The Rake Magazine

Year: 2002

  • 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.

  • Jem Casey Explained

    Many readers write to ask about Rake contributor Jem Casey. He is modest, and unlikely to speak up for himself, so we thought we’d take this opportunity to answer a few questions that frequently come up.

    Under several different pen names, Jem Casey has written stories for magazines like the Oxford American, Ploughshares, the Prairie Schooner, and Harper’s. He also publishes a quarterly newsletter called JUPPER. He has received numerous awards for his short fiction.

    Jem Casey is in charge of newspaper clippings at The Rake. As his fans already know, he is frequently the author of the anonymous “newsbreaks” which appear at the bottom of the columns in the print version of The Rake.

    Jem Casey is not “the Poet of the Pick” made famous by Irish writer Flann O’Brien. He did not write “the pome that’ll be heard wherever the Irish race is wont to gather.” He is that Jem Casey’s great-grandson, and he too believes that “The Workingman’s Friend” will “live as long as there’s a hard root of an Irishman left by the Almighty on this planet.”

    Jem Casey can be reached directly at press@rakemag.com.

  • Forgiving Rick Kahn

    Fritz Mondale said Wednesday that the effect of the tragedy on those closest to Wellstone didn’t justify the tone of his memorial service, “But we’ve all made mistakes. Can’t we find it in our hearts to forgive?”

    I certainly hope so—for a couple of reasons. First, how do we blame Rick Kahn for an electorate that gives Norm Coleman only 30 percent of the vote when he’s running against Jesse Ventura but 50 percent when running against Fritz Mondale? And second, if the Democrats are in a situation where one speech by one person that nobody had ever heard of can kill their election chances, their problems undoubtedly run deeper.

    So, whom can we blame? I think Ventura gets a heaping share for making such a big deal out of Kahn’s speech that he walked out of the memorial, appointed Barkley to the senate seat, and ordered the flags which had been lowered for Wellstone back to the top of the staff. (Of course, if you believe the disingenuous Pioneer Press editorialist D. J. Tice, we should praise Governor Dimwit’s swift assessment of Kahn’s speech, for if not for Jesse, response to the memorial faux pas “would have hardened along partisan lines, producing mostly confusion and still more bitterness.” Yup, thank God for Jesse helping to mitigate the bitterness so voters could get back to considering the real issues.)

    Some blame should accrue to Jim Ramstad, the Republican singled out by Kahn that night, who immediately said, "People get carried away sometimes with emotions. We all get carried away sometimes with emotions. Just let it be." The stark contrast between the class Ramstad and the crass Ventura not only benefited the Republicans, but helped sink Ventura’s party mate Tim Penny.

    Don’t forget Norm Coleman, who was facing certain drowning under a tidal wave of Wellstone sympathy, and yet never complained, nor showed anything less than regret at the loss of an honorable opponent, even when he knew he would now have to go up against the second most popular politician in Minnesota history.

    President Bush deserves particular blame, too. The son of the man who once called Paul Wellstone a “chicken shit” praised Wellstone’s principles, even though he agrees with not a one.

    Yeah, I’m blaming the Republicans for their victory, in Minnesota and in every other state where they kicked Demo butt. They are better actors, better marketers and much better politicians. If you don’t believe that, ask yourself if you do believe, had the shoe been on the other foot, that the Republicans would have let the family send some overwrought accountant without a script to deliver Jesse Helms’ eulogy.

    It reminds me of the line in The Untouchables when Sean Connery accuses his opponent of “bringing a knife to a gun fight.” Well, the Democrats brought a pea shooter. They have the best orator that’s been in the White House in my lifetime in the audience and they let the admitted drudge Tom Harkin rattle off the same old Democrat doxology? We should be glad these guys lost, because if you can screw up a funeral that bad, imagine what they’d do to the country.

    Which, come to think of it, is what you have to do–imagine what the Dems would do, because I’ll be damned if I can remember if they told me in the past several months. One thing you can say about the Republicans is they’ll sure tell you what they are going to do. In case you have forgotten, it’s destroy Iraq, give you a prescription drug plan, fix social security, make sure your neighbor is not Al Qaeda, police up the corporate villains, fix the schools, and get tough on crime while keeping it easy for a 17-year-old undocumented alien to get a sniper rifle. Best of all, you won’t have to pay for any of this because they are not going to raise taxes. What makes it even cooler is that each one of these messages fits neatly into a 30 second voice over of pictures of a good looking young man in an open collar shirt shaking hands and kissing babies.

    That is how politics is done. And as long as the Democrats believe that a man like Fritz Mondale, whose thoughts on complex issues don’t fit neatly between the sports and weather on the 10 p.m. news, can win against this kind of expertise and execution, I don’t see much hope.

    As for me, tonight I’m going to start acting like a Republican. I’m going out for a very expensive dinner, and I’m going to charge it to my kids.

  • Mock the Vote 2002

    A few years ago, Gerard Cosloy detailed the reasons why we shouldn’t encourage voting. The founder of Matador Records (and legendary Gen-X curmudgeon) argued convincingly that the last thing this nation needs are legislators put into office by the same people who have made Eminem, Spongebob Squarepants, and Miller Lite what they are today. Is that an elitist point of view? Of course it is. Is it correct? Probably. Look at it this way: Do you really want MTV’s viewership deciding the fate of Social Security?

    Of course, it’s a matter of degree. Even the most informed political junky can have a few blind spots. For many years, we entered the voting booth with both a sense of purpose and angst. Why were half the names on the ballot completely new to us? Why hadn’t we seen significant public debate among the major-party candidates for dog catcher? What exactly did the State Auditor do besides run for office every four years? Why were regular, law-abiding citizens–most of whom haven’t seen the inside of a courtroom since The People’s Court–being asked to elect judges?

    One response–and we think it was more common than anyone lets on–was to vote for a woman, all else being equal. (Consider this salient truth: The single largest minority or “special interest” is women, who at about 51 percent of the population are actually a numeric majority. So why do women hold less than 10 percent of all elective offices?) Well, we know now that there are plenty of women who are just as capable of wildly misanthropic policy positions as men.

    The lesson? If you don’t know for whom to vote, then don’t vote. Simply casting a ballot is not enough. Better you don’t vote at all, than vote for someone arbitrarily on the basis of party affiliation, the color of her lawn signs, or the number of vowels in his surname.

    But if, on the other hand, you simply don’t know where to vote, try here.

  • Wellstone the Teacher

    My son Matt, who is a freshman at Carleton College, called me early last Friday afternoon to tell me that he’d just heard that Paul Wellstone had been killed in a plane crash. He’d got the news right after getting out of his freshman political science class, the same class I’d taken at Carleton 32 years ago from Paul Wellstone.

    By then I’d been at Carleton for two terms and had encountered, I thought, all the typical types of college teacher. The calculus teacher had a beard and wore a peace medallion over his turtleneck and smoked dope with students. The Latin teacher was 70 years old and chain smoked Pall Malls while quizzing you on Virgil’s grammar. The English teacher lost his collection of tweed jackets and Hemingway when his house went up in smoke.

    Wellstone breathed fire.

    He was the first teacher who reminded me of me—short stature, long hair, loud voice. Like me, he wore t-shirts and jeans to class and seemed to pay scant attention to the reading list he’d assigned, except that he had an amazing command of facts that he used to support his lectures, which actually were more like speeches. His brilliance was manifest. He was a first year teacher, so he couldn’t have memorized his lectures, but he spoke without notes for an hour. He wasn’t constrained by a podium, but he was predictable. Every lecture he’d start with his fingers jammed into his jeans with the thumbs hooked over the edge of the pocket, as if he were trying to restrain himself from what he must have known was coming–the inevitable rising volume, quickening cadence, and karate chopping of knowledge into our small freshman brains.


    Sometimes you’d come out of class feeling as if you’d been assaulted by an intellect and energy so far superior to yours that you’d never measure up. But more often, you felt smarter for having spent an hour with him. That was his power, and he used it to great effect on people who had yet to fully develop their own critical abilities.

    Wellstone didn’t fit the Carleton mode. Then, Carleton was the ivory tower, and the presumption was that most of what you’d ever have to know could be learned within the confines of campus. Students were not permitted to have cars. All students lived in the dorms. And the work load was so ferocious and academic standards so high that every moment spent other than in class or the library was regarded as lost. Carleton’s stature among the best liberal arts colleges seemed a justification of its insular attitudes. Whenever we had a large snowfall, I imagined the college news bureau coming up with a press release headline: “Highway 19 Closed, World Cut Off.”

    Wellstone wasn’t of such scholarly demeanor. In 1974, he was given a negative evaluation by his department and was on the verge of being fired. The then president openly wanted to be rid of him, as did most of his colleagues. (To their credit, many Carleton profs admitted this even after last Friday.) But students and recent alumni, who’d obviously picked up something about the power of politics in his classes, organized in his defense, as did some sympathetic colleagues. The college eventually agreed to an evaluation of his work by scholars not connected with Carleton. This evaluation was overwhelmingly positive, and the decision was reversed. He was actually granted tenure a year ahead of the normal cycle.

    Carleton was an early power base for him. A liberal arts college in a liberal state is a Petri dish for growing lefties, and he knew it. From Carleton, he started organizing in Rice County, moved from there to the western Minnesota power line controversy, to the nomination for state auditor and to the Senate. His cadre was young, very smart, and mesmerized by his power to harangue. Wellstone never taught, by example anyway, that it was sometimes more effective to shut up. (Rick Kahn, a former student who spoke at his memorial service, unfortunately didn’t pick up that lesson from anyone else either.)

    Wellstone’s attractiveness lay not just in his oratorical skills, though, but in his liberal message itself, repeated endlessly. His true believers never flagged.

    But to others, the diatribe became tiresome, and we lost interest. It’s hard to tell whether it was from pure repetition or because of the seeming change in Wellstone from outsider to insider, best typified by the change in his advertising strategy from the distinctive wit and message of 1990 to the same monotonous doggerel broadcast by every other Candidate X ad infinitum. As his erstwhile ad man said last month in The Rake, “He drank the Kool-Aid.” Hell, if you believe what you hear from those who spend too much time on counterpunch.com, our interest waned because Wellstone wasn’t radical enough.

    I went to a Democratic fundraiser with Al Gore last month. The main topic of the evening was why Democrats were losing ground every election. Gore, one would think, should have more insight into that question than any man alive. A brilliant man with the right ideas, who so muddled his message during the campaign that he couldn’t even carry his own state, somehow didn’t offer me any answers. Congressional candidate Janet Robert made it all clear to me though. She chimed in that she was in such a close race she had to support Bush’s Iraq policy so she could get elected.

    Since I also have never learned the lesson of shutting up, I asked “Why then should Democrats vote for you if you’re just going to act like a Republican? Any first year marketing student could tell you that you have to draw a clear distinction between your product and that of your competitor. Do you think they sell Aquafresh toothpaste by telling you it’s just like Colgate, only a little bit tastier?” There was a brief lull in the din, which in a room full of Democrats, is about all you can hope for.

    Wellstone wasn’t there that night, but he gave us his answer the next week by voting against granting Bush dictatorial war powers. He was the only candidate in a close race to do so. He certainly didn’t do it for marketing reasons, because, if anything should be clear to us, it’s that Wellstone knew nothing about marketing. What he did know was what was right. Oddly, that was his market advantage, and his polls immediately trended up. I wonder if he even knew why.

    That’s the last lesson the professor got through to me–that despite the prevailing political wisdom, the people will ultimately know the genuine man not by what he says, no matter how loud and often he says it, but by what he does. The rest is silence.

    Photo courtesy of Carleton College

  • Portait of the Artist as an Old Master

    Thirty-three years ago, Richard Lack started his atelier for classical realism. The modernists laughed, groaned, and went back to their wine. Decades later, the arts movement that found a happy home in Minneapolis may be the most exciting thing happening in the nation.

    You walk up a flight of stairs and down the flourescent-lit cinderblock hall of a faceless warehouse in the industrial heart of East Hennepin Avenue. You push through a set of black steel doors labeled simply The Atelier, and you enter a space where time and the outside world have lost their hold. The stinging smell of oil and turpentine hangs on the air, and the pristine white walls are punctuated by long gray curtains hiding innumerable rooms beyond. Dividing the walls like a riot of unrelated windows are hundreds of paintings.

    The paintings are landscapes, still lifes, and a small army of figures, mostly nudes looking on. They are solitary images, some in color, many in black and white or sepia, each with its own demure elegance. Pull back one of the curtains and a cascade of cool, northern light dapples the small room as if it were a private chapel. More paintings line the perimeter of the room, stacked upright four or five deep. Opposite the window is a table covered with blue silk, a white porcelain pitcher, a silver tray, and a clutch of pink roses. From one wall, a plaster face, milky and deathly in its bone-like monochrome, frowns down at a disheveled assortment of paint tubes and brushes. The silence is vast, the scent of mineral spirits dizzying. The stillness is both mesmerizing and foreign.


    But the sensation suddenly evaporates when a voice chimes out from behind. A small woman with a flash of brilliant blond hair appears from around the corner. Her greeting reveals an easy Texas drawl as she introduces herself as Cyd Wicker, co-director of the Atelier, a school for fine art painters. Wicker’s name reappears over her shoulder, attached to a large painting of Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft. It’s a relief to know this isn’t a time warp anymore. As we stroll through room after room of pedestals, easels, still-life props and paint carts, Cyd explains the courses that would-be painters pursue at the Atelier. Four years full-time, drawing the figure three hours every day, five days a week. Pencil, charcoal, painting in black and white, painting in color, portraiture, still-life, interiors. She speaks in terms of tonality, light, nature and observation.

    Then she ticks off a list of names: Burne-Jones, Millais, Godward, Waterhouse, and Bouguereau (yes, the beautiful child and mother offering an apple at the MIA—the one that’s on all the posters). But mostly the names are unfamiliar, long dead. Foremost, Wicker talks of lineage, the ancestry of the Atelier—as if it were a family tree. Still more names: Ives Gammell, the Boston School, William Paxton, Jean-Leon Gerome, Jacques-Louis David— these men, too, long past. Except one, Richard Lack, who founded this institution in Minneapolis more than thirty years ago.

    At 74 years old, Richard Lack is an institution in his own right. “It’s really been incredible what he’s accomplished,” says Steven Levin, a successful painter and one-time Lack pupil. Lack has been an artist nearly all his life. A well-regarded portraitist and landscape painter, he has works in collections all across the county, including governor’s portraits at our Capitol. Moreover, as the founder of Atelier Lack, the forerunner of the current Atelier, he’s taught his craft to dozens of others. His students consider him to be one of the most influential teachers alive today, a teacher of whom they speak in the same breath as Rembrandt and Rubens. Steve Gjertson, in his recently published biography of Lack, unabashedly calls him “one of the most significant American realists of the second half of the 20th century.”

    Yet Lack’s success hasn’t made him a household name by any means, and the fact that people have come from all over the country to study with him has gone largely unnoticed by the cognoscenti. “He stayed on his own path, and it’s always been an uphill struggle,” Wicker says. The established art world looks at Lack as an anomaly, part of something abandoned a hundred years ago in the tidal wave of modernism and its tangle of currents. While Lack may not appreciate the dismissive posturing of the moderns, he doesn’t give them much heed. It’s the past that he really cares about. He is an apostle of a tradition of painting that all but perished in the 20th century. Yet it’s a tradition with roots reaching back to the Renaissance—to the imagery, style, and techniques of those still known as the giants of art history, the likes of Titian, Michelangelo, Raphael and da Vinci.

    Lack is a purveyor of realism. “Classical Realism” to be exact, a term his biographer claims Lack himself coined in 1982. And the company of the old masters suits him just fine. It’s their impulse he lives by. For Lack and his followers, what is good in art today should be judged by the same merits it was judged by then. As he wrote more than twenty years ago, “Our criterion is broad and simple: A picture must be beautiful in line and color, and the representational element skillfully achieved. Only then can we dwell on matters of taste, style, innovation, historical significance, relevance of subject matter, paint handling…”

    The teacher wasn’t writing about Cherry Spoon Bridges. “The rest of the world can have it,” he says in a satisfied undertone, on a glorious autumn day in his studio. His snow white hair and quiet gaze give him a countenance that is at once ancient and full of life. Somehow his aluminum walker and blue robe have a regal dignity, lit from north facing windows set at 45 degrees, just as da Vinci dictated. In a way, you could call it a matter of perspective.