The Rake Magazine

Month: April 2003

  • Off the Wall

    Fucci is the nom de plume of Peter Bue, whose signature paintings can be found inside and outside stores, coffee haunts, and restaurants all over the Twin Cities, with the highest count in Uptown and Lyn-Lake. That painting of Pee-Wee on his cruiser outside Penn Cycle? That’s a Fucci. Woody Allen moping on the side of Specs, the glasses shop at 22nd and Hennepin? Fucci. The party scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Via’s Vintage Wear? Fucci again. And there are many more. He’s been painting around town for 15 years, but only within the past few years has he been selling paintings and murals faster than you can say Holly Golightly.

    I went to see Bue last month at his studio in the Calhoun Arts Building on Lyndale and Lake. When I knocked on his door, the loud rock music that had been blasting was turned down and Bue, a forty-something guy with a long grey ponytail and a quick smile, appeared in the doorway. He waved me inside his dimly lit workspace, where a crowded jumble of paint cans dripped various shades of gray. In-progress paintings leaned seven-deep against the baseboards. There was a second-hand Victorian couch that’s been worked over by more than a few cats, and a fireplace Bue painted to look like marble. Among the finished paintings crowding the upper walls, Marlon Brando and Barbara “Jeannie” Eden smoldered and smirked down at us.

    This is the think-tank where Bue plans his big murals, and where he paints small stuff, like the “off-the-rack” 4×6-footers he’s been showing lately in the 34th and Hennepin Dunn Bros. “So what’s with the ‘Fucci’?” I asked. “Well, when I was getting started with the murals, I wanted to have a name that would go with my work. It was the 80s, and both Ferrucci jeans and Gucci were real popular, so I combined the two and got Fucci.” Even if you’re not close enough to see the distinctive signature, you can tell his work by the confident, heavy brushstrokes and pop-culture subject matter. Bue definitely has a thing for movie stars, particularly from the 1950s and 60s.

    He remembers watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s, James Bond movies, films by the Rat Pack, and Marlon Brando’s The Wild One on TV as a teen. “Painting this stuff is how I feel young again,” Bue said. He also sticks to the pop-culture material because he likes being able to pay rent every month. “I needed to make something that was saleable, and subject matter from film and television made sense because it’s already in people’s heads. It’s stuff people like, so they buy it.” And why are most of his paintings colorless? “I paint these people in black and white because that was how I first saw them, on my black-and-white TV. Plus it gives me my own niche,” he says. “Who else do you know who’s painting murals in black-and-white?”

    Typically, Bue’s work begins by taking snapshots of the film or TV moment he wishes to paint—he jogs the DVD in slow-mo until he gets the frame he wants, then takes a picture with a 35mm camera. Bue says that the great thing about taking stills out of films is that “the scene has already been set up and balanced, and the models are professional actors.” He blows up the picture at Kinko’s and has it color transparencied. He then projects this onto a large masonry board, traces the projection onto the surface, and begins painting in the details. Toward the end of the painting process, Bue stops looking at the original snapshot and focuses exclusively on the painting. “Nobody sees the original that I work from,” he said. “They only see the painting, so it needs to make sense on its own.” He then installs the Fuccified masonry board outside the store or restaurant that commissioned the work. (With some older work, Bue painted directly onto the brick or stucco.)

  • The Minnesota Model—Unglued

    After more than 50 years at center stage in American politics and government, Minnesota has been relegated to the supporting cast in the nation’s capitol at the beginning of the 21st century. The North Star State’s once-impressive Washington presence has dwindled. A host of nationally prominent figures of both parties who have played leading roles in all three branches of government pass from the scene.

    Consider: Since 1948, Minnesota has given the nation two vice presidents and two Democratic presidential nominees; two other serious presidential hopefuls, including the standard bearer of the Vietnam anti-war movement; two secretaries of Agriculture, a secretary of Commerce and a secretary of Labor; a Chief Justice of the United States and an Associate Justice; a Director of Central Intelligence; a White House economic adviser, an executive editor of the Washington Post who became U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; a host of powerful Congressmen and top federal bureaucrats; and, more recently, the nation’s most visible governor.

    Minnesota’s disproportionate influence on American politics and government is a thing of the past, and not likely to be restored soon. This realization was underscored by several events in recent months: Paul Wellstone’s death, Walter Mondale’s defeat, and the passing of two other legends of Minnesota politics.

    For Mondale, who followed his mentor Hubert Humphrey into the vice presidency in 1976, eight years after Humphrey had left it, his failed attempt to return to the Senate in 2002 was a stinging defeat that marked not only the end of his long and distinguished political career, but the end of an era for the once-dominant Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

    It all began with Humphrey’s electrifying civil rights speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, in which he urged his party “to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” Humphrey’s speech helped Harry Truman achieve one of the greatest upsets in American political history in the 1948 presidential election, and launched Humphrey on a path that took him from the Senate to the vice presidency and ultimately to an agonizingly narrow loss to Richard Nixon 20 years later.

    If Humphrey’s defeat and Mondale’s landslide loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential campaign, and again to Coleman last year, were signs of Minnesota’s declining influence in national Democratic politics, other recent events show that it’s not just Minnesota’s Democrats whose national influence has declined in recent years: Witness the retirement in January of iconoclastic Independent Gov. Jesse Ventura; the deaths in February of former Governor and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, and Republican Congressman Clark MacGregor; and the outbreak of public protests against the war in Iraq in March without the open support of a single elected official. (Never mind Wellstone as the sole opponent of the Gulf War in ’91. Anyone remember Eugene McCarthy? In fact, when McCarthy returned in late March to his alma mater, Saint John’s University in Collegeville, most students had no idea who he was.)

    The names of those who held Minnesota’s banner high and helped shape contemporary American history are legion. In addition to Humphrey, Mondale, McCarthy, Freeman, MacGregor, and Wellstone, they include Congressman and Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland; House Public Works Committee Chairman John Blatnik, Congressman and Gov. Albert Quie; House Ways and Means Committee member William Frenzel, and Congressman and Minneapolis Mayor Donald Fraser; U.S. Chief Justice Warren Burger and Associate Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the landmark 1973 abortion decision that still roils the political waters; White House economic adviser Walter Heller; CIA Director William Colby; Assistant Secretary of State and Carnegie Endowment President Thomas Hughes; State Department Inspector General Howard Haugerud; U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (and former executive editor of the Washington Post) Russell Wiggins. Each of these political giants is either dead, or fully retired from public service.

    No other state, except perhaps California, Texas, and Massachusetts, had a higher profile during this period. Can Minnesota regain its national prominence? Not likely. I offer that judgment from the perspective of a native son who has reported on all these Minnesotans, and worked for one of them—Vice President Mondale—during 38 years in Washington. In October 1965, the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press assigned me to its Washington bureau. Since then, I have served as a Washington correspondent for the St. Paul and Duluth newspapers, press secretary for Vice President Mondale, adviser to the founder of Control Data Corporation, William C. Norris, and as founding editor of The Hill, a newspaper that has covered Congress since 1994.

    Although it is tempting to focus on the contributions of Minnesota’s name-brand DFL power brokers, the state has had its fair share of influential Republicans and Independents. In fact, getting past party affiliations helps explain what, exactly, made Minnesota the player it was for half a century.

    Although each of our great public servants was vastly different from the others in political outlook and personal style, all embodied the essential elements of what has been called “the Minnesota model,” a kind of political franchise that has played well on the national stage and has served to reinforce the positive image of Minnesota’s political system in the minds of many Americans dating back to at least 1947.

    That’s the year author and historian John Gunther, in his classic book Inside USA, devoted an entire chapter to former Governor Harold Stassen and described the origins of Minnesota’s social, political, and economic system. Stassen, a moderate Republican who was only 31 when elected in 1938, wasn’t destined for the White House as Gunther anticipated (in a chapter entitled “Stassen—Young Man Going Somewhere”). Instead, “the boy governor” resigned in 1943 to join the Navy, then served on the U.S. delegation to the 1945 San Francisco conference that created the United Nations.

    Hoping to parlay that prestigious appointment into even greater things, Stassen undertook a series of futile campaigns for the presidency in 1948 and 1952—and well into the 1980s—that made his name synonymous with unbridled and unrealistic political ambition. Stassen turned out to be too liberal for the party that would soon be dominated by Southern and Western conservatives. Nevertheless, the reform-minded politician left a legacy of good government and corruption-free politics with which Minnesota is still widely identified. In 1947, Gunther knew something was going on here. “Minnesota is a state spectacularly varied, proud, handsome and progressive,” he wrote. “It is a state pulled toward East and West both, and one always eager to turn the world upside down.”

  • King of Fish

    There’s nothing quite like a Door County Fish Boil to kick off the summer. Up on the sandy Wisconsin peninsula that’s known as the Martha’s Vineyard of the Midwest, a warm Friday night is nothing without a cold can of beer and a steaming kettle of fish. It’s a steadfast tradition and comforting and safe. But if you’re not a careful non-coastal Northerner, you might end up eating fish boil and breaded walleye sticks your whole life. If you never get beyond our Great or 10,000 other lakes, you might not realize that on this little blue planet, the world’s stock of fish is our largest and most diverse wild food supply. The number of edible species of fish is so great that no one has tasted them all.

    It’s odd to think of fish as “wild.” Beyond sharks and movie piranha you rarely think of fish as being toothy and predatory. For the most part, they are thought of as docile—swimming, genteel creatures which aren’t even considered “meat” by many. Thai Buddhists, for whom vegetarianism has to do with reincarnation, will eat fish because the view is that they aren’t killed, but merely harvested from the water, like potatoes of the sea. The truth is, most fish will happily gobble up smaller fish as they have been doing since the time of the coelacanth. And ever since humans have been around, we have been gobbling them up.

    Fish skeletons have been found at stone-age excavation sites and in Danish peat bogs along with bone arrows. The works of ancient Chinese and Greek authors contain detailed accounts of fishing techniques which remain the world’s favorites: line and hook, spear, and net. Fish, in all its forms and glories, has meant a great deal to many cultures. Easterners have recognized the benefits of fish for thousands of years; in China the fish is a symbol of regeneration and marital bliss, as well as abundance and prosperity. Witness, too, how Christians here at home value fish during Lent, and as an icon to be displayed on the back of the minivan.

    There may be no more powerful emblem of fishy issues than the cod.

    Also known as bacalao, cabillaud, dorsz, kabeljau, merluzzo bianco, torsk, and scrod, cod has been fished throughout the North Atlantic for hundreds of years. Initially thought of as “penitential” food because of its great availability and sad appearance when salted and dried, cod’s true destiny would prove to have a global impact. Because the fish breed prodigiously, large stocks have existed in the waters from the Bay of Biscay to the Arctic and back down to Cape Hatteras. “Icelandic cod” refers to the plentiful stocks in the areas around Iceland and the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. It is precisely these stocks that have tempted fishermen with the promise of greatness.

    Mark Kurlansky, who wrote Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed The World, believes that the Vikings were pursuing these very stocks of fish when they stumbled upon a new land—America. The Pilgrims believed they could live off the wealth of cod in the New World, despite having no idea how, nor the equipment to do it. From Clarence Birdseye, who founded the frozen-fish industry with cod in the 1930s, to the present-day cod wars, Kurlanky details the rise and decline of the fish whose now-threatened status is still shaping world politics.

    In fact, cod isn’t the only fish to swim in troubled waters. There are many who feel that the world’s fish supply in general is being overfished into extinction. Chilean sea bass is currently on the hit list among activists who boycot chefs and restaurants who carry endngered fish on their menus. Still others believe that boycotts are uninformed, not founded on real data, and can hurt or cripple small fishing communities. (Remember the swordfish scare in the late 90s?) All because a fish is fashionable.

    With today’s obsession with protein and good fats, fish aren’t about to go out of fashion any time soon. When categorized by their fat content, they fall into three groups: Lean fish with less than 2.5 percent fat (cod, perch, sole), moderate-fat fish with less than 6 percent (trout, swordfish, bonito), and high-fat fish that can go as high as 30 percent but usually hover around 12 (yellowtail, bluefish, some salmon). The fish that are especially good for you are the ones packed with lots of Omega-3 oils—or “polyunsaturated oils” in Zone-speak. Good choices include pompano, tuna, herring, mackerel, sardines, Atlantic bluefish, or butterfish. As for protein, fish have a greater advantage over land animals because water supports their weight, leading to a less elaborate skeletal system and a higher flesh-to-weight ratio.

    If you’re sold on international fish, but don’t have your schooner polished and ready to go, the best local source has long been Coastal Seafoods. They provide much of the seafood used by local chefs, and have a few well-stocked retail locations where they even teach classes about scary things like de-boning and wine pairing (newsflash: it’s not all about white). The key is to be open to new fish and new flavors—after all, it’s supposed to be brain food. If you’re wondering how much you need to consume for a positive effect, Mark Twain suggested “Perhaps a couple of whales would be enough.” But that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

  • Their Just Dessert

    “ST. PAUL — A lawmaker who had hoped to stop Minnesota prisoners from getting desserts met with an unexpected problem this week: Turns out it would cost the state an extra half million dollars to stop.” —Associated Press, April 5

    I’m kind of sorry that Rep. Marty Seiferts’ no-dessert proposal for state prisoners wasn’t taken more seriously. I mean, hey — you can see where he was going with it. Just trying to save a few bucks here and there. Even though our hoosegows are closer to Super 8s than Hiltons, you can always squeeze another few pennies out of the budget. Put the money to better use than tossing chocolate parfaits down the necks of evildoers.

    And if it weren’t for those outdated feel-good nutritional guidelines gumming up the process, we might have had something here. But no, if we deny our prisoners dessert ($), we then have to replace it with an item of comparable caloric value. Like fruit or cheese ($$$).

    I say we get rid of the guidelines and just send them to bed without any supper. I mean, they’ve been bad, right? And instead of rehabilitation programs, let’s just get my mom to go over there, and she’ll give ’em a good talking to. Hey, it worked for me. Well, mostly, anyway. And, for the super tough cases, I’ve got a friend who’d love to go over there on Saturday nights to dole out spankings, free of charge, just because he’s into that kind of thing.

    Another scheme that got the kibosh before the House Judiciary Committee was a plan to hire private companies to house state prisoners. Jury’s still out on that one, and considering the troubling number of Minnesota-based businesses wallowing in red ink, perhaps this is one proposal we should think about carefully. Do you think Musicland could re-organize in time? They could put Lifers in the Oldies section. Assault and Battery convicts in World Beat? All they have to do is snap those magnetic shoplifting tags on the prisoners and they’ll never get past the Cinnabon before the guards open fire.

    And how about Northwest Airlines? They’ve got some awfully big hangars out at the airport, and loads of high visibility zip-up jumpsuits. Plus, the staff is already adept at maintaining the discipline of large unruly groups, performing cavity searches, and dishing up cheap food.

    My favorite recommendation for thrifty incarceration, however—even better than Gov. Pawlenty’s brainwave of charging political protesters for their luxurious accommodations in the klink—is Rep. Seifert’s plan to serve brunch on weekends and holidays. By adopting the program already in place at St. Cloud State Prison, the state will save almost $250,000 each year. And brunch sounds so festive! I can just see the inmates rioting if there’s not enough whipped almond butter for their scones. Since Martha Stewart may soon be joining the ranks of Cellblock H, perhaps she can lend her special touch to planning the repast. It’s a different kind of state dinner than she’s used to, but I’m sure her classic good taste is appropriate for any occasion. And I imagine we’ll have far fewer escape attempts with Martha designing the Big House menu. Instead of The Shawshank Redemption, it’ll be The Lamb Shank Reduction. (Slice thinly with shiv and serve warm.)

    Still, maybe we don’t need to get rid of the nutritional guidelines altogether to make this thing work. I mean, if ketchup is a vegetable why couldn’t water be classified as a thin soup? We haven’t exhausted our options. What about road kill? Make it into jerky and nobody’d know the difference. How about putting all the prisoners whose height/weight ratio doesn’t match up on Slim Fast? A delicious shake for breakfast, a delicious shake for lunch … a case of the shakes by dinnertime. Like I said, I don’t blame Seifert for trying. He wanted the money saved to go into funding areas of public service that are doomed to be cut this year. Meals on Wheels for one. And if that gets cut, maybe we can just serve the inmates a new Hormel product… Soylent Green!

  • Wanted: The Middle Class

    When I moved to north Minneapolis in October 2001, my “posse,” with perhaps one or two exceptions, was, shall we say, perplexed. Oh, everyone liked the house, a recently renovated five-bedroom house with Birdseye maple hardwood floors and leaded glass windows. The neighborhood—that was a different matter. My former wife warned my two oldest sons to never stray more than a block from my house, and then, only in broad daylight. My future father-in-law asked me, “Will my daughter be safe in this neighborhood?” And my sons nervously joked about borrowing my old military flak jacket when they came to visit.

    Someday, I vowed, y’all be kicking yourself in the backside for not joining me up here. Now, I must confess that sometimes I wonder if I should be kicking myself for moving up north; I still contend with trash in my yard, the “boom-boom” of mega-decibel car stereos, and the knowledge that some of Minneapolis’ worst mayhem occurs within a 20-minute walk from my front door. For some time, the prevailing mantra among those in the urban renewal business has been “affordable housing.” However—and I am sure I’ll be called an elitist or worse for saying so publicly—some of the people who most need affordable housing are not great neighbor material. Now, I am defining “great neighbor material” as those who are stable, law-abiding, and respectful of the rights and property of others, those who value education—in other words, those with values closely associated with the middle class. And, unfortunately, a disproportionate number of those who fall short in the “great neighbor department” live in north Minneapolis.

    Now, I am not alone in that view. Don Samuels, Minneapolis’ newest City Council member, represents the racially diverse Third Ward, which includes a very good chunk of north Minneapolis. Samuels recently told me that the Jordan neighborhood, where he lives, has too many thugs. He told me about drug dealers threatening him in front of his own home. Samuels believes that the gangsters felt bold enough to do this for one reason. “They had become the dominant culture on my block. Sure, we had a few middle-class families—three or four—on our block, but that is not enough to change the culture. Give me just two or three more families, then we really make a difference.”

    Samuels publicly exhorts the middle class, particularly the African-American middle class, to “come home” to north Minneapolis. Privately, he admits that living in north Minneapolis is harder than, say, Linden Hills or Uptown. He concedes that it is tough to encourage affluent, educated people into neighborhoods like Jordan, joking, “not everyone shares my sense of mission.” Samuels agrees that middle-class people, because they value hard work and planning for the future, can anchor a neighborhood in a way that those struggling to survive simply are unable to do.

    The truth is that many middle-class people are scared away from north Minneapolis because they fear what nationally known educator Ruby Payne calls the “culture of generational poverty.” According to Dr. Payne, those in generational poverty live “in the moment,” and do not consider the future ramifications of their actions. She adds, “being proactive, setting goals, and planning ahead are not a part of generational poverty.” The middle class by contrast usually embraces those very values that those in generational poverty resist.

    What if the Minneapolis City Council, in conjunction with various community groups, collaborated in creating a predominantly middle-class neighborhood in north Minneapolis? I would suggest redeveloping three or four city blocks with market-rate (i.e. no subsidized) housing, unlike Heritage Park, the new development rising where public housing projects once stood. I personally think Heritage Park developers will have a tough time selling market-rate housing alongside significant subsidized housing. Why? Because most people want to live around people that share their world view, even if they are not willing to admit so publicly.

    North Minneapolis is at a critical juncture. Middle-class folks and their values are crucial to providing the stability that creates a truly healthy community. The Minneapolis City Council needs to do everything in its power to ensure that middle class values are the rule, and not the exception, in this challenged part of town.

  • Excellent References

    The next time you wake up at three in the morning, sweating and shaking and befuddled by what the appearance of Barbara Flanagan’s bustier in your dream could possibly symbolize, don’t just make yourself a glass of warm milk, roll over, and try to forget about it. Oh no—that’s what someone in Andrew Carnegie’s day would have done. We’ve come a long way in information gathering and reference services since the 1890s. Gone are the days of dusty card catalogs, dismal Dewey decimals, and pinch-lipped librarians who go home when the clock strikes five. (In fact, gone may be the days of an actual public library, to judge by recent developments in Minneapolis.) Enter “24/7,” a round-the-clock live chat room full of, well, unrestrained librarians. If you live in Hennepin County and possess a Hennepin County Library card, you are but three mouse-clicks away from a librarian’s magic touch.

    24/7 is one of the most up-to-the-minute services a library can provide, explains Maureen Bell, references services manager for Hennepin County Library. People are out there researching and surfing the web at all hours of the day, and the library wants to be there with you, no matter what you’re looking for.

    Over at the Minneapolis Public Library (uh, wherever that is right now), Nancy Corcoran helps run the MPL’s InfoLine, a telephone reference service available during library hours. She says it is not a 24-hour service per se, but you can leave a message on the machine anytime, and library staff get cracking on your behalf the next business day. If you can wait till morning, we still nominate InfoLine as the city’s most valuable resource.

    What many Minnesotans in their stoicism fail to understand is that reference librarians relish a challenge. They love your questions, need your questions, depend for their jobs on your questions. And though (despite the rumor) there really is such a thing as a stupid question, it is often even stupider not to ask it.

    The other day, I watched the standard crew of six answer the InfoLine phones, which never stopped ringing for very long. The librarians efficiently answered questions, quickly relaying the correct spelling of “seizure,” retrieving the number for the Ramsey County Medical Examiner, and researching the availability of a particular CD. They remained professional and thorough at all times. But they admitted that they do catalog some of the weird and wacky questions that come their way.

    One staff member remembered the day a woman called from South Carolina. She was helping her daughter with a school report on Minnesota, and wanted to know simply “what ya’ll wear, up there.” Another woman, who said she was looking at a map of the United States, called to ask if Mexico was a state. The staff takes these calls seriously, and they work diligently to provide answers. But frankly not all of the 500-600 calls a day are answerable. It would take a virtually omniscient librarian, for example, to answer the woman who called with a technical question about her crockpot: Was the meat she had started simmering four days ago in fact horse meat? A reference librarian does not like to admit defeat, but hates even more to be wrong.—Katie Quirk

  • “Slaughtered By A Muslim”

    At the 2002 State Fair, the Minnesota Pork Producers Association unveiled a catchy new slogan: “Today’s Pork: Created With Enduring Values.” Ever curious, the Gastronomer asked a representative if these might be, specifically, Christian values. According to Muslim values, of course, pork is “haram”—not allowed. To Jews, pork is “treyf,” or not kosher.

    “Rural values,” was the artful reply to my query. Of course, this could amount to the same thing. The vast majority of the 2.2 million Muslims and 5.8 million Jews in America are city slickers. Issues of social tolerance doubtless play a role in this, but the proliferation of five-million-gallon hog manure lagoons across the Minnesota countryside might also be a contributing factor.

    So when a rabbi was spotted in February near Thief River Falls, it made the news in a big way. A tanker of kosher canola oil had overturned, and the press, as usual, found it very much fer cute that a little guy with earlocks showed up to wave a blessing over the process of transferring the oil to another kosher tanker. The rabbi was really just verifying that the transfer equipment wasn’t contaminated with non-kosher products.

    The dietary rules for Muslims don’t make the news as often, despite a large local market for halal products. The Holy Land market and deli on Central Avenue in northeast Minneapolis does a bustling trade in halal goat, lamb, beef, and poultry, as do the Cedar Bakery and Deli and several other metro outfits serving the local Muslim community. While there are significant differences in practice, halal regulations and kosher laws share the same basic foundation, says Iman Ghazalla of the Arab-American Cultural Institute in Edina. Each custom forbids consumption of insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds of prey, pigs, dogs, donkeys, or any carnivorous animal.

    Also similar to kosher custom, halal products are subject to certification. Al Safa Halal in El Paso, Texas, certifies most halal products in the Midwest. While their tagline “Hand Slaughtered by a Muslim” may give pause to some, their mission of “Extending the benefits of Islamic dietary laws to Muslims and non-Muslims alike” is a worthy goal, according to Holy Land market staffer Amber Essaid. Both halal and kosher slaughter are more sanitary, more humane, and involve more thorough bleeding of meat than the average factory practices. Essaid says this satisfies more than a spiritual necessity; it’s simply better quality. “You have to taste it,” she commanded. “There’s no comparison.” Whether a halal chicken might taste different than a kosher one, we’ll keep you posted.—Joe Pastoor

  • from Saigon: Two Wheels Good, Four Wheels Bad

    We pedaled our singlespeed bikes for three days, roughly 50 kilometers each day, from the Thai-Cambodian border. We were traveling on National Highway 6. Some highway; it’s like a bloody Cal-Trans orgy, only they forgot the asphalt and somebody stole a fleet of Toyota Camrys which cannot be driven slower than 95 mph, kicking up cyclones of pure, demonic, red dust that gets so far down the crack of my biking shorts I think I’m working for Mr. Slate. But it’s a dandy way to see the country. Every Cambodian school kid knows the words “hay-lo” and “bye-bye” but not always in that order. Sometimes they throw a curve ball, and ask, “Where you go?” Well, to paraphrase Picasso, if you know exactly where you’re going, what’s the point? The smiles are endless and genuine, and a great juxtaposition to the endless dust—or if the roads are “paved” then potholes that, if the world were a just place, would be swallowing those damn Camrys. I’m not kidding. Nearly every car is a Toyota Camry, driven by madmen at top speed. They don’t slow down, but their horns work. The pigs don’t seem to mind, and I don’t mean the cops. See, the pigs are being held against their will, upside down, usually three abreast in makeshift cages that look like they were rigged from snow fencing. These “cages” are strapped to the back of moto-bikes, and sometimes rip past us in squadrons of three, for a total of nine pigs. In the morning, we stopped for Coca-Colas and Marlboro (oh, yeah—this is Marlboro country) and I positioned myself so that the local police station sign was in the foreground as these swine merchants rode past. It was pure delight. Well, I laughed anyway.

    As I write this, we’re enjoying 75-cent Angkor beer, (in cans, no less, with old fashioned pull-tabs! Can you imagine?) at an air-conditioned Internet brothel. On the way into Siem Reap, we rode with some young Cambodian kids who spoke excellent English. They ride about 10K to school each day, and I gave one of them my last copy of Bike magazine. He was geeked, and then they invited us to their home for coconut water. The kid just shimmied up the tree about 25 feet above the ground, knocked a few ’nuts down, and we had refreshing coconut water, through a straw naturally, as all drinks in these parts are served. We met his whole family, and got to ride through some true backroad Cambodian villages.

    Now it’s four days later. We made it from Phnom Penh (and completed our trek across Cambodia) to Saigon. We crossed the Cambodian-Vietnamese border at Bavat/Moc Bai with no problems. Cambodia: What an incredible adventure. Just too bizarre, and yet extremely beautiful, and poignant in its own way. Very desolate, very poor, yet the people so proud, so genuine and friendly. They comport themselves with such grace. Truly humbling, and somehow, sandwiched between the gritty fast-paced world of Thailand, and then the barren landscape gives way to the lush, green irrigation of Vietnam.

    At the border, we were immediately thankful for the paved, mostly smooth roads. Aside from that, the mad 71K dash into Saigon was nothing short of a mindblower, traffic coming at us from all directions, in every conceivable and unbelievable vessel. The usual Camry brigade firing past at Mach 666 speeds. Yesterday, we regaled in joy at a broken down Camry on the side of the road. I swerved into the other lane to take a photo, which Mac thought a bit “in-your-face,” as the poor chap had his hood up and was cranking an obvious beat-down starter. Screw ’em. As just one of the legions of Camrys who terrorized us for the past 17 days, I have no sympathy.

    The heat continues to beat down on us. We’re riding most mornings by 6:30 a.m. My face is a beautiful shade of crimson, even with the SPF 50 I’ve been lathering on. The exhaust fumes are black clouds of distortion that you could chew on. We feebly defend our lungs with bandanas pulled over our faces like some modern-day Jesse James. As we neared Saigon, the traffic just increased and it was a full-on assault to stay focused and upright, fighting through the maddening throngs of silk-suited school girls, tuk-tuk taxis, moto drivers, and cyclos hauling sheets of stainless steel, or maybe a woman would roll past with a 12-foot piece of PVC tubing casually draped over her shoulder, held at a deathly-close-to-our-heads angle. Pick a lane, any lane, just don’t make any sudden moves and you’re golden.—Hurl Everstone

    Hurl Everstone

  • Your Point?

    Long before Scud missiles, Apache choppers, and Shock and Awe, warriors lived and died by the sword. That spirit survives — albeit tempered by civility and an official rulebook — in a former bowling alley on Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis. Here, the Minnesota Sword Club has operated for 20 years. Just the other day, more than 40 young fencers, ages 8 to 19, filled the room. “The defender doesn’t lunge,” said a voice from the practice floor. “I didn’t lunge!” his opponent replied. “Yes you did!”

    Fencing often appeals to young people who aren’t interested in other athletic pursuits. “It attracts smart kids because it’s a mental game, like chess,” said Sword Club owner Rich Jacobson. “It’s kind of like debate, but it’s a physical debate.”

    Jacobson’s svelte physique, his wavy grey hair, and well-trimmed moustache give him the look of a dashing European villain in a swashbuckling film. But his East Coast accent, still with him three decades after moving to the Twin Cities, reveals less exotic roots. As a teen in New York, Jacobson took up fencing and competed using the foil and the saber. He moved to Minneapolis to coach several fencing groups before founding his own club in 1982.

    Jacobson recalled when there were just 2,000 competitive fencers in the United States. Now, he said, the number is closer to 20,000. At the Minnesota Sword Club, there has been a particular surge of interest among girls. Alyssa Vongries is one of the most dedicated. She’s been fencing half her life. With her slight build, feathered hair, and dark eye shadow, she looks like an average 12-year-old. But armed with an épée, she’s ranked number one in the nation in her age group.

    “I fence against people who are older, taller, and more experienced than me a lot,” Vongries said. Does she beat them? “Sometimes. Sometimes I lose to them. But it’s all in the game.” Alyssa’s mom, Lynne Vongries, likes those odds. She often watches her daughter and son, Alex, compete, and she values the losses as much as the victories. “Competition is something that schools tend to try to hide,” she said. “Everybody gets to win, and that’s not the way life is. Everybody doesn’t get to win. Everybody gets to lose a lot and sometimes you get to win. Our kids are learning how to win and lose on an individual basis. I think it’s helping them be better people.”

    The appeal of fencing is pretty straightforward. “Kids just naturally hack at each other with two sticks,” noted Jacobson. Movies play a role as well; gunplay may be more common, but sword fights still make it to the silver screen. In the last two years, filmgoers have seen a Count of Monte Cristo remake, heartthrob Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale, Madonna teaching James Bond suggestively about swordplay, and a digitally enhanced Yoda kicking serious butt with a light saber. For Sword Club newcomers, reality sometimes suffers by comparison.

    Two men bouting inside the club were secured by wires to a pulley system above their heads. The mechanism allowed back-and-forth movement and conducted electricity, triggering wall-mounted lights and buzzers each time one fencer’s sword touched his opponent’s metal lamé jacket. These sparring partners traded blows and chatted amiably about church activities. Elsewhere in the club, another group learned the en garde position and tried to maintain a slight crouch as they advanced on their rivals. The real beginners were getting a demonstration of how to put on a mesh fencing mask with one hand.

    Wayne Hector was an unlikely musketeer, in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. He and his wife, Carolyn, picked their fencing course out of an Open U catalog. Others are more serious about the sport. Linda Merritt, who is 38, has gone from a 44- to a 36-inch waist since she discovered the Minnesota Sword Club. She believes fencing gives you “every bit as good a workout as you would get from taking an aerobics class, but you don’t have to dance around like a big fool.” Anna Leahy, 35, appreciates fencing’s therapeutic qualities. “I really like hitting people,” she said. “Without, you know, hurting them.”— Scott A. Briggs

  • Busting Baghdad

    Two days after one of those giant statues of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Firdos Square, and had its head chopped off and dragged through the streets of Baghdad, artists at the University of Minnesota were participating in the art department’s 34th Annual Iron Pour, casting new and graven images for artistic fulfillment and academic credit. Dozens of artists in heavy protective clothing, safety glasses, and a hodgepodge of facemasks and respirators braved the acrid smoke from the coke-fired furnace, which stung the eyes and embedded in clothing. Manipulating heavy crucibles on pulleys and poles, teams of artists poured molten steel into sand molds. It was a delicate and carefully timed group performance, not something you see too often among go-it-alone artist-types.

    Given the sweat and planning required to finish even the simplest of these metal sculptures, did anyone here experience a pang of sadness for the public art being pummeled in Iraq? Max Thomas, a University senior in red safety glasses, said that seeing a 40-foot statue come down was an amazing visual experience in itself. He said, “I wish all sculptors could have an armored M88 tank to do stuff with!” His eyes went wide with the possibilities.

    First-time pourer Peter Schmidt, a student from Southwest State, had doubts. “It’s a shame to see all those statues being torn down. It’s like taking away history—like burning up pictures and paintings.” Although no fan of that particular subject or its execution, Schmidt hoped the statue’s remnants would one day end up in a museum rather than, say, the basement of a frat house at Baghdad U.

    Jim Swartz, another visitor from Southwest State, considered the artistic possibilities of the fallen Saddam statuary. “I figured you have two choices with all those statues: Either put them in a museum for bad art from bad regimes, or cut them up and reassemble ’em in a really nice abstract way. That’d be the first thing I’d do,” he said.

    Actually, the bad art museum is not all that far-fetched, said iron-pour organizer and U of M art professor Wayne Potratz. “I can certainly understand why people would want to destroy a symbol that’s been oppressive, but one of the things that’s happened in the former Soviet Union is that they’ve taken a lot of the sculptures of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin and put them in these very bizarre sculpture parks. Then they’re all together, representing an era.” Indeed, in Grutas, Lithuania, a local entrepreneur assembled more than 60 statues and busts of Lenin and Stalin in a park that locals dubbed “Stalin World.” The park, which its creator has boasted “combines the charms of Disneyland with the worst of the Soviet Gulag prison camp,” has not been without controversy among Stalin’s victims. But it has become a popular tourist attraction. Would a future Saddam Land be any less tasteful or popular among history buffs?

    “The statue of Hussein does speak about a particular style and an idea of what art is,” Potratz said. “I thought it was pretty typical of what I call totalitarian art, which follows very closely the aesthetics of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. It’s naturalistic work depicting heroic figures. It’s very much like a lot of the post-Civil War statuary you find here in the States.”

    Structurally, the Firdos Square Saddam got low marks from Prof. Potratz. “My impression was it wasn’t made very well, because they had big steel pipes in the legs and it was broken up pretty easily by people with hammers. That leads me to believe it wasn’t such a great casting.” What would Potratz create if given the opportunity to build a 40-foot sculpture intended to weather the ages and sway the masses? He thought for a minute and then grinned. “Me, I’d make a giant turtle.”—Dan Gilchrist