Month: November 2004

A couple years back—this was before everyone started talking about exhibition designers—it seemed like curators were eclipsing artists as the hot thing in the art world. (That is, when architects weren’t hogging the spotlight with their museum designs, but we digress …) How did this happen? One likely factor was the rise in demand for curatorial services as biennial exhibitions—sprawling shows whose themes are all-encompassing, ambitiously esoteric, or both—began sprouting around the globe. The Venice Biennial is one of the granddaddies, but now there are dozens, enough that curators spend lots of time jetting around the world just to keep up with them all. Douglas Fogle is one of those globe-trotters (his home base is here at Walker Art Center), and courtesy of mnartists.org, he’ll give an insider’s scoop on how the biennial craze is affecting the art world. 2640 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-375-7622; www.walkerart.org

We first met about six years ago in a basement lab. I was a young archaeologist with a short attention span. The bison calf was in an old cardboard box, just bones now, and had been there for decades. If the calf was born alive, its very brief life was spent on the prairies of west-central Minnesota. It’s hard to say for sure when it died, although it was almost definitely within the last two thousand years. There are a number of mysteries concerning this little bison, not least of which is this: Where is its head?

Bison bones have been discovered at archaeological sites all over Minnesota, spanning the 10,000-year history of human presence here. Some sites contain the remains of dramatic bison hunts where dozens to hundreds of animals were killed and butchered. Other sites contain bones—cut, burned, broken, boiled, and dog-chewed—that are the food scraps found amid other evidence of daily village life. These artifacts help us visualize an unscarred landscape of rolling prairies and lakes where massive herds of bison once roamed. But a particularly potent image for me is the solitary burial of this headless calf. It was found in the early days of Minnesota archaeology, in a burial mound near Glenwood, overlooking the shore of Lake Minnewaska in Pope County.

The year was 1938, and Lloyd Wilford was leading a small crew of excavators. Wilford, who had recently earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University, would go on to become the grandfather of Minnesota archaeology. In compiling the outline of Minnesota’s archaeological record, he trained generations of students at the University of Minnesota; his life’s work became the foundation upon which current research is still conducted.

The mound was located on land owned by a family named Fingerson. Wilford and his crew excavated a large circular area in the center of the earthwork, in which they found the skeleton of a bison calf, a pile of stones set on top of birch bark, and the powdery traces of decomposed wooden poles. The pole section with the largest diameter was found in an upright position at the mound center, with other sections laid out to the north and east. The stones were found to the east of the center. The bison calf’s body had been placed to the northwest. Its skeleton was found fully articulated, indicating that aside from its head, the calf’s body was clearly buried intact. Bundles of human remains, some colored with red ochre, and one cremation were found in and around the poles, the cairn, and the skeleton of the calf.

Two small pottery shards and a few stone chips were found during the excavation. None were of a style that indicated a particular time or place, leaving the age and history of the mound uncertain. Mounds were built for more than two thousand years, by a number of American Indian cultures, and for a variety of purposes that fall under two common themes. They tended to be built for religious reasons and at times of the year when large numbers of people congregated in one place for an extended stay—which was generally in the spring or early summer.

The Fingerson Mound is one of more than eleven thousand that have been recorded in Minnesota (it is assumed that many more were never documented). Based on his findings from other mounds that shared a similar manner of human burial and general lack of associated artifacts, Wilford theorized that it was built during a time that archaeologists now call the Late Woodland period, ranging from approximately 500 A.D. until the time of local European contact in the late 1600s.

It was sixty years after Wilford’s excavation, in 1998, that I met the Fingerson calf for the first time. Much had changed in Minnesota archaeology. For one thing, we no longer seek out burial mounds for research excavations. State laws passed in the 1970s protect burial sites of all types from archaeologists as well as from bulldozers. Archaeological research related to mounds is now done in consultation with American Indian communities, with a goal of protecting cemetery sites rather than digging them up. The findings from past studies by Wilford and others now help archaeologists to recognize mounds and other grave sites with minimal disturbance, so that they can be preserved in place, with the same legal protection as modern cemeteries.

The state mandate, together with a federal law passed in 1990, created a boon for Minnesota archaeology. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act meant that many of the state’s early digs would receive increased scrutiny: It gave museums a deadline by which they were to consult with Indian tribes regarding human remains and sacred objects in their collections. If a connection was established to a federally recognized tribe, then the disposition of the remains and objects is decided by the tribe.

The process elicited a wide range of responses from archaeologists and American Indians, with some archaeologists protesting the “loss to science” in repatriating such artifacts. In my experience, though, quite the opposite is true. By the late 1990s, the Fingerson bison calf had been lying in a storage box for sixty years. In fact, most archaeological materials that came under review because of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act were being studied and documented for the first time. So my study of the calf occurred at a crossroads in Minnesota archaeology, amid a flurry of laboratory research.

The Fingerson calf was part of this repatriation process because it was found in a burial mound. Most of the attention in such cases fell on human remains. Other objects discovered in mounds were generally examined to confirm that they were burial offerings—objects intended to be with the people buried in the mound. Wilford’s research linked the Fingerson mound generally to the Dakota, establishing a path for consultation and repatriation.

Both then and now, the calf was interpreted as an integral part of the mound construction ceremony for several reasons, the most obvious ones being the lack of its head and its age. This was not just any little bison. Also important was its location within the mound. A number of earthworks excavated by Wilford had bison remains placed to the northwest of the mound center, suggesting a broader tradition beyond this one mound. This is the only case known, however, where the bison was a calf, and the only one with a missing head. It seemed likely that the head was removed as part of the religious and funerary rites conducted when the mound was built, but the reason why was far from clear.

The Fingerson bison calf captured my imagination, and I undertook a brief study of its skeleton before it was repatriated. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the calf would connect itself to many other aspects of my archaeological work. Even though it was (and is) a side project, my attempt to solve the mystery surrounding the calf provoked questions that have continued to keep pace with my other research. A cynical person might say that I had simply found that the calf offered a great excuse to procrastinate on other projects, and perhaps that’s true to a certain extent. Yet it also led me down paths that I might not have otherwise encountered, and it was my other work that always benefited. Even as I began to see how the calf was connected to so much, I also came to realize that there is so much else to this story that I will never know.

When I examined the calf skeleton, I found some intriguing details that supported Wilford’s interpretation that the entire body of the animal (except for its head) was buried in the mound. One fragment of the axis (the second vertebra of the neck) was present, but there was no trace of the atlas (the topmost vertebra, which supports the head). Presumably, the atlas had been removed with the head, and the axis damaged in the process. All of the other vertebrae and bones of the body were present; nearly all were intact and well-preserved. No cut marks were visible on any of the
bones, indicating that the rest of the body had not been butchered.

Archaeologists identify ancient fragments of bone by comparing them with modern skeletons. In this manner, the bones of the Fingerson calf were identified as a bison during Wilford’s original analysis. I hoped to learn more and was fortunate to be granted access to the reference collections at museums and research institutions around the Upper Midwest. My search ended at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, where I was able to compare the Fingerson calf with the skeletons from a number of bison calves of various ages. The closest match was an unborn but fully developed calf, suggesting that at the time of death, the Fingerson calf was either soon to be born, or perhaps just born. The comparative skeleton in Springfield included the skull, which emphasized the tender age of the Fingerson calf. Adult bison are huge, powerful animals, but this little bean was tiny, with nubs of horns the size of a pencil eraser. Bison calves are born in late spring to early summer, so if the death of the calf and the construction of the mound were concurrent events (which seems reasonable given that the entire body of the calf was buried in the mound), then it’s likely that the mound’s construction and its accompanying ceremonies occurred in May or June.

As expected in a young animal, the ends of its bones (the epiphyses) were not attached to the shafts. The bones of all mammals grow in this way, fusing together by the time the animal is fully grown. (We humans experience the process as “growing pains.”) Therefore, the skeletons of baby mammals are quite distinct from those of juveniles and adults of the same species—at birth they are still geared for gestation and the birthing process.

In 1999, shortly after I made my study, the Fingerson calf was reburied, along with the human remains from the mound. Prior to the repatriation, I requested permission from the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council to retain one calcaneus, or ankle bone, of the calf in order to one day provide a radiocarbon date. This technique, a byproduct of atomic research during World War II, did not exist at the time that Wilford’s crew excavated the mound. They had estimated the age of the Fingerson Mound through comparison with other known archaeological sites; now, however, this bone from the Fingerson calf could provide a more precise date.

A few years passed by first, however, with other projects and other concerns. An archaeological find at Mille Lacs had inspired me to jump back into graduate school—while also continuing to work full time. Then, in 2000, a friend asked me to present a paper on the Fingerson Mound at a conference in St. Paul. He was aiming to explore connections between that mound and the Sonota Complex, an archaeological culture of sorts, identified at sites in central North and South Dakota on the basis of elaborate ceremonies involving bison. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to participate at that time. I was scrambling to prepare for a research trip to Sweden, and trying to work in a much-needed visit to my girlfriend (now wife) at her dig in Ireland. Meanwhile, my schedule of field projects in Minnesota was stretching out to the end of the year. But the mystery of the calf drew me back in, and preparing for the presentation provided an excuse to get a radiocarbon date for the calf bone.

First, though, I needed funding, and in this case, my jammed schedule was actually a benefit. Lacking the time to search for grants, I decided simply to ask for help, and was rewarded with kindness. The cost of the radiocarbon testing was split by the Institute for Minnesota Archaeology (a nonprofit in St. Paul that is now sadly defunct) and Loucks Associates, the Maple Grove consulting firm that I worked for at the time. I submitted the sample in the fall of 2000, and wouldn’t get the results until just a few days before the conference, but I wasn’t expecting any surprises. The Sonota Complex dates from about 100 B.C. to 600 A.D., and it seemed reasonable to expect that the Fingerson calf would be from that same era, or at least close to it.

After sending off the sample, I returned to a heavy fall field season at Mille Lacs, as we raced to finish several projects before the ground froze. It turned out to be the year I learned to love winter archaeology. The landscape opened as the leaves fell, revealing subtle hints of the recent past: logging camps and trails, old birch trees stripped of their bark, homestead sites and their storage pits. At the same time, an excavation in Onamia ranged across more than two thousand years of human history, from the oldest pottery known in the region (around 500 B.C.) to the founding of the town in the early 1900s.

The bombshell dropped during a short break from that project, just days before the start of the conference. I checked in at my office and, standing there at the receptionist’s desk, tore open the envelope from the radiocarbon lab. The report stated that the calf was about 150 years old. More precisely, and factoring in the margin of error, they concluded with a ninety-five percent probability that the bison calf died between 1670 and 1960 A.D.

First came confusion (what happened? what?), followed quickly by disappointment (the sample must have been contaminated), but soon, intrigue (hold on, what if it’s right?). I had begun simply by looking at the headless skeleton of a bison calf, but a door opened with the new date. The result moved the entire mound from the remote past to a relatively recent and pivotal period in history, during which the land of Minnesota changed dramatically.

Age is generally considered a virtue in archaeology—so many of our studies aim to discover the first something-or-
other or the origins of that thingamajig. But there is another side of archaeology that searches for insights to the simple beauty of everyday life. Archaeologists focusing on recent history (say, the last three hundred years) are well-versed in the limitations of written documents. Artifacts, on the other hand, regardless of their age, can take us through the heavy curtain of history to connect with an individual person—as with an ancient fingerprint preserved in the wall of a fired clay pot, or a child’s toy from hundreds or thousands of years ago, or the animal bones, seeds, and shards that combine to recreate a meal. The age of the oldest mounds in Minnesota is well-known to be about 500 B.C. The recent date given to the bison calf bone, however, knocked our legs out at the other end of the timeline, suggesting just how long the mound-building tradition may have persisted—which is why my dismay transformed into a growing excitement.

Under the broad brush of archaeological time, indigenous clay pots and stone tools seem to disappear immediately after the introduction of European trade goods in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The possibilities raised by this radiocarbon date reminded me that culture is too complex to be painted with such a broad brush, and that artifacts and archaeological typologies do not equate with belief and ritual, or the actions of individual people. If correct, the date seemed to show the continuity of ancient cultural traditions well into the historic period, against all the odds presented by disease, warfare, exile, and systematic transformation of the land by white settlement.

It is important to remember that a single radiocarbon date does not prove anything. It is always preferable to get a series of dates from different samples and to compare the results. Unfortunately, this was not an option with the bison calf and the mound, since there was only one sample. It’s not unusual to reject a date if it conflicts with other lines of evidence. At first glance, this would be done with the date from the bone of the Fingerson calf. Looking again at Wilford’s report, however, there was no independent evidence that actually contradicted the result, and previously overlooked details began
to whisper that the date might be correct. I had assumed, along with other archaeologists, that this was a Late Woodland mound, and had therefore glossed over the wood and birchbark as simply remarkable preservation (though such artifacts have been discovered in ancient mounds as well). With this puzzle in mind, I set out to examine Wilford’s unpublished field notes and photographs for additional information and clues that could explain the date.

Working from what little is known about the mound, we can reduce the radiocarbon age range back a bit from 1960. The mound was excavated in 1938, for instance, so obviously it is older than that. More importantly, the accounts of the Fingerson family demonstrate that it was present on their land in the “pioneer days” of the mid-nineteenth century. This implies that it was built sometime before 1850.

Wilford believed that the calf was placed in the mound during its construction, as did the other excavators. Other bison bones, including articulated limbs, were found in the mound (although they apparently were not collected). Joseph Nicollet observed that bison hunting by the Dakota in western Minnesota was common in the early nineteenth century. But by the 1850s, the Dakota were largely confined to a reservation along the Minnesota River, well to the south of the Fingerson Mound. The last wild bison in Minnesota were seen in the Red River Valley in the 1880s.

George Sletten, one of Wilford’s students, made a record in his field notes that is particularly relevant to the radiocarbon date. “According to statements made by the Fingersons,” he wrote, “the mound was of interest to the Indians, who came back to the spot a number of times after they had been moved to the reservation to look after the mound. They also, at one time, built and kept in repair a rail fence around the mound.” This argues that the mound as a whole was an important place within living memory at that time, and highlights the sad irony that it was excavated such a short time later. These historical circumstances suggest that the mound may have been constructed in the early 1800s.

While archaeologists generally think of burial mounds as a trait of the “prehistoric” period, it should not be surprising that a tradition spanning more than two millennia did not end so abruptly. After all, past research at Mille Lacs has shown that Dakota people were still building mounds at the same time the French were trading for fur in the late 1600s. We know that because “historic” artifacts—French trade goods—were found in association with “prehistoric” pottery. The Fingerson Mound differs in that no historic objects were present. In fact, few artifacts of any kind were found. If European goods were placed in mounds in the late 1600s, it seems likely that they would be more common over a century and a half later, by the early 1800s. Their absence suggests that there was a deliberate rejection, and that the ceremonies represented in the structure of the mound were those of notably traditional people.

Given the radiocarbon date and the apparent importance the mound had for the Dakota, I looked to written accounts of Sioux religion for clues about the bison calf and other elements of the mound. Historical descriptions of the Sun Dance, recorded nearly a century ago by Lakota elder Short Bull, yielded another surprise: “A consecrated buffalo calf skin is hung as a flap over the entrance to the sacred lodge as an act toward the Buffalo God who prevails in the formal camp for the Sun Dance. This skin is taken and hung upon the sacred pole during the dance.” In later years the calf skin was represented by a red cloth, since a bison calf is red for the first six months of its life.

As a ceremony of world renewal and self-sacrifice, the Sun Dance is a historic part of numerous Great Plains Indian cultures, in which some participants pierce their flesh with sharp objects that are attached with leather thongs to a sacred cottonwood tree. The wooden poles in the Fingerson Mound offer further evidence of a link between the mound and a ceremony similar to the Sun Dance. Could the upright pole segment at the mound center be the base of the sacred cottonwood at the center of the Sun Dance circle, later buried within the mound? Lakota artist Arthur Amiotte writes that “the sacred tree is the Axis Mundi, the Tree of Life, the center of the universe. It is ritually and then literally killed in preparation for the Sun Dance.” If the Sun Dance is indeed connected to the Fingerson Mound, then the bison calf was also killed to provide the skin for the ceremony; these elements were later buried in the mound with the remains of the deceased. This interpretation could explain the calf’s missing head: perhaps it had remained attached to the skin and was placed at the top of the sacred tree.

The Sun Dance is a complex, symbolic, and profound series of rituals that has its own religious significance. But was it once also connected in some way with mound-building and funerary ceremonies? Robert Hall argues in An Archaeology of the Soul that world-renewal rituals were combined with mound construction for thousands of years. He writes that it was only after white settlement, when mounds were seemingly no longer built, that the Sun Dance and other ceremonies emerged as separate traditions.

In My People, the Sioux, Luther Standing Bear describes a Sun Dance in the 1880s in which participants, representing the dead, laid on beds of sage in the ceremonial area. In the contemporary practice of the Sun Dance, Beatrice Medicine writes that “those who have lost a relative during the previous year are fed a ritual meal and thereby reincorporated into the ordinary activities of Lakota society.” These descriptions suggest symbolic connections between the Sun Dance and former funerary practices, possibly held over from older versions of the ceremony. This particular question aside, it is clear that the Sun Dance has changed in various ways—in large part because it was once prohibited by the U.S. government. Traditions such as the Sun Dance had to be preserved in hiding from the late 1800s until the 1930s, a span of more than fifty years. The religious ceremonies of all peoples change and evolve over time, and the same should be expected for the Sun Dance. But this extended period when it was forced underground undoubtedly had a strong impact. Historian Mari Sandoz describes the Sun Dance as “a modified combination of several old, old ceremonials.”

Some archaeologists view artifacts and other information in a clinical way: If we study them with scientific precision we will find the “truth,” or at least empirical data upon which to base further research. Others see the archaeological record as a mirror in which the archaeologist sees him- or herself, and thereby can unconsciously skew the findings to tell a desired story. The reality of archaeological practice is probably somewhere in between. Scientific method is the foundation of modern archaeological research, which no archaeologist would willfully ignore. On the other hand, our interpretations of the archaeological record are inevitably filtered through the lens of our own knowledge and experiences. That was as true of Wilford as it is for me, and for everyone else. Wilford helped construct the archaeological world that I work in every day, whereas my knowledge about the Sun Dance is limited to the writings of others. A practitioner of the Sun Dance may find my interpretation absurd (or maybe not). Some archaeologists do, and that’s fine—this is a field that advances through debate, independent evaluation of evidence, and revision of interpretations based on new findings.

Actually, when I say “revision,” I’m being an optimist. This is the first interpretation of the Fingerson Mound, for all its flaws, and I would gladly welcome another. Archaeologists must be humble when we look at the available information about Minnesota’s past—data is so scarce that even after a century o
f research we are generally limited to description (as Wilford and his crew were), not interpretation. In the end, there is no way to definitively say that the Fingerson Mound is the archaeological remains of a Sun Dance. The available evidence certainly leaves much room for debate, and there’s so much more that we simply don’t know. As a suggestion, however, it holds out an intriguing possibility that reminds us of the complexity of mound-building and the ceremonies that accompanied it. It also best fits the known pieces of the puzzle and the historical context—the wooden poles, the visits by the Dakota, the headless calf—as I see them, and so it seems appropriate to link a burial mound to religious ideas. After all, ancient earthworks are not just piles of dirt any more than a cathedral is just a building. The mounds were constructed in a deliberate and symbolic way, as resting places for deceased loved ones, and also much more.

Imagine removing the topsoil from your entire lawn without metal tools or machines. Then imagine building and shaping a mound one basketload of soil at a time. That kind of work is not to be undertaken lightly. The Fingerson Mound was sixty feet in diameter and seven and a half feet tall, one of tens of thousands created throughout the region. A tiny fraction of them have been excavated by archaeologists. The vast majority have been bulldozed or plowed away.

I am grateful for what I’ve learned since I first encountered the bones of that bison calf in a cardboard box, though I regret that the mound was disturbed. If there’s a lesson here, perhaps it is to cherish the unknown. Despite the drastic remaking of the landscape during last century or so, much of Minnesota’s cultural and natural heritage remains, albeit in a fragile state. The Fingerson calf reminds us of what we have lost, such as Minnesota’s bison herds, and could point to the continuity of cultural traditions in the face of adversity. Not all development is bad, of course, and we can’t stop the future any more than we can change history. But as an elder once told me, “These things can co-exist.” The modern world is a more meaningful place when it’s rooted in that which has come before.

The artist came from new york; the helicopter, from houston. The pilot arrived from new jersey and, at the artist’s direction, positioned his craft outside the two-story window wall at midway’s massive new gallery. For a couple of hours it hovered there, its searchlight trained on the crowd gathered for opening night. Some availed themselves of cheap sunglasses, hanging on a sculpture—a totem-like, enameled version of the displays at gas stations—at the center of the gallery. Aggressively artsy, beautiful yet foreboding, and also just a tad absurd, it was a happening tailor-made for the age of terrorism and the patriot act. This exhibit includes videos and photos from that event, titled inside out (tender buttons), along with other pieces from young, who in previous works has collaborated with tattoo artists, day laborers, and a football team. 3338 university ave. S.e., minneapolis; 612-605-4504; www.midwayart.org

Last year, the Minneapolis Police Department received a “generous gift” from Target Corporation: enough money to purchase thirty surveillance cameras, which were strategically placed within a ten-block radius downtown. We Minnesotans like to keep to ourselves, so when the ACLU tried to stand up to Big Brother, many of us quietly cheered.

Compared to other cities, though, we should count ourselves lucky. Chicago has more than two thousand surveillance cameras scanning its windy streets, and, according to a recent BBC story, the average Londoner is caught on Closed Circuit Television (the Brits’ official surveillance system) three hundred times a day.

Anyone can hack into an unencrypted wireless surveillance camera and view what the cameras are monitoring. The practice of “war spying” derives from “war driving,” where computer nerds with WiFi cards in their laptops cruise through neighborhoods and business districts in an attempt to “borrow” an unsuspecting victim’s Internet access. (“War chalking” is a system of graffiti that advertises where to find these open nodes.) War spying lets anyone with a video camera and a two-point-four GHz wireless video receiver (about fifteen dollars online) tap into the signal. Remember that creep last year who was using a camera to look up women’s skirts at Target? Wireless, if not guileless. He was spotted on Target surveillance cameras.

In San Francisco earlier this year, two war spies drove around town and picked up twelve different cameras within an hour, including one in a hotel room. And a news station in Oregon tried it out in Seattle—where they picked up images from a restaurant, art gallery, tattoo parlor, and a random room where some guy was sitting at a computer—and they ran a salacious scare story the following week. (No surprise there.)

The attraction for newscasters and non-newscasters alike seems to be not so much tapping into a prime view of that abandoned parking ramp, but in discovering illicit surveillance—in other words, spying on the spies. Or at least seeing what they see.

In the ongoing effort to nurture my own geek gene, I decided to see for myself. The same day I received my equipment in the mail, I drove around the Twin Cities looking for hidden cameras. With every muffled noise or burst of static, I almost wrecked my car trying to see if anything showed up on my video camera’s thumb-size screen. I drove through Uptown, Downtown, Edina, and St. Paul, convinced I’d soon see scenes from a locker room or bathroom where someone had hidden a camera. Worst-case scenario, I figured, I’d at least catch a glimpse of the front of a gated house as I drove by. Would they be able to watch me watching them watching me?

After a few hours of this, all I’d seen was a number of other bad drivers on the other side of my windshield. I decided to head home. Suddenly, just as I was pulling up to my house, the static gave way to a real voice, one that sounded vaguely familiar. Maybe it was someone I know! I stopped in the middle of the street and fumbled for my camera. People were talking! I could make out a face. I recognized that face!

It was Cartman from South Park. I had picked up images from the wireless cable box inside my own home. I guess I left the TV on. Like Cartman says: Pretty sweet.—Molly Priesmeyer

One reason so many lapsed Christians find themselves back in church on Christmas Eve is to hear the music. This year, you might be surprised to discover that those wonderful old carols have changed in your long absence. While you were away sinning, there has been a bit of an internecine scuffle between fans of the classical canon and what we’ll call the “Kumbayah” sect.

Traditionalists uniformly deplore the “Life Teen” church services that seem to be flourishing in the suburbs. For example, the Upper Room service at Christ Presbyterian Church in Edina is essentially a Christian rock concert with candlelight, velour seats, and a joyful noise. The result is a little like a parish talent show. At an Upper Room service the other day, the pastor served as emcee, music director, Mick Jagger-like rock star, and liturgist. He even performed an interpretive reading—a spoken-word performance, in heathen terms—of the Lord’s Prayer. While teenagers and twentysomethings sprang to their feet and flailed their arms (to the beat of music that, for the most part, pats them on the back for having found Jesus), a skeptical writer in the back pew wondered how this counted as churchgoing.

It is a national crisis: Out with the pipe organs, in with the drum sets and acoustic guitars. By introducing modern music into their worship services, many churches are trying to make the sanctuary a friendlier, more worldly place. Of course, this often merely splits both clergy and congregation along contemporary versus classical music lines.

“There are churches in the Twin Cities that literally have an upstairs church and a downstairs church,” said Dr. Lynn Trapp. He is the director of worship music and the organist at Saint Olaf Catholic Church in downtown Minneapolis. “They won’t allow the guitar into the upstairs church.”

The doctrinal loosening of Vatican II back in the sixties spawned a slow, steady, but ultimately radical transformation of sacred music, first in the Catholic Church and then among Protestant denominations. Churches increasingly made music that sounded like pop, folk, rock, even saccharine love ballads—but they often saved this kind of thing for special events that were more social than worshipful. That began to change, however, and in the last decade, younger clergy have tried to incorporate more contemporary music directly into regular services.

The past year has seen an especially pointed battle between contemporary and classical worship music, with some church members preferring—even demanding—their sacred music sound more like what they hear on the radio. Their sworn enemies are the traditionalists, who are recognized by their white-knuckled grip on the old choral hymnal.

From this pew, it appears that contemporary music is winning. In the past year, many Twin Cities churches uprooted music directors and organists, fired well-paid sopranos, and switched formats. And even though the organ is to hold a “pride of place” according to Roman Catholic dogma, the majestic pipes of this instrument, so often incorporated into the very architecture of church buildings, stand silent. They have been displaced by a crop of friendly, goateed guitarists playing sacred music that sounds like something off the Sonny and Cher Show.

The sweep has the choral community in a fuss, because many are professional singers dependent on the income from their lucrative “church gigs.” Snobbery and self-preservation aside, they argue that contemporary music is too individualistic for congregational worship. The lyrics, they say, are self-referential and self-indulgent. Jeffrey O’Donnell, associate producer for WCAL’s nationally syndicated sacred music program Sing for Joy, suggests that contemporary music is inevitably New Age-y in tone and content. It “looks inwardly rather than outwardly. ‘Lord, let me be your shepherd’ and all that kind of stuff,” he said. By contrast, traditional music is concerned with “the wonders of God’s creation, God’s work, God’s people.”

O’Donnell said that the rhythms of contemporary music are often too jarring for a group to successfully join in, thereby forcing reliance upon soloists and excluding parishioners from singing along. “This style of music is written to be embellished or improvised,” he said. “It works for smaller groups or meditative sessions, but not necessarily for congregational song.”

Dr. Trapp, who leads a diverse music program for Saint Olaf that includes both contemporary and classical music as well as African chanting and other genres, argued that this is but one movement in the constant evolution of worship. “Gregorian chant was the basis of Christian music,” he said. “We only moved into the standard hymnody after Martin Luther and beyond. In history, there is always a need for the charismatic.”

If you like what you’re hearing, Dr. Trapp said, the Twin Cities are especially ripe with new Christian music, thanks to a concentration of renowned composers who live here alongside some of the best church choirs. “We have worship styles far left and far right and everything in between,” he said. “Where else in the country do you have this hotbed of experimentation? And along with that you have the divisiveness.”

Some of the best-known modern services—or most notorious, depending on your confessional preferences—include the bluegrass service at St. Paul’s House of Mercy and the rock ’n’ roll service at Spirit Garage, the nonconformist, nomadic south Minneapolis church. While both are successful in attracting the unbaptized and the backslider alike, organizers acknowledge that their music programs alienate, even offend, others. “What we’re doing may not work for you,” said John Kerns, minister of music for Spirit Garage. “It’s cool to us, but it may not be cool to you.”
—Christy DeSmith

On December 1, a mandatory three-day orientation begins for newly elected members of Minnesota’s House of Representatives. It all starts with a jovial chartered bus ride to a conference center outside of Monticello. Meanwhile, back in St. Paul, fourteen defeated, soon-to-be-former House members will be closing up their offices as part of a disorienting, but nonetheless mandatory, exit process. “It’s quite a shock, that’s for sure,” says Representative Tom Rukavina of Virginia, who, in the course of a two-decade House career, has seen literally hundreds of members lose and leave. “But if you lose, you lose, and you’ve got to be realistic about it.”

Practically speaking, Election Day is merely the beginning of the end for legislators suffering the humiliations of defeat. They still have to pack and check out. And so, at some point during the two months between Election Day and the convening of the new legislature, they will surrender their perks and privileges to the Office of the House Sergeant-At-Arms, which oversees everything from parking passes to office furniture. “Most of them are courteous about it,” says Shawn Peterson, the Chief Sergeant-At-Arms. “And for the most part they’re out by mid-December.” Before they leave, however, each departing member must also submit to an exit interview to ensure that all state property receives a proper accounting. “Everything is bar-coded at this point,” Peterson adds. “Because in the old days—say, twenty years ago, and I’m speaking anecdotally here—members may have left with some things that were not theirs.”

Nevertheless, sentimental members may keep their nameplates, including the one attached to the voting board in the House chamber, because “they’re not valuable to the state anymore.” They are also free to keep their House IDs, which some choose to do because they want “to use them for identification purposes.” Offices and papers are packed up in taxpayer-provided boxes. “They’re provided as a course of business,” Peterson explains, somewhat defensively. “It helps the efficiency of the legislature to move the old members out so that we can get the new ones in.” Defeated legislators under the impression that their boxes of official papers might interest future historians had better clear out some attic space. “We’ve found that the Historical Society doesn’t want much of that stuff,” Peterson says. “Maybe if a member went on to become governor or president, they’d want it in hindsight.”

Despite the humiliations of electoral defeat, most legislators eventually get around to exercising the one perk that they are allowed to maintain for life: floor privileges. “Members who have lost, it usually takes a little longer, but they still want to come back,” Peterson says. “Some even come back two or three times per session.” However, defeated members looking to cash in on that access should note that lobbyists, including former members who have joined their ranks, are prohibited from setting foot on the House floor.—Adam Minter

“It’s not really about art at all,” said Brian Johnson about his detailed and intricate chain saw carving techniques. “In fact I’m very big on that idea.” Johnson is tall and burly, a sawdust-covered guy who is as animated as his sculptures are static. “At best I’m a craftsman, not an artist. Isn’t that right, Fred?”

“Yes, sir!” said Fred Vangeison, a semi-retired farmer and businessman from central Illinois. Vangeison is one of four students who have just completed a five-day, $1,500 course at the state-accredited Wisconsin School of Chain Saw Carving that Johnson and his wife Doris run. Their “campus” is just outside Hayward.

The “A” word is clearly met with some skepticism by Johnson. “A friend of mine got his art degree at UW Madison. He wanted to carve a duck decoy for a sculpture class. His art professor said, ‘That’s not art.’ So he carved a woman’s head on the duck, and that made it art!”

During this particular week, Johnson’s students include a project manager for General Motors, a heavy-machinery mechanic, and a dentist. They all are enthusiastic about Johnson’s pedagogy, and proudly show off their main projects from the week: an eagle in profile cut from a half log and a bear standing on its hind legs. Each is quite a respectable piece. “This guy here’s got it down to a science,” said Vangeison, admiring the handsome results of the Johnson Method.

In fact, Johnson’s secrets are rooted in the mundane science of proportions. Many of his students, who arrive itching to rev up the chain saws, are disappointed when most of the first day of class is spent talking about math and working out proportions on calculators. Jim Bohanon, who runs Stump Busters, a tree service in the western suburb of Waconia, took Johnson’s course last spring and he remembers calling his wife after the first day of class, wondering what he had gotten himself into. “‘I thought we were in chain saw school!’ I told her, ‘I’m not good at math—that’s why I do what I do!’” he said.

Unlike most of Johnson’s students, who take the course for personal enjoyment or to develop a hobby for retirement, Bohanon plans to make carving a winter supplement to his stump-removal and firewood business. He’s an enthusiastic convert to Johnson’s detail-oriented method, which also eschews cutesy, cartoonish animals with glued-on eyes in favor of more realistic renderings with carefully hollowed-out pupils. Bohanon laughed when he recounted how he asked Johnson where to buy black marbles, which a chain-saw-carving video had recommended using for bears’ eyes. “He said, “Marbles? You’ve gotta be kidding me!’”

Johnson’s entrée into what is arguably the manliest arena of arts and crafts (some techniques call for two or three different chain saws, a side grinder, a Dremel tool, an air compressor, and a propane torch) came by way of his previous work as a taxidermist and sculptor of taxidermy models, where the proportions and anatomy of animals are also important. Still, when it came to chain saw carving, Johnson says he and Doris, who now teaches sealing and finishing techniques, started from “zero,” developing their methods through thousands of hours of trial and error. “I was so bad that I hired somebody to teach me how to use a chain saw to cut firewood!” he claimed. Today he’s tight-lipped around other professional carvers, saving his insights for tuition-paying students, who leave the school with detailed plans and plastic models of eagles and bears. (The Cold War lives on, apparently, as these two figures far outsell any other kind of carvings.)

Johnson’s own gallery is filled with expensive, elaborately detailed carvings of bears climbing trees, rampant cougars, herons in flight, and more. It’s clear that he enjoys the process as much as the result. “It was something that appealed to me,” he said. “I can go outdoors and be physical, because I’m hyper, and a chain saw wears me out in about four or five hours.”—Dan Gilchrist

Minnesota’s technology underground is a loose confederacy of extreme tinkerers and technical self-expressives—guys, mostly, with day jobs in corporate labs and academic facilities—who spend incredible amounts of time and money on odd stuff that goes boom, whoosh, and splat. It is a netherworld of guerilla science, cobbled together with pneumatic pumps, reclaimed solenoid valves, and rusty arc welders.

There are numerous specializations. Some are into high-powered amateur rockets, million-volt tesla coils, titanium-clad warrior robots, and hand-welded railguns. Still others are into vegetable-hurling weaponry.

I first became aware of Minnesota’s leadership in the field of agricultural artillery when I got interested in a recent surge of non-traditionally powered projectile launchers. First, there was a public television show called Secrets of Lost Empires, which featured a bunch of guys who built a working catapult and knocked down a medieval wall with it. A few months later, a distressed Dan Rather (“What new danger lurks in America’s garages?”) reported on a young Texan who, mishandling a friend’s homemade potato cannon, shot himself in the head with a bullfrog (long, messy story). It turned out that the friend bought the parts for his spud-gun off the Internet, from a person who makes them for a living in a small shop just east of the Twin Cities.

Sensing a growing trend, I began seeking out any local news of vegetable-discharging air guns, catapults, trebuchets, giant slingshots, and the like. Other examples soon popped up. Last spring, on WCCO news, I learned about “Two Boys Hospitalized After Potato Gun Accident in Northwest Minnesota.” Then I took note in my newspaper of a “Des Moines Man Arrested for Spud Cannon Possession.”

But these little incidents are nothing compared to pumpkin chucking, an alarmingly popular hobby. A sport of sorts (in the same way that, say, horseshoes, lawn darts, and battle-bots are sports), it is practiced mostly in areas that grow a lot of pumpkins: central Illinois, southern Delaware, and greater Minnesota. The idea seems to have originated in 1986, when a somewhat eccentric and possibly drunk Delaware man dared his friends to find out how far they could throw a pumpkin, using whatever means they could devise. As it turned out, they didn’t get too far, at least not at first. But guys who are serious about heaving pumpkins tend to be long on tenaciousness, too, and are devoted to the doctrine of continuous improvement. It didn’t take them long to get better at it.

Back in 1986, the winning shot sent a ten-pound pumpkin on a ride just under two hundred feet long. The bar has been set higher each year since then. The 2004 crop of shooters includes trebuchets, slingshots, spring engines, ballistae, torsion catapults, and colossal compressed air-powered behemoths such as the “Aludium Q36 Pumpkin Modulator,” whose name was inspired by the raygun belonging to Marvin the Martian, one of Bugs Bunny’s more memorable rivals. The Q36 is from Morton, Illinois, the home of Libby’s, who incidentally make quite a lot of canned pumpkin filling. The gun travels to pumpkin-shooting events on large flatbed trailers and is assembled on-site using a construction crane. The machine is basically a giant air gun fabricated from ten-inch-diameter aluminum piping, pneumatic valves and regulators, and other assorted industrial doohickeys. The gun is powered by huge tanks of compressed air and mounted on a steel launch pad the size of your average garage slab. Its barrel spans nearly eight stories and the whole thing is encased in a welded steel superstructure tensioned with guy wires.

When the trigger is tripped, a deafening release of compressed air imparts great gobs of kinetic energy to the projectile in the breech. If it’s a good, tough-shelled pumpkin, it soars about 4,800 feet before splatting into seedy goo upon impact. That’s getting very close to a mile, and brother, that’s a long way to shoot a pumpkin. If the pumpkin can’t handle it, it disintegrates in the barrel and somewhere down-range, it’s raining pumpkin pie.

One can also divest oneself of a pumpkin with an old-fashioned catapult, and there are several local examples to provide inspiration. Pumpkinland, near Mankato, has one. Mommsen’s Produce Patch in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, does too. Owner Chris Mommsen has a particularly impressive collection of pumpkin-shooting devices. His biggest thrower is a medieval catapult that hurls its ordnance nearly four hundred feet. He’s also got an air-powered cannon with a twenty-foot-long barrel and a two hundred-gallon air chamber. There are not nearly enough eaters of pumpkin pie to justify all that filling—but pumpkin pie was always more community ritual than dessert, anyway.—William Gurstelle

Is there a sound more heavenly than the harp? The ancient, wing-shaped instrument seems incapable—even in the hands of a clown—of producing anything but the most soothing and somber sounds. The Stoney End Harp Company is headquartered in an old barn in a rustic valley just outside Red Wing. For more than a decade, it has been a quiet presence in an area more famous for work boots and pottery. In the Stoney End workshop, five hundred harps are forged from local oak, cherry, and walnut each year. The atmosphere is hardly bucolic; the harps’ celestial notes are forged in a hellish cacophony of hammering, sawing, scraping, and drilling, with loud modern rock and the occasional yelp of a cussword adding to the auditory frenzy.

Presiding over the din is Gary Stone, who admits he has no musical abilities, but was intrigued by the way harp-making joined the science of acoustics with his love of woodworking. His wife Eve says he has a “tin ear.” But that impairment may be just the thing that compels Stone. Like a tone-deaf Robin Hood spreading euphony, he seeks to bring instruments to people who don’t think of themselves as musical.

Connecting musical instruments and amateurs is why Stone and his wife moved their company from the West Bank of the University of Minnesota to its country home. The old-time, agricultural, make-do heritage of rural Minnesota is in perfect harmony with Stone’s quest to bring folk and ethnic instruments to non-musicians. He says Stoney End harps are not for high-end concert performance or the recording industry. “The main thing we’re interested in is people making music for themselves, for people to enjoy as a life or activity.”

It can still be a serious commitment. A Stoney End harp is a substantial investment: A simple folk harp (with twenty to thirty-six strings) costs between $1,000 and $6,000; a larger forty-six to forty-eight-string pedal harp costs from $13,000 to $50,000. Those are the kind you see in orchestras. They are played by “harpists,” while “harpers” play the smaller folk, or Celtic, harp. Harpers typically have humble aims. Many of them volunteer to play their music for weddings, sick infants in hospitals, or to nursing-home residents.

“We make a good-sounding instrument,” says Stone, “not the most expensive and not the least, not the top of the line or the bottom. Just the best value.”

Stoney End harps have loyal fans all over the world. Though most are sold to British retail shops and distributors, the second largest destination for Stoney End is Japan, where they ship five or six instruments a month.

Stoney End’s former mail order and web business has moved into the second floor of the barn and is open to the public. The shop is also the sole North American location of Hobgoblin Music, a celebrated folk-instrument company that has eight retail shops scattered around Great Britain.

Not only are the beautiful, handmade harps on display. There are also didgeridoos, Peruvian panpipes, bodhrans, bones, lutes, concertinas, accordions, ouds, and bougarabous. For the musically challenged who still want to get in on the campfire tunes, there are egg-shaped shakers and percussion instruments.

The top floor of the Stoney End barn is a performance space, an old hay loft that lets light from the uppermost windows rain down through the second floor. The stage and the concert schedule threaten to make Stoney End the Seventh Street Entry of the folk scene. Why should audiences strap themselves into fixed theater seats to see Riverdance when they can stomp the boards to Curtis and Loretta, Bill Staines, Ann Reed, and traditional Irish musicians Triall Ro-Crua in a historic barn just a bagpipe’s throw from the Mississippi?—Sári Gordon

Once I had a boyfriend whose purpose in life was to pick a meaningless fight with me daily. Predictably, he would become furious when I was unwilling to participate. He would retaliate by sputtering, “You just want everything to be so easy!” Cue to me looking incredulous, with a silent scream of, “Uhhhh DUH?” We’d reached a point of excruciating futility in which he had clearly run out of bullets and now was just throwing the gun at me.

Yes, yes, I know life isn’t only about the things you love to do.

So what if, for twenty-four hours, you had to do only the things you would most hate to do? How would your day go? This would be my daily planner:

7:00 A.M.: Wake up from the recurring nightmare in which I’m waitressing at a college sports bar on “Dr. Who Trivia Night.”

9:00 A.M.: Head to a voice-over job, where the producer’s sole direction is to tell me: “Think Demi Moore-ish, but not really.”

Noon: Lunch in the bathroom at 7th Street Entry: mayonnaise straight from the jar, washed down with a hot-dog water smoothie.

1:00 P.M.: Go to an audition for extras for a community theater production of The Dirt by Motley Crüe.

3:00 P.M.: Take my second-grade math teacher shopping for a new thong.

3:15 P.M.: Suddenly remember that said math teacher used to bite his hangnails off and then make sucking noises like he had a cough drop in his mouth.

3:30 P.M.:
Vomit in public.

6:00 P.M.:
Listen to the radio.

7:00 P.M.:
Participate in a study on the effects of eating expired paté, to earn extra cash.

11:00 P.M.:
Judge a Creed cover band contest in St. Paul.