During these contentious weeks when football and baseball fans argue over the recent picks for their sports halls of fame, it is nice to know that that there are no arguments in the blood sport called Hollywood, at least in the all-important question of “who’s the worst director ever?” Many have tried and failed spectatularly, but none have uncrowned the reigning king. That’d be Edward D. Wood Jr., war veteran, unashamed transvestite, and auteur of unselfconscious awfulness in such atomic bombs as Glen or Glenda? and Plan 9 From Outer Space, often commended as the most idiotic film in history. Wood’s abysmal stock cast of Z-grade actors included the memorably enormous Tor Johnson and a morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi, then clinging feebly to the last rung of fame’s ladder and wracked by a late-life jones so bad he made Kurt Cobain seem like Doris Day. In 1994, Tim Burton filmed the biography Ed Wood, a loving look at a man who proved that it certainly doesn’t have to be lonely at the bottom. Johnny Depp is pitch-perfect as the never-say-die Wood, who dreamed of being Orson Welles but wasn’t even Orson Bean, and Martin Landau won an Oscar for a Richard III-like portrait of the pathetic Lugosi.
Year: 2004
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Shannon Olson, Children of God Go Bowling
Olson’s debut novel Welcome to My Planet is one of our happy memories of the year 2000, and we’re pleased to report that the local heroine hooks us again with her followup, a sequel starring Planet’s semi-fictionalized version of Olson herself. A few more years down the road, Olson is now thirtysomething and still single in a world being taken over by couples with kids, looking for love and life outside of bad blind dates, a cramped apartment furnished by an ex, and her snarky mother Flo. She takes us on a whirlwind tour of the heartbreaking (yet often hilarious) process of recycling old college boyfriends, attending group therapy, and maintaining a desperate attachment to feng shui in an effort to clear out the spiritual clutter from her apartment and life. Wry, sometimes cynical and likably written, Bowling really strikes out. In the bowling sense of the word, that is. Olson reads at the Fitzgerald March 16.
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Anchee Min, Empress Orchid
You’ve heard of China’s last emperor, the boy king toppled from the throne by the rise of Mao. Now, meet his mother, the last empress. Becoming Madame Mao and Red Azalea author Min returns with another wonderfully descriptive work, the first in an eventual trilogy about Tzu Hsi, China’s longest-reigning female ruler. Min aims to rehabilitate Tsu Hsi’s historical reputation as a power-seizing schemer, which she sees as an unjust slander based on misogyny. Instead, she gives us a sympathetic portrait of the lower-level concubine who used brains and beauty to rise to the rank of the emperor’s closest advisor and mother of his heir—and upon his death in a coup, head of the Chi’ing Dynasty for forty-six years. It’s a deft combination of historical research and storytelling skill. The best part? This particular glimpse into pre-Westernized Asia doesn’t involve Tom Cruise. Min reads at the Fitzgerald April 20.
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Susan Vreeland
After chronicling the life of Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi in her last book, Susan Vreeland continues her welcome biographical specialty in underappreciated women artists in her new novel, Forest Lover. This time around, her subject is turn-of-the-century painter Emily Carr, who defied her strict Victorian family to live among the Indians of then-isolated Vancouver Island. Her work, which centered on scenes of nature and Indian life, would eventually draw comparisons to Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo in the salons of Paris. In the isolation of the woodlands, she finds something that speaks to her soul. But she still needs somebody to buy her paintings, and she finds herself reluctantly becoming a champion of Indian culture to the bourgeoisie she scorns. It’s a moving portrait of a woman who couldn’t fit into the strictures of the society she was born into—deftly represented in visual metaphor in one early scene by five Douglas firs, four tall and straight and one with twisting and wild branches seeming to reach out yearningly to find unknown soil.
Barnes & Noble Galleria, 3225 W. 69th St., Edina, (952) 920-0633, www.bn.com
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Neil Gaiman
Katherine Lanpher has moved on from MPR, but before she left she helped broaden the vistas of the Talking Volumes radio book club by getting Neil Gaiman, who perhaps may not draw the same crowd as Anna Quindlen. Gaiman, who will discuss his recent kid-lit creeper Coraline, is best known for creating the nineties graphic-novel series Sandman, which made him cock of the walk for smart, edgy writers in the contemporary fantasy genre. He has also written and illustrated children’s books, mature novels, screenplays, and even rock songs…why can’t we be more like that Gaiman guy? And he’s still only in his early forties! While Oxbridge graduates like Martin Amis, Tina Brown, and Nick Hornby hog all the headlines, Neil Gaiman is probably the only Brit Pack literary figure likely to be remembered in thirty years. Gaiman hasn’t sold out: It’s not his fault that Norman Mailer hosannaed him by saying, “Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it’s about time.” Nor can we blame Gaiman for Tori Amos choosing to sing about him repeatedly on her albums.
Fitzgerald, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul, (651) 290-1221, www.fitzgeraldtheater.org -
Haven Kimmel
North Carolina writer Kimmel’s third book, Something Rising (Light and Swift), isn’t quite strong enough to justify that optimistic title. But there’s merit in the story of Cassie Claiborne, an emotionally wounded girl from poor rural Indiana whose preternatural talent for shooting pool might be her ticket out of town, or at least toward reconciliation with her self-absorbed father. That skill is the one good thing she inherits from her dad, but even so, it inspires nothing more paternal in him than grudging rivalry. Besides Cassie herself, her father is the most interesting character in the book, and it’s a shame Kimmel drops him from the storyline so early. If their poisonous relationship had been developed further, it could have made for a fascinating book. Instead, we get long sections on Cassie’s life as an aimless teen in rural Indiana—ground Kimmel covered extensively in both her previous books. But despite the unfocused plot and occasionally clumsy description (“his haircut seemed fresh and raw”), Kimmel captures Cassie’s self-destructive nature, and there’s a nice moment late in the book when Cassie sadly realizes that, like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, she could’ve been a contender. Given another draft, this book could have been one too.
Ruminator, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, ruminator.com -
Wine, wine, wine! Wild Horses on Bended Knee
The saints of February are a rum lot. The larger their reputation, the less can be said for certain about their lives and activities—and vice versa. The blameless virgin Saint Scholastica, twin sister of Saint Benedict, is relatively well documented—for someone who lived fifteen hundred years ago. But she is remembered only for the name of a distinguished college in Duluth, and for the fact that on her feast day (February 10) in 1355 no fewer than sixty-three Oxford scholars were killed in a riot, which began as a difference of opinion about the beer in the Swindlestock Tavern in the city center.
By contrast, nothing is known for certain about the fourth century’s Saint Blasius (February 3), but in the Middle Ages he had a mighty reputation for curing sore throats and as the patron of workmen who combed raw wool—thanks to legend that the Roman authorities tortured him by scarifying his sides with metal combs. Similarly, Saint Agatha (February 5) is entirely legendary. But she was regularly invoked in medieval Sicily to prevent volcanic eruptions from Mount Etna, no doubt on account of the myth that her martyrdom involved double mastectomy.
In such company it is scarcely surprising that there is not much that is true, or even likely, to tell about the best known of all the February saints, the patron of tacky Hallmark cards, unseasonable single red roses, and the midweek catering trade. We know for certain there was a shrine dedicated to a Saint Valentine just outside Rome as early as 352. The rest is legend—in fact, two legends: one revolving round Valentine of Rome, the other around Valentine of Terni, a hill-city many miles to the north. It was not until the time of Chaucer, a millennium after the construction of the Roman shrine, that we find people pairing off on February 14, and they seem to have been inspired not by the alleged deeds of either Valentine, but by noticing that this was the time when small birds found their mates. Fourteenth-century folk were as good at inventing traditions as the Victorians.
In our gray world (and what is grayer than the slush churned by the buses in Uptown on a February evening?), it is a poor heart that never rejoices. There ought to be something that can warm and lubricate your Valentine’s Day (and, no doubt, your valentine). Everyone I ask about this suggests champagne. I disagree. For one thing, it’s cold, and what sensible person wants to add extra chill to a Minnesota winter? Second, even in small quantities it dries you out, causing particularly grim and enervating hangovers. But most important, the energy it imparts is evanescent; it lifts the spirits only to dump them good and hard afterward. Macbeth’s porter might well have been thinking of champagne when he said that much drink is an equivocator with lechery: “It provokes the desire, but it takes away from the performance.” Those who propose champagne are welcome to my share.
I will choose something heart-warming, fruity, and red. Pinot noir is the grape from which the French make Burgundy. For a fraction of the cost of a bottle of good Burgundy (in fact, about twenty dollars—but your sweetheart’s worth it!), you can share Wild Horse pinot noir from the Central Coast of California, midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The winery, founded little more than twenty years ago, gets its name from the local wild mustangs, descended from the horses brought by the Spaniards to the California missions. Wild Horse gathers grapes from vineyards spread widely across the region.
Wild Horse pinot noir would be good on its own, with pâté or cheese, or with a wide variety of food. It is a wine that would look warm by firelight. I can imagine it well with roast wild duck, but you would need to cook a brace—they mate for life, not just for February. Good luck with your own valentine legend.
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For Those About To Get Off The Rock…
It wasn’t love, but it was enough to risk his life for. It was the first morning of 1992 at five a.m. on Madeline Island and the bar had emptied out when Tommy Nelson, the ponytailed owner of Tommy’s Burned Down Café, spun out onto Lake Superior in his 1972 Cadillac Fleetwood and was surprised that the ice held. He already had the record for the earliest crossing: Two years before, he’d driven the two-and-a-half miles of ice to mainland Bayfield, Wisconsin, in a one-ton Chevy Van only fifteen days after the ferries had quit running. But more than that was the confidence that came from being from a long line of indestructible islanders—the Nelson clan, who, among other things, had run the ferries, windsled, and ice road for years. In the passenger seat of the Fleetwood was Tommy’s twenty-one-year-old cousin, Brian Nelson, also a tester of lake fate. Even so, he objected to this foolhardy attempt, and perhaps it was this challenge less than the girl or the booze that made Tommy go through with it. Fifteen days before the ferry quit running, weeks before the amphibious windsled navigated across the channel, and a month before the ice road opened to cars, Tommy gunned it. It’s easy to imagine Tommy’s thin, tan face in a wild grin, his signature Hawaiian shirt despite the cold, and his startling pirate’s laugh at the deliciousness of danger. Twelve years later, he calls it a mix of courage and stupidity. His brother, Arnie Nelson, is in a position to be professionally critical of his brother’s behavior. Arnie is the unofficial commissioner of winter transport. With thirty years’ experience shuttling island residents and children to school on the windsled, and the only authority trusted to open or close the ice road, he thought differently. “You sit up at that bar,” said Arnie, his voice both authoritative and playful, “and the ice gets thicker real fast. I could hold the record if I wanted, but I can’t. People follow me. And it’s the ones behind you who can have problems with the cracks you made.”
But Tommy has always devoted himself to making cracks in the norm. Besides, isolation was not what the man—a bar owner, after all, who greeted you in the summer with a hearty “Welcome to paradise!”—was willing to accept.
“I had no intention of going to Bayfield, but boredom being what it is… Or, as Jimmy Buffet said, ‘I just shot five holes in my freezer, I think I have cabin fever.’ And then there was this girl,” said Tommy. “The record is always set by islanders for an obvious reason: to get the hell off the island.”
They made it across, perhaps flipping an ice cake or two behind, hitting the ice curb on the beach, flatting their tires. And the girl, new record not withstanding, was asleep in Bayfield. “You never get the girl at five a.m.,” Tommy said sagely. “This was extreme sports before they were invented. Sometimes you just have to get off the Rock. Especially when a Nelson is rutting.”
Isolation is the last thing you think about on Madeline Island in the summer. The local population of 220 swells to over 2,500 in the high season, with the ferry chugging back and forth all day every day. Tourists from Chicago, the Twin Cities, and farther away overwhelm the fourteen-mile-long island. It’s an eclectic crowd of family budget travelers, wealthy yacht clubbers, bikers, snowbirds, bohemians, and descendents of early island settlers who all miraculously converge under the glowing tent of Tommy’s Burned Down Café, an outdoor bar/monument to irreverence. (“Let’s Make Getting in Trouble Fun Again” is among the many signs posted on the premises.) Eastern Europeans wait tables, artists arrive to make metal sculptures in the annual “Wrestle With Steel,” kids pack in for the music camp, preppy vessels proliferate in the harbor. Show up on a summer weekend without a reservation, as I did once, and you’re lucky to be lent a spare tent to sleep on the beach.
Yet while the world arrives in fleets during the summer, there is a period during the winter when Lake Superior would become an impassable moat if not for generations of islanders inventing ways to bridge themselves to the world once again. When temperatures drop to freezing, Chequamegon Bay freezes in layers, the ice penned in between the Apostle Islands and the mainland. Generally, the windward side of Madeline doesn’t freeze (only three times in recorded history has Lake Superior frozen entirely). Beyond the islands, a frigid ocean of open water and drifting ice extends to Michigan.
The durable ferries mount a slow fight against the ice, first shattering the glass plates, then slicing and reslicing a channel each day until the weight of the vessels can no longer break a path through ten inches of ice. The battle can exhaust captain and passengers alike: Last year, the ferry took a record nine hours to get across, instead of the usual twenty-three minutes. What follows is a period of time when nothing but a plane can make the jump from mainland to island. It’s then that the islanders perversely start to wish for colder, nastier weather so the bay will freeze to support an ice road, liberating them from their dependence on the Nelson family ferries. When the ice road is declared safe, there are no more timetables or fees. People can journey to the mainland on a whim. The irony is that while the island offers an escape from the mainland much of the year, locals feel most free when the island ceases to exist as an island and is annexed by ice to the mainland. Madeline could be called a part-time island: Just when cabin fever is setting in, nature remedies it with the ice road.
But there is the trouble of waiting through the freeze-up, the limbo of unstable ice in January before the ice road can support unrestricted traffic. This transitional period is mirrored in spring, when the ice grays as it weakens. The water that normally collects on the surface of the ice road because of surface melting from the sun (they call it “the island carwash”) disappears and you worry; “candling” has riddled the ice with holes that drain the meltwater. Seagulls ominously start to circle above the warm currents of the sandbar. Small herring or smelt may appear on the ice road, attracted up through the holes by the light. It’s during this in-between time when they no longer have the freedom of their own boat or car, or even the ferry, that the islanders would be stuck—if not for inventing their own way off the “Rock.”
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Valentine in My Cubicle
Despite the married man’s frequent lament, there are married women out there who have healthy and wide-ranging and even naughty appetites. True, we know that men need to work extra hard to make sure that they’re doing their part in the way of romance. But women are every bit as capable of wanton, physical desire.
One of my favorite Valentine’s Day traditions with my precious is giving each other a sexy wish list. We each write down five things we want to try, no limits, no rules. We trade lists and we each get veto power over one of the items on the others’ list. Maybe next month I’ll go into details, but my point here is that women can be every bit as perverse as men, given the opportunity.
Case in point: Last year, my precious dared me to show up at her office in nothing but a trench coat, and to ravish her in the boardroom while secretaries and middle managers strolled by the curtained windows completely unaware. It was a blast for both of us.
Lots of people fantasize about getting naughty at work. I’m not sure what that says about their level of engagement in their jobs, but I do know there’s a little childish kick to be had by breaking the rules and risking getting caught. (Actually, it’s a bit more powerful and insidious than that—think of all the politicians who have gambled away their whole careers and all their dignity just to get physical for a few minutes. I blame the media. Then again, I wonder why none of them are ever caught doing the nasty with their wives. Maybe we just didn’t hear about it when Bill and Hillary, uh, took off their jackets in the Oval Office.)
Just last week, I was helping Melanie move. She got a promotion from her old cubicle to her new one, and she had a few boxes of office supplies and doodads. The bottom fell out of the box I was carrying, desk crap rained down on the carpet, and among the paperclips, file folders, family pictures, and an old telephone headset was a big surprise: a well-used, uh, vibrating device.
Melanie turned a bright shade of red, grabbed it, and stuffed it into her handbag. “A gag birthday present. From Emily in accounting,” she stammered. I just smiled and shook my head. “Sure, Mel.” I didn’t want to be mean, but both of us knew what I might ask Emily the next time I saw her at the water cooler.
It’s not like that, though. Mel and Emily and I are good office buddies who actually talk pretty frankly about stuff, and I hang with their husbands on occasion. The women are always giving me the female perspective on things. But now, of course, it had gotten personal. I decided to be cool about it. If Mel wanted to tell me more, that was her business. But I was curious. Did she—you know—at work?
The short answer was yes, the long answer was none of my business. But this got me to thinking and speculating. Did Mel slip off to the bathroom when she felt the primal urge? Did she go to her car? I thought it was kind of cool that she could be so straightforward about it—as if it were no different from a break she might take to powder her nose or get a cup of coffee.
Is it morally wrong to get sexy at work? I know most employers won’t touch that subject with a ten-foot pole. They forbid it as best they can, as well they should. The most obvious reason is to eliminate harassment and the abuse of power. But if there is no victim—either Mel with her electronic friend, or me with my lawful wife—the issue is not so black and white. The social proscriptions against it make it titillating, and the shame of getting caught would certainly be punishment enough.
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All In The Wrist
To all those people whose mothers told them, “You’ll never amount to anything sitting on your ass all day playing those damn video games!”—this one’s for you.
The “Robolounge” is in a dank corner of the Xcel Energy Center. Its denizens, Michael “Buddha” Novak and Tim Dufour, run the robotic cameras used to dramatic effect in telecasts of Wild hockey games on FOX Sports Net. These are cameras that go where no human camera operator could realistically go. Novak and Dufour are a pair of thirtysomething photojournalists who get paid to fiddle with their joysticks for three hours a night, certainly the dream of any PlayStation-addled adolescent who enjoys a dose of hockey to break up the monotony of a Grand Theft Auto marathon.
The robotic cameras—or robocams, as the knowledgeable call them—have been used in one form or another for a decade, bringing fans so close to the action that they’re ducking every Marian Gaborik slapshot or Matt Johnson haymaker in their rec room. Novak operates the camera stationed behind the net in the west end of the arena, while Dufour’s robocam is mounted above the glass at center ice between the penalty boxes.
From those vantage points, the two cameras, each with a lens about the size of a puck, capture the speed and fury of Wild games from an angle impossible to replicate with any of the other seven cameras throughout the building.
“The secret is to try to make it look like it’s not on a motor, that it’s smooth and steady,” Dufour said. He and Novak are both trained on stationary and handheld cameras, and they operate the more standard equipment for KMSP-TV (Channel 9) telecasts. But when the game’s on FSN, you’ll find the two in the Robolounge—actually, just a couple of tables tucked under the seats, hidden behind a maze of room dividers that provides a buffer from fans stumbling to a nearby restroom.
The cameras are controlled by a three-piece console that features a zoom wheel, a focus mechanism, and a joystick that dictates its 360-degree movements, not unlike your standard video game setup. In fact, Novak insists his experience as a gamer is crucial to his ability to master the robocam.
“It sounds weird, but I think I shoot better if I play PlayStation,” he said. “When I play video games, I’m just grooving on hand-eye coordination, because these are really subtle movements. Gaming is great practice. I wish I could write that off—I haven’t found a way to do it yet.”
Since the images captured by the robocams are most often used in replays, the guys must have a steady hand. (They’ll cut to the goal cam for live shots only during power plays.) “If we’re jerky at all, when they slow it down in a replay, it amplifies anything we don’t like about a shot,” Novak said. Both men frequently mentioned the importance of being “in the flow” of the game in order to perform at peak levels. And peak performance is a must with hockey. “In basketball, if you miss a basket you’re going to get plenty of others,” Novak said. “Sure, if you miss a big slam-dunk, that’s unfortunate. But in hockey, if you miss a goal, you’re screwed. You’re hosed. You’re the goat. So, it’s a challenge because of the speed.”
But the speed of the game is what makes the robocams such a valuable tool to FSN director Dave Dittman. “It’s one thing to sit on a wide shot and show all the ice. But we try to get down close and show the speed, the action of the game, the hard hitting, and that’s what having the robos right on top of the glass has done,” Dittman said.
Robocams are used in other sports, including baseball and basketball. In drag racing, they literally save lives. Running a track-level stationary camera in that sport puts the camera operator in great peril. “I only ran it once, and it’s the scariest camera in all of sports,” Novak said. “It’s right on the wall two hundred feet down from the starting line, and the cars are going three hundred miles an hour past you. If there’s a problem…we call it the suicide cam, because you have less than a second to react or it can take you out. Two cameramen got killed using that camera when it was farther down the track.”
When ESPN took over the drag-racing package, they replaced the track-level stationary camera with a robocam, where technology not only protects the operator but helps fans track the dragsters better, because with a flick of the wrist, the robocam can pan 180 degrees in less than a second.
As the pregame skate continued, and the sound system fittingly cranked out U2’s “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” Mike Miller, who runs the robocam for the Gopher hockey telecasts at Mariucci Arena, strolled into the Robolounge. Miller said operating the robocam is fun, though it can lead to the ultimate game over. “It’s like a video game,” Miller said. “Except if you lose, you’re fired.”—Patrick Donnelly