Year: 2004

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.

There are colleges in cities and colleges in cornfields, but a college on a hill is an especially pleasing thing. Serious students deserve a space that is elevated, that is dedicated to learning for its own sake, free from the corruption of the “real world.” The modern idea that equates a college degree with employability is both cynical and false.

We think it’s deplorable that human resources departments scoff at resumés from liberal-arts graduates, while the captains of capitalism grouse that there aren’t enough applicants with broad minds. But we never believed one should get a diploma in order to get a job. It is an insidious line of marketing designed primarily to separate students from their money.

Schools have taken their cues from government, which for the past twenty-five years has been corrupted by the strange idea that the public good can be measured only on a financial ledger. The people making decisions have somehow persuaded themselves that civil services from mail to mass transit are failures if they do not generate a cash profit. “Return on Investment” is the gospel, and fiscal doubletalk has overwhelmed the civic conversation about what is best for one and all.

Look to the administration of any college or university today, and count the degrees in finance and the certificates in business. There was a time when the deans who ran these institutions were as broadly educated in the humanities and the sciences as they now expect their own graduates to be. Today, most institutions of higher learning are more worried about the bottom line than about educating a new generation. They are investing in real estate, and they are building their endowments. They call it survival. We wonder at what point they stopped using the traditional measurement of their actions: how many students graduated with enlarged hearts and enlightened minds.

Graduates of one Minnesota hilltop college are upset about the sale of their alma mater’s beloved radio station. WCAL is, as they say, the “original listener-supported public radio station” in the nation. St. Olaf College has been the material owner and operator of the station, although the station has not had much to do with St. Olaf, other than to occupy one of its lovely little ivy-bedecked buildings off the quad. (Students tinker with their own low-band FM station, KSTO.) It is a sign that WCAL was doing something extraordinarily right that the buyer is the nation’s best public-radio operation, Minnesota Public Radio.

MPR has been bemused by WCAL’s continuing operations—both the size of its signal and the unorthodox nature of its programming—and one gets the sense that the idea to purchase the precocious little station in Northfield became the best way for the lion to dispatch the fly. It is certainly a relief that the other potential buyer, a lunatic evangelical Christian broadcaster, was apparently not welcome at the table at any price. And it can only be a good thing that MPR will have a new station in its stable. Perhaps it will inspire some refreshing innovation in public radio.

The sale of WCAL is a disappointment, but it is not the end of the world. That colleges and universities are raising tuition at three hundred percent the rate of inflation; that they are increasingly maudlin in their hat-in-hand attempts to pad their endowments; that they are relying on underpaid, overworked, un-benefited adjuncts while building state-of-the-art whirlpools and short-order grills and climbing walls—these things are the end of the world. The one we would prefer to inhabit, anyway.

What graduates find most irritating about the sale is that their alma mater is divesting itself of an eighty-year-old landmark for an instant financial high. St. Olaf hopes to realize $10 million to add to its estimated $235 million nest egg. Alumni, who are well-acquainted with the beggar in the varsity sweater, are now trying to find a way to stop the sale. They know better than anyone that there are greater truths than short-term gain. A college on a hill should command a much better view of the future than that.

Yesterday, the people who organize the Gay Pride parade in the Twin Cities filed a complaint against the Star Tribune. This one could sting: They are complaining to the Minnesota Commission on Civil Rights because the Strib apparently refused to publish an advertisement for the parade that showed two men kissing.

Many interested readers who pay attention to the subtleties have been piqued by the Strib in recent years—in fact, ever since Keith Moyers took over the paper. There have been some real brow-raising moments, particularly on the publishing side of the paper. Last summer, for example, there was a widespread rumor that high-ranking ad executives were avid followers of Luis Palau. Thus had his ballyhooed “Twin Cities Festival” not only got sweetheart status in the sales department, but the edit department had also bowed to the will of the Lord and published numerous odd features that could only be called fawning.

Then this fall, the paper refused to publish an advertisement that had no images at all— in fact, it was a piece of poster art depicting a bunch of numbers. It was a mathematical compendium of the lives and limbs lost so far in Iraq. (An advertisement we subsequently published in The Rake, incidentally. Of all the consipiracy theories, we like the one that suggests the Strib has something against simple math. It certainly seems to be catching in the newspaper industry.)

So what the hell is going on with the Newspaper of the Twin Cities? We doubt whether there’s truly an emergent Christian fundamentalist impulse taking over down on Portland Avenue. Like most of these things, the real story is found neither on the front page nor the ad pages nor even in the op-ed pages, but in the McClatchy spread sheets.

It is just barely possible that the Strib is hoping to outflank the Pioneer Press’s alleged play to the right (going for all those wacky Woodbury readers with backyard bomb-shelters, you know). What is more likely is that the business is simply responding to a certain neap tide of community sentiment. While the city’s liberal core has been just as loud and outraged as ever, the Christian right has—as they say—been emboldened by what we in the Big Bad Media have made of them in the past 90 days.

We don’t hear about it so much here on the far-left side of downtown—but then we’ve always tried to respect community standards in a kind of surgical way. (A smarter culture war!) But over there on the right side of Minneapolis, we imagine the Strib has seen a real spike in envelopes bearing a return address from the Holy Name Society. The Strib is undoubtedly the bellwether for this type of critical mass. On the opposite end of the publishing spectrum, we understand there are similar pressures. We hear through the grapevine that the Minneapolis office of the Onion is no longer accepting display ads for sexual services—in other words, pictures of boys kissing boys—and it sure as hell ain’t because they suddenly got Jesus.

One word, people: Circulation.