be the husband of the young woman.

    Unfortunately, Joseph had doubts about the marriage. He worried that friends and family would ridicule him about his youthful bride. Furthermore, he already had two sons of his own. But he took her in, reluctantly, and then left for a neighboring town to go about his trade. Months later, when his wife told him about her unexpected pregnancy, Joseph was unhappy and incredulous, and she cried bitter tears. It took a visit from an angel to declare Mary’s virginity and the immaculate conception of Jesus.

    The rest of the story is well worn. Mary’s name is now known the world over—despite the fact that accepted scripture actually makes very little mention of her, and apocryphal texts and legends fill in only a few more blanks. Regardless of this spotty historical knowledge, public interest in Mary—on the popular and scholarly level in Catholic, Protestant, and even secular circles—has existed ever since Jesus was born and died. And after several decades of increasing popularity, attention to Mary is reaching a crescendo and igniting this question: To whom, precisely, does Mary belong? Of and for the people, Mary is attractive to the masses specifically because of her humanity, and because there is so little concrete information about her. She can be whoever you need her to be.

    Yet certain institutions, most notably the Catholic Church, have a fervent interest in defining and protecting Mary and her likeness. If religious scholars riff on whether Mary’s mantle should be red or blue—and they do—then it’s easy to see why they’d recoil at the collection of irreverent plastic Mary memorabilia at places like Sister Fun, the oddball gift shop on Lake Street. There, on any given day, you’ll find the image of the Virgin emblazoned on everything from key chains to ashtrays—displayed right alongside the fart powder and hairy soap bars. But taste is a matter of opinion, and the gap between one person’s and another’s is really all that divides the merchandise at Sister Fun from the “relics” at the Marian Library, a service of the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton. The library’s collection includes “nearly 100,000 cards depicting Mary in the art of all ages and numerous Marian shrines, attractive collections of statues from around the world, Marian postage stamps, recordings of Marian music, Marian medals, and rosaries.”

    Legally and poetically, Mary sits squarely in the public domain, where people are free to make what they will of her, including a profit. As much as the Church may want to be the primary beneficiary of Marian interest, the reality is that more and more people are wanting a piece of Mary for themselves.

  • The British Superbowl

    Last week, the whole office adjourned to the Walker to see the British TV advertising awards. It got me wondering, among other things, whether somewhere in Great Britain , there was a crowd of urbane hipsters gathering to see the American TV commercial awards. Probably not.

    Which is not to say that we can’t make great ads here too. I don’t doubt that there may be such an awards screening for our own TV commercials. (The Superbowl functions in this way, I suppose, but the high entry fee–up this year to something like $4 million per minute– insures that these are merely expensive ads, not necessarily artful ones.) It’s been said many times that the best minds of the present generation are working in advertising, rather than writing novels or making films or painting masterpieces or any of the other things brilliant people are supposed to be doing with themselves. As I tried to think of a few good examples of the American art form, I didn’t have much trouble. In other words, great British TV commercials don’t necessarily asperse their American counterparts. Buck up, friend–we have some great ads here too, for what it’s worth.

    No, the real attraction is in the exotic otherness, the subtle differences in what’s allowed and expected in TV abroad. The nifty thing is that Brits, having sent most of their Puritans to America hundreds of years ago, treat themselves to more nudity and swearing. That salaciousness adds up to more than just fart jokes and bare breasts, though–it cultivates a permissiveness throughout the whole medium, and that means TV will occasionally be challenging and even artful in ways you never see here. (The artful and the challenging tend to find a home here at HBO–where there are no commercials per se.)

    Humor of course is almost as effective as sex as a selling device—and it’s much more difficult to do well. As you might expect, most of the best ads in this year’s awards are laugh-out-loud funny. But the relative freedom of the British medium also pushes the envelope in disturbing ways. British public service announcements, for example, tend to be shocking beyond description. In particular, there are a series of highly graphic car-accident PSAs this year, including a heartbreakingly realistic reenactment of a car colliding in slow-mo with a child crossing a street. This ad has already given me nightmares—and I’m a guy who’s fully versed in Unreal Tournament, Wes Craven, and all the other signifiers of red-blooded American violence-as-entertainment.

    The main distinction in British and American advertising, from my point of view, is the same distinction that exists between good and bad advertising in any culture. Like anything else in media, we remember the good and forget the bad—the average being perhaps the most forgettable of all. Good advertising works the way a good book or movie or CD works—it stands out, you remember it, you talk about it with your friends. And if the advertisers are lucky, you associate it with whatever brand it is that they’re peddling.

    One can only hope that the capacity audience at the Walker last week was filled with Twin Cities advertising professionals (there are as many here as practically anywhere, as a matter of fact) walked away with this endorsement: The finest ads in the British TV commercial awards are powerful and funny and sexy and mighty creative in themselves, as miniature movies. “Extending the brand” of their bankrolling advertisers is, though certainly not accidental, almost incidental.

    Ad people undoubtedly fight this battle every day—convincing advertisers that good advertising needs to innovate, and in some cases that may not mean hiring a supermodel to scream a brand name and a price for 30 seconds. They should approach their clients with the rare attitude of the wisest writers—that good writing flatters all writers. Good ads are not nearly as pernicious as bad ones.

    There’s an interesting flip of the script going on here. Movies, books, CDs are increasingly driven by bottom-line formulas. It’s the advertisers who are, in many cases, given more freedom to explore creatively and artistically. It’s no accident that some of our most artful and credible musicians, movie directors, actors, and writers are working in advertising. And even if they never come back over from the dark side, we can still take a moment to appreciate it when they use their powers for the attenuated good of a memorable commercial.

  • Opportunity Lost

    The American legal system and the parents of a certain Breck School senior took a pounding in the press and on talk radio last week. For the few of you who missed it, here is the story: Andrew Stanoch, a high school senior at Breck, was caught with a small amount of marijuana during the morning of a school day. Breck expelled him. Stanoch’s parents sued Breck, and Hennepin County Judge Allen Oleisky ordered Breck to readmit him.

    Essentially, Judge Oleisky’s reasoning was that Breck’s policy on possession of drugs was sufficiently vague so as to make their expulsion of Stanoch arbitrary. Although the Breck policy clearly states that a student who is found to possess drugs “faces dismissal,” the policy also says a student who “possesses, uses, or comes under the influence of alcohol or other harmful chemicals is required to follow the appropriate recommendations as set forth by the school in order to remain in the Breck Community.”

    What I think Breck was trying to accomplish by their wording “faces dismissal,” was the total discretion to act however they please whenever they please. That is, if they like the kid they can find a way to keep him. If they don’t, he’s gone. As Breck is quick to point out, they have hundreds on the waiting list ready to fill the spot. (I am discounting any suggestion that Breck was just sloppy in the way they wrote their policy. God knows there are enough lawyers around the place they could get it right if they wanted.)

    The criticism leveled at Stanoch’s parents and Judge Oleisky was vicious. The talk radio crowd and the letter writers to the Strib were near unanimous in their condemnation. As a parent of a Breck sophomore and a recent Breck graduate, my first inclination was to agree with them. But I’ve read Oleisky’s decision, and I’ve spent some time looking into the policies at another private high school I know, and I have come to the conclusion that Breck not only blew it legally, they also blew the opportunity to do what they are supposed to do best—educate.

    The other private school I contacted has an extensive disciplinary policy regarding drug and alcohol possession that involves three levels of offenses. The Level 1 offense is possession with intent to sell, or actually selling drugs. That gets you expelled, period. The Level 2 offense is hosting a party where alcohol or drugs are used. That gets you suspended or expelled, depending on the discretion of the dean of students. The Level 3 offense of simple possession or being under the influence gets you a parent conference, chemical dependency evaluation and in-school suspension for a first time offense. The second offense gets you mandatory rehab and out-of-school suspension. Only the third Level 3 offense gets you expelled. And even then, you may be able to come back if you can convince the school your behavior has changed.

    When I asked the president of that school why their seemingly lax policy worked for them, he answered, “We want to be partners in helping that student become a better person. If we simply expel him, we lose that educational opportunity.” He also pointed out that a more lenient policy also encouraged students who aren’t using to tell the school if another student “needs help” without worrying that their friend will be expelled. “We have had several students approach us on that basis,” he said. “They want to help, and they know we want to help, too.”

    Now perhaps the Breck administration wanted to get rid of Andrew Stanoch for other reasons and took this opportunity to pull the trigger. Perhaps they wanted to get rid of his parents. That is exactly the sort of arbitrary power Breck’s policy was intended to protect.

    Stanoch’s parents certainly squandered their opportunity to teach their son a lesson about the consequences of his actions. Since they didn’t seem to know or care that the lawsuit made it a matter of public record that their son uses drugs, as well as made it much less likely that any exclusive college would admit a litigious family, we wonder if they understand the concept themselves.

    But maybe if the Breck administrators were to reexamine their own role in the education of Andrew Stanoch, they would come to the conclusion they could have done a better job, too.