The Rake Magazine

Year: 2004

  • Scooper & Scooped: Poached Edition

    We were surprised to open up Monday’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune to see Jon Tevlin’s article on religion in the workplace. Surprised, because it was very similar to a feature story that was on the cover of The New York Times Magazine about a month ago. We’d noticed Russell Shorto’s feature, not only because it was a compelling cover story, but because its main subject was a small bank in outstate Minnesota. Also because the photographs, taken by white-hot Minneapolis photographer Alec Soth, were wonderful.

    We’ve already commented recently on the phenomenon of follow-on news stories: The New York Times or the Washington Post do the heavy-lifting on a story, get all the glory for the scoop, and when the parade has passed, all the local papers shuffle along shoveling up the remainders, maybe a little ashamed that someone in Manhattan managed to break a local story under the noses of a whole newsroom full of local reporters.

    Tevlin does acknowledge the source of his interest in Riverview Bank, after a fashion. Near the end of his piece, he notes that Riverview Bank, on its website, claims to have converted Times "freelancer" Shorto during an "interview for a newspaper article." (Shorto denies this.) When we emailed Tevlin about his follow-on article, he told us there were lots of other interesting loose ends to tie up in the Riverview Bank story, and he was onto them the day after the Times article appeared. The St. Paul Pioneer-Press, in the person of business reporter Dave Beal, was also on the story. They published their own follow-on November 11.

    There is nothing wrong with this practice per se. While we don’t want to inflame professional jealousies, it would be nice if writers acknowledged where they get their story ideas, particularly if it’s from other writers. It is merely vanity that prevents someone from writing "as first reported in the New York Times." But this sort of story poaching goes on all the time; local daily newspapers are especially bad about doing it to nationals, weeklies, and monthlies. They have done it to us here at The Rake. (We’ve already given up hope of ever working elsewhere in this town. Funny how if you write about media in New York, you’re guaranteed a job practically for the rest of your life. If you write about media in the Twin Cities, you’d better keep Monster.com bookmarked.) For our own part, we admit to being allergic to a story if it has appeared anywhere else our esteemed readers may have been exposed to it. This falls under the principle of giving your readers a little credit. And, as we love to point out, a newspaper article and a magazine story are two very different animals. Tevlin’s story was different from Shorto’s, though it was clearly provoked by it.

    Still, we were surprised that the Star-Tribune photographs were so similar to Alec Soth’s. One Strib image depicted the exact scene as the shot on the New York Times Magazine’s cover: An office wall with a handsome painting that shows one modern businessman introducing another businessman to the robed and haloed Jesus Christ, as if to say,"I’d like you to meet my boss, the Son of God."

    The striking similarity in the photographs seemed a breach. Were we being naive? We can see how you might make the argument that, just as Riverview Bank is sitting out there in the public domain for anyone to write about, their office interiors and personnel are not themselves copyrighted. And given that Tevlin’s lead specifically refers to this painting, it falls under the definition of pure documentary photography, right?

    We don’t know. It doesn’t seem possible that Stormi Greener, an excellent photographer in her own right, was unaware of Soth’s photos when she shot hers for the Star-Tribune. To our eye, it seems obvious that someone asked her to take precisely the same pictures Soth had taken for the Times magazine— photos that are undoubtedly under license and embargo, and not therefore available to the Star Tribune or anyone else. You look and see what you think: Here is Soth’s photo for the Times, and here is Greener’s.

    We got ahold of Alec Soth in Paris, and he was a little surprised. "Wow, that is quite similar," he said. But he was willing to believe that it was a coincidence—and that probably an editor at the Star-Tribune should fall on the sword for this. (We know from experience: It is ALWAYS an editor’s fault!) Jon Tevlin told us he thought you could send dozens of photographers to Riverview Bank and they’d have taken the exact same photo. The Jesus-in-the-executive-suite artwork is a "no brainer," he said. Times magazine editor Gerald Marzorarti politely declined to comment, and Greener has not answered a call and an email.

    This photographic facet of the follow-on story undoubtedly falls into a grey area, and maybe it illustrates the difference between fine art photography and photojournalism. Soth’s photo is striking in part because it is so artful, whereas Greener’s has a solid if unremarkable gravity as photojournalism—and it’s almost the same picture!

    But it’s the art within the art. When we first saw the cover of the Times Magazine, we were convinced that a Times art director had pulled off an amazing illustration. Indeed, the point of both the Soth and the Greener photos was actually to reproduce the astonishing piece of framed, evangelical art, in situ. Perhaps the real injured party here is Nathan Greene. He is the formerly anonymous born-again capitalist who was responsible for painting "The Senior Partner." He’ll undoubtedly get his reward—and maybe his copyright—in the next world.

  • Panderlust

    In yesterday’s Sunday Times, Frank Rich makes a point we were trying to make ourselves a few weeks ago. In the aftermath of the election, USA Today had published a story that suggested Big, Bad, Liberal Media was scratching its collective head, wondering where it had gone so terribly wrong in understanding the country–and more to the point underestimating the electoral muscle of the anti-intellectual, conservative, white male, NASCAR masses. In fact, even Frank Rich’s boss, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, was described in that article as being somewhat flummoxed–so flummoxed in fact, that the best idea he could come up with was to reopen the Times shuttered Kansas City bureau.

    Yesterday, Rich looked at the problem as it applies to network TV news, what with the recent retirements of Rather and Brokaw, and the ascendency of Brian Williams. He suggests that network news is desperate to win the hearts of red America, so desperate that they are making a point of decamping to Toledo and Dubuque and Denver. NBC news is going to great lengths to establish the bona fides of Williams–hey, he’s a part-owner of a go-cart track! He drinks Budweiser! He showers AFTER work. (Well, no maybe not that. But hey, he’s got a mitten loofa too, just like O’Reilly! Wait, that’s kinda faggy and liberal, innit?) Why would they do that? Is it because they seriously believe there is news happening out there that they are ignoring because of their bi-coastal myopia? What Rich said better than we could ever hope to say was this: They are chasing an audience, not a news story. And that is a real sign of declension, and a cause for worry.

    Salient, fact-checking moment: Why chase after Fox News viewers who are rabidly partisan and reality-challenged, and in any case, are far outnumbered by network viewers? The problem is perceptions and myths. As Louis Menand makes very clear in his wonderful story in last week’s New Yorker, the already unassailable “take-away” from election 2004 was the “values fallout.” There was no values fallout. Menand points out that this was strictly a misreading of exit poll numbers with no clear consensus on why people voted in any particular way. (This is probably, like everything else, the fault of Democrats. Republicans could care less why they won–the less said about that the better, as far as they’re concerned.)

    The key to this little conundrum is the very real frustration that great media organizations like the Times and the New Yorker and almost any other thoughtful organ of print journalism are feeling. You can print the facts, the truth, the most compelling sorts of historiography–but you can’t make that horse drink the water.

    We had the same sinking feeling after reading Rich’s essay that we had reading all those terrific pre-election presidential endorsements–that there isn’t one person in the country who’d read it and have his mind changed. In these fractious times, even the Times is preaching to a choir. One can certainly forgive them for trying to either expand the choir a bit, or take their show on the road. (Incidentally,interesting article today covering the same territory with NPR, but with a racial facet; Tavis Smiley wonders how to get more blacks to listen to public radio. How is this different from trying to get more conservatives to read the New York Times? Discuss…)

    To have a small but vocal crowd of knownothings grow into a hateful GOP monopoly of government that has, in no small way, been underwritten by a deliberate campaign of falsifying reality and pre-emptive accusations of “liberal bias”– this has diminished the power of the entire industry of journalism. Facts are not partisan, but many people don’t seem to believe that anymore. We guess you just feel the pinch more at the top, where you’re accustomed to the respect afforded the “paper of record.” When it develops that the news is not the news, but an exercise in servicing an audience, you get– well, modern TV news.

  • The Eternal Optimist

    The last time anybody heard from Eric Utne, it was the year 2000 and he had just walked away from the magazine he’d founded and run for almost fifteen years. The Utne Reader was faltering. It had published a “Y2K Citizen’s Action Guide,” which predicted a radical reorganization of society that never happened. Circulation and ad revenue were down, so down, in fact, that it looked as if Minneapolis’s most prestigious national publication might fold.

    There was personal turmoil, too. A few years earlier, in a stinging public undressing, Utne, who has made his living and reputation championing a New Age brand of liberalism, was taken to task by his employees. They described him to a local reporter as maniacal, controlling, and, worst of all, a hypocrite. They said they’d repeatedly had sex on the couch in his office in secret rebellion. They said they’d placed a giant zucchini in his chair and pretended to worship it.

    Utne wasn’t running a sweatshop. Nor was he pushing crystal meth on the side. His biggest crime, it seems, was espousing high ideals and not quite living up to them. His second biggest crime was blindness to how others perceived him. When an idealistic reader discovered that Eric and his wife Nina Rothschild Utne had four kids—not exactly in line with the magazine’s philosophy of environmental conservation—Utne responded in embarrassingly guileless fashion, explaining to readers that he’d asked certain friends to refrain from reproducing, to balance things out. He described himself and Nina as “designated breeders in a tribal or extended family.”

    Statements like that chafe in a place like Minnesota, whose citizens pride themselves on reasonableness. And when Utne started discussing walkabouts and fasts, during which he said he’d talked to rocks, trees, the wind, and a pigeon, well, even the man’s robust national reputation couldn’t save him.

    But if a person earns any points at all for effort, it’s worth noting that Utne truly believed, and still believes, in the power of nature and the power of community. He may be flawed and grandiose, but it seems that he earnestly wishes to be a force for good, to be part of some grand cosmic solution, even if it is from a palatial Linden Hills home with a Volvo and Prius in the garage. Utne is quite aware that on certain points his philosophies and actual life haven’t matched up. (At the magazine, for example, he subsidized bus passes for Utne staffers, while he continued to drive his car to work.) That’s why, five years ago, he fired himself and walked away from his empire in order to embark on a tortured stretch of soul searching. He found some of what he was looking for, apparently. Today, the once deadly earnest Utne cracks wise about his formerly “inflated ego.” And when friends describe him, they use adjectives like mellow, charming, and delightful.

    Given Utne’s almost Candide-like optimism, it’s not exactly a surprise that in November he published a new project, Cosmo Doogood’s Urban Almanac: Celebrating Nature & Her Rhythms in the City. “I never expected to be publishing again,” says the fifty-eight-year-old Utne from a corner seat at the Zumbro Café, just blocks from his house. He speaks quietly, almost nervously at first, but as the conversation progresses, he loosens up. “I thought I was done with that. But I’ve always loved almanacs. The Farmer’s Almanac always seemed interesting to me, but maybe written for somebody else.”

    The idea behind the Urban Almanac—conceived during one of Utne’s legendary personal vision quests—is to alert urban dwellers to the surrounding environment, to get them in tune with “living time.”

    “Eight or nine years ago I had an experience in the desert where I connected with nature in a way that I never had,” Utne recalls. “And especially the full moon on the last night. And then a month later, I was in the heart of Manhattan and a little breeze came up and I turned into it and here was the full moon again. I felt a connection with it as I had in the desert, and I realized we are always in nature wherever we are. I’m usually pretty much oblivious to it. And I wondered, what would it take to be connected to nature even in the city?”

    It’s a simple enough notion. It’s also the kind of notion that infuriates Utne’s detractors. Here it is, 2004, and the country is embroiled in the wrong war at the wrong time. The future of abortion and other civil liberties is at stake. And Eric Utne, the one-time digester of the nation’s alternative press, arrives with a book about stargazing in the city. Its publication date, the day after the presidential election, was chosen deliberately, Utne explains. “Wasn’t it Thoreau who once said, ‘Read not the times, read the eternities’? I think we should be doing both. But if we are only caught up in the turbulence and chaos of current events, we just get swept and buffeted back and forth. This is a way to kind of ground people so that we can participate without being jostled by every urgent piece of news.”

    Eric Utne was born in St. Paul, the second of four children, to Norwegian parents. His father was vice president of an insurance company, his mother a homemaker. They divorced when Utne was thirteen. He attended the University of Minnesota casually, off and on, through a seven-year period, and majored in architecture before dropping out. “I was a good designer,” he once told Time magazine, “but I couldn’t pass mechanics and materials.” His wife added with a snap, “He could build them, but they wouldn’t stay up.” Later, in 1969, Utne began studying Eastern cosmology and macrobiotics in Massachusetts with a guru named Michio Kushi. The fascination ran deep. The man offered tangible answers and a formula for living. With what Utne describes as “missionary zeal,” he managed Kushi’s natural foods store and sold ads for his East West Journal. When, in the mid-seventies, Utne began to question the narrowness of Kushi’s philosophies, he and a handful of other devotees jumped ship and formed the New Age Journal. That effort, too, devolved into acrimony, so he switched gears and, for a time, worked as a Manhattan literary agent.

    It was while living in New York that Utne met Nina Rothschild, with her wild curly hair and piercing blue eyes. She still remembers the details. “That was twenty-five years ago,” she says. “I had had a greeting-card business with a friend. She kept having religious conversion experiences and it was tough on the business. I was trying to figure out what to do next.”

    Rothschild—not of the legendary banking Rothschilds, but of the lesser-known department store Rothschilds—was at an entrepreneurs’ conference. She was sitting at a table when Utne walked in. “People made assumptions that we were together,” she recalls. “I had been in this relationship that was basically over. I was making a statement for myself and to myself and by myself. And I didn’t want people to lump me in with somebody else. I got more and more flustered. I was blushing more and more. He leaned over and kissed me on the mouth in the middle of dinner. And I didn’t even know his name.” Eric invited Nina to Minnesota to meet his family. “We came out here in May of 1980 and the lilacs were in bloom,” she says. “It was seduction by lilac. We never left.” The two, each having been married and divorced before, were wed the following May.

    Four years later, while Nina raised the children and acted as loose consigliere to her husband, Eric started the Utne Reader, a compendium of “the best of the alternative press.” First housed above a food co-op, the publication gained renown and moved on up to tonier but still suitably Bohemian headquarters on the edge of Loring Park, where it remains today. The business grew and grew and grew. From 1987 to 1992, circulation quadrupled to almost three hundred thousand paid subscribers, making it the fastest growing magazine in the country, according to the Detroit Free Press. Utne was optimistic about the magazine that Bill Moyers had labeled an “underground railroad of ideas.” Said Utne at the time, “We think we’re going to reach five hundred thousand in circulation by the year 2000.”

    Unfortunately, by the mid-nineties, subscriptions had leveled off and begun to decline. Onlookers, barely able to conceal their schadenfreude, pointed to a variety of factors. Some felt the magazine had sold out and forsaken its mission of directing readers to fringe perspectives. Others suspected that with the Internet, people no longer needed to be directed. Still others surmised that formerly radical ideas had been co-opted by the mainstream, making the fringe less fringy. Perhaps the magazine’s privileged readership (subscribers are consistently well-to-do and well-educated) was tiring of the publication’s increasingly spirituality oriented outlook. Bill Babcock, at the time a U of M journalism professor, surmised that the Utne was in the “throes of its midlife crisis” and that the publication had run its course. “Eric hit on a wonderful gold mine,” he said back in 1995. “That was giving yuppie baby boomers the opportunity to feel they are part of the counterculture while still driving their Saabs and Volvos.”

    It was downhill from there. Utne launched an expensive and quickly aborted foray into web publishing (“We were distinguished by how much we lost on the Internet,” says Nina Rothschild Utne) and a failed attempt to sell the business. There was a staff downsizing and mounting ill will around the office, and, in November of 1995, that damning cover story in the now-defunct Twin Cities Reader.

    The article seemed to take unbridled glee in popping Utne’s warm bubble of privilege. By the Reader’s estimation, he was guilty of both frivolity and hypocrisy. These were serious transgressions in the world of advocacy journalism, and he was committing them on the newspaper’s own lefty turf. Utne, who’d spent a decade digesting the alternative press, suddenly found himself being chewed up and digested by the alternative press. It was especially galling to the story’s author, Jon Tevlin, now a reporter for the StarTribune, that the magazine editor had refused to be interviewed. Designating him a “hypocritical flake” and the “self-appointed guru to the questing hip-oisie,” the Reader’s cover text asked, “Has the global village idiot gone off the deep end?” It was a brutal rebuke.

    Utne was, no doubt, a juicy target. During the early nineties, he recalls, “there was a few-month span in which People magazine did a profile. Time magazine did a piece. CBS launched a show opposite Nightline hosted by Charles Kuralt and Lesley Stahl. And they gave me a minute or two a month to talk about whatever I wanted. That was very inflationary to my ego. I thought I must be really hot stuff. And then I learned that I wasn’t.”

    Utne jokes about it now, but at the time, the revelation was painful. “Praise is very hard for me to take,” he says. “I’m much more alert to criticism. And it lands much more deeply.” So, when faced with the vitriolic Reader article, he was devastated. “That was terrible,” he says. “It was the innuendo that was so insubstantial that was really awful. But you know, I have not sought out [Tevlin], but I’m very grateful that it happened. Because, while it wasn’t the only factor, it made me take stock of myself.”

    Rothschild Utne adds, “There was something about Eric that made people want to take him down a peg. And, perhaps, rightly so. Eric was really riding for a fall. The story wouldn’t have been complete without it.”

    Beginning in early 1996, Utne took a couple of years off, during which (as he later wrote to Utne readers) he went on a walkabout to “find, feel, and follow my heart.” Along the way, he “learned to meditate, did lots of therapy and ‘inner work,’ took singing lessons and joined a gospel choir, enjoyed lots of leisurely conversations for the first time in years, and volunteered at a local health crisis resources center.” He returned to the magazine in 1998 with bright eyes and big plans to expand into book publishing, radio, television, and the organizing of events and cruises. But this new energy quickly fizzled. In a fundamental and irreversible sense, Utne was burned out. In 1999, he turned the reins over to his wife.

    “I said I’d do it, but it had to be for real, not window dressing,” recalls Rothschild Utne. “He gave me half the company. We ran it together for six months. It became clear that he didn’t want to do it anymore. His heart wasn’t in it. He was making messes everywhere. At that point, he turned all the ownership over to me.”

    Rothschild Utne was—and had been for years—the magazine’s primary investor, and she was concerned for the family finances. “At some point I had guaranteed a credit line,” she explains, sipping water in her comfortable, sky-blue Loring Park office “And then the company didn’t expand and wasn’t sold. Nobody was paying attention to the fact that it was hemorrhaging money. I had a lot at stake and so I said, ‘I want to try to turn this around.’ In order to be effective in that way, I had to be able to call the shots.” Though at the time Rothschild Utne had zero publishing experience (she was a Harvard English major), she says, “I have some fairly sturdy business genes.”

    These days, she counts her efforts, which have included a redesign, trimming the name simply to Utne, and landing a handful of additional investors, a resounding success. “We’re not profitable, but we are close,” she declares, while her assistant approaches with packets of supporting documentation. “With the anniversary issue, we had our best ad-sales issue since 1996.” Most importantly, Rothschild Utne adds, the magazine is getting back to its original mission-cum-mantra: Focus on what’s breaking through, not what’s breaking down.

    That’s all good news, of course. But without the magazine to run—in fact, watching his namesake fare better without him—Utne was left directionless and missionless, not an entirely comfortable position for him, one suspects. He hung around home, trying to be a better husband and father, shopping and cooking, taking care of the boys, rebuilding himself. And then he crossed paths with Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher who believed in spiritual evolution and in 1919 founded the Waldorf Schools movement. “I tried to read Steiner thirty-five years ago,” says Utne, munching the last of his bacon while REM’s “Everybody Hurts” drones from the Zumbro’s speakers. “I found him absolutely impenetrable. And then after leaving the magazine, I was reading widely, and doing some of the stuff we’d been publishing about but never really doing—like learning how to meditate—and I encountered some of his ideas. I picked up my old copy of the book I had tried to read before and it was moldy and musty and this time it just leapt off the page. It spoke right to my soul.”

    The Waldorf schools, described in broad strokes, espouse age-appropriate education. Children learn the various disciplines, like reading, when they are ready to learn them. Creativity is nurtured and handcrafts are required. Exposure to television and other forms of mass media is discouraged. As it happened, back in 1988 Rothschild Utne had co-founded the City of Lakes Waldorf School, now located on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis (which seems to draw the children of every thirty-something artist and musician in town). Because Utne believes that some things are fated, when he was asked to teach seventh and eighth grade at the school, he said no and then yes. “I have four boys and they’ve all been in Waldorf, preschool through at least eighth grade,” he says. “They’re really good guys and they’re really interested in life and the world, as are many of their classmates. I’m quite impressed with the curriculum. I’ve always said we teach what we need to learn. I got a real liberal arts education by teaching these kids.”

    And because Utne is always looking into things, searching for some deep hidden meaning, he says his education went beyond the topics he instructed, which included Renaissance history, creative writing, meteorology, astronomy, geography, and algebra. “I’ve always considered myself unemployable,” he offers with a chuckle. “I’ve often been in situations where I’ve been the entrepreneur. So working with a group of colleagues at the school was a great thing for me. I got a yearbook at the end of the year signed by all my colleagues telling me—I know this is going to end up in the article—saying how much they loved working with me and what a great time we had. I found myself bringing it home and showing it to Nina and saying, ‘Look, I can work with other people. I just have to not be the boss.’”

    The Urban Almanac is a modern, citified, lefty version of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. Its motto (Utne is undeniably fond of mottos) is: Look up, look out, look in. Toward these goals, the book contains a varied collection of information, a reflection of Utne’s eclectic mind, including a piece on naked-eye astronomy, another on how to predict the weather, and a primer on the life of Franklin himself. There are also poems, recipes, lyrics to Elvis and Prince songs, quotes from Goethe, a yearlong date book, and airy inspirational passages like, “The soul shines in the darkness and gives it form.” The book, which Utne hopes to publish annually, is at its best when paying tribute to “essential places” and “living urban treasures” such as Minneapolis’ Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden, Domino Park in Miami, authors Studs Terkel and Jane Jacobs, and L.A. peace activist Aqueela Sherrills.

    During his time at the Utne Reader, Utne was deemed a glory hog, partly because he’d plastered his own name across the cover of the magazine, a move he now calls a mistake. “It’s really a team of people doing it,” he says. Where the self-published Almanac is concerned, he’s eager to share the credit, albeit in his own grand, cosmic way. Of designer Margaret Bossen, he says, “I met her and she had shown up with an armload of almanacs and other stuff that was clearly just exactly the sensibility I wanted for this almanac. And I got the feeling when I was interviewing her that this was her project to do. Almost like she was born to do it and I was facilitating her destiny.”

    He’s equally effusive about managing editor Martha Coventry, whom he calls a “dear friend.” Coventry, who worked with Utne at the magazine and has known him for twenty-two years, offered this assessment in return: “Eric has become a really wonderfully mature man.”

    The stated goal of the Almanac is to draw people to nature, but the larger (and largely unarticulated) aim is to connect people to each other. Utne has long been entranced by the idea that cooperation creates power, which leads to change. In 1991, the Utne Reader published a story titled, “Salons: How to Revive the Endangered Art of Conversation and Start a Revolution in Your Living Room.” The piece drew national attention and, in fact, did start a bit of a revolution, with the New York Times discussing the revival of conversation and the L.A. Times publishing an instructive how-to called “Bringing Together Your Own Salon.” Both pieces credited Utne for instigating this new chattiness: At the time, more than eight thousand Utne readers had signed up to participate in some five hundred klatches nationwide. It was the perfect salve, a culturally positive trend that also served as a brilliant marketing tool for the magazine.

    The movement itself turned out to be short-lived, but Utne claims he was not disappointed. The effects live on, he says. “People meet each other and they develop a relationship or start a business or a school or a co-housing project. They forget about this magazine in Minneapolis. We couldn’t figure out how to maintain a connection to it. But we were like this catalyst. Mostly I think salons lead to things. I don’t think they are an end unto themselves.”

    It was the impulse to facilitate a larger conversation, to be a catalyst (Utne describes himself as a “proselytizer and a pamphleteer”), that led to the Almanac, which he hopes will be popular among a wide range of people, including students. “We get our news now from TV, newspapers, and the radio rather than from each other,” he laments. “The media tends to separate us from each other. So a big part of the Almanac is to connect us. That’s sort of buried in it. We have things like the citizen wisdom councils and community-supported agriculture, farmers markets, poetry slams. There are all kinds of aspects encouraging people to connect with other human beings. People are craving connection.”

    That is probably true. It’s a bit of cultural analysis that Utne has always gotten right. But people are connecting, just not necessarily along the lines he would prefer. The Republican Party has never been more solidified or zealous. Religious fervor is on the upswing. People are bound together and stratified by fear—fear of terrorism, fear of our nation’s perceived moral weakness. Back in 1989, Utne told USA Today, “We are convinced the country’s values are changing in the direction we have been articulating in our pages.” Alas, quite obviously, the tide didn’t turn that way. Thus far, the twenty-first century has been decidedly grim and non-green.

    After the September 11th attacks, New Age leaders suggested that the movement had to change. Mainly, it needed to be more macro and less micro, less concerned with small, internal matters. In October 2001, astrologer Walter Mercado declared, “The New Age, the way we have defined it in the past, is passing now. Everything was how to, how to, how to. Everything was me, me, me. But being egocentric is over. Even the astrology of the individual has changed. September 11th was a very violent shock to the way we saw the world. Now people are less interested in what the stars have in store for them and more interested in what they have in store for the universe.”

    Is there room in the post twin-towers era for somebody like Eric Utne, for stargazing and flower sniffing? Even Voltaire’s Candide finally had to conclude that “regrettable things happen in this world of ours,” that the fundamental aim in life is not happiness, but merely survival.

    “I think the last line of Candide is about tending your garden,” says Utne, decidedly upbeat. “We become better citizens and more responsible citizens when we are more grounded and more connected, not just to nature, but to each other. Even in warrior cultures, for example the Samurai, in order to know what they were protecting, they became masters of the arts. The Samurai were the guys who did the tea ceremony or flower arranging or brush painting. They had to develop their inner being. I think, related to 9/11, that for us to really know what we are trying to protect and take care of, it might be good for us to become intimate with it. We’re pretty clueless these days.”

    Certainly, Utne’s sights have lowered from the days when he was leading the Utne Reader and igniting a national salon movement, or, as with the Y2K guide, proposing a radical, new way to operate society. His idealism has been seared by hard truths. Asked whether, at this point, he considers himself an optimist, he says, “I would have said that in the past. But I don’t know anymore.”

    That’s just real life talking.

  • Judith Guest: Ordinary Person

    Renowned author Judith Guest
    talks about “the terror of chance,” taking what you want, and falling in love with your characters.

    I can vividly recall my first reading of Judith Guest’s Ordinary People twenty years ago, in the bleak midwinter of my sophomore year of high school. When the book’s main character—the mortally depressed teenager, Conrad—fends off the world by narrowing his eyes to “blend everything to gray,” he was speaking right to me. Conrad’s melancholy was achingly familiar, and, like millions of others, I loved him for being frail and angry and strangely brilliant. And so I’m somewhat awed to be in Edina, knocking on the door of the author’s stately brick-and-stucco home.

    Judith Guest’s combination of courage, talent, timing, and luck has reaped rewards that are reserved for a very few. Yet Judith Lavercombe (she publishes under her maiden name) doesn’t throw the weight of her fame around. Many Twin Citizens don’t even know that she is a fellow resident, which is odd, considering that she and her husband, Larry, have lived in the same home in the Browndale neighborhood of Edina since 1975. Still, her national recognition, especially for someone who is not considered a prolific writer, is impressively enduring. “The story of you is a remarkable event,” Studs Terkel told her during a radio interview almost thirty years ago. This August, Slate magazine put her on its list of America’s most prominent novelists. But Guest is reluctant to talk about her fame, and she is downright sensible about the fairytale success of her first novel.

    Since its publication in 1976, Ordinary People has sold close to ninety thousand hardcover copies and over half a million paperback copies. It’s a standard selection on high school reading lists and an equally likely entry on banned-book lists. It won the Janet Heidegger Kafka Award for best first novel and it brought Robert Redford to the author’s front door looking for a chance to make his directorial debut—which resulted in a film that won four Academy Awards in 1980. And all of this happened to a forty-year-old first-time author with three kids and no agent. Maybe that’s another reason I’m so curious to meet her.

    Guest opens the kitchen door and shoos her cat away as she ushers me in. After pouring us some coffee and moving into a shaded front room, she curls into an oversized chair, her suntanned legs tucked aside. Dressed casually in denim shorts and a white sweater, she is strikingly youthful for a woman of sixty-eight-years. Her good fortune is almost palpable. This spacious home, with its intimate stained woods and turn-of-the-century windows, has that lovely and lived-in quality of a place where children were raised comfortably and grandchildren visit frequently. Bobby, a large, scruffy dog with good manners, settles herself at my feet, keeping a protective eye on Guest.

    After a bit of small talk about her three sons, her grandchildren, and everything there is to love about Minneapolis, I bring up the question of Guest’s phenomenal success. Immediately, she gets down to what seems to be one of the main points she wishes to make with this interview. “My success is not who I am,” she says, setting down her coffee mug. “I’m not terrifically comfortable with even thinking about what I’ve accomplished in relation to who I am and how I relate to other people.” Bobby raises her ears at the tension and looks up at me warily. “Of course, sometimes I’m forced to think about it, because the person I’m talking to is giving it back to me, which is upsetting and discomforting to me. I would just as soon not be what I do,” Judith explains, picking up the coffee cup again. “I do it, it’s my job. I’m glad I’m successful at it, because it’s allowed me to live very well financially, and give my kids a lot of things. It’s enabled me to do stuff that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. But it’s not who I am.”

    Perhaps it’s only natural that the issue of fame touches a raw nerve, as Guest has recently returned from a demanding book tour promoting The Tarnished Eye, a mystery novel based on the real-life mass murder of an affluent Michigan family in the sixties. This tour was tiring, especially for someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy them in the first place. “When the publisher says, ‘OK, we’re flying you here and there, and can you drive here and there,’ I get this sinking feeling in my stomach. I think, ‘Oh my God, why do I have to do this?’ And then my next feeling is, Oh, you’re so ungrateful! Here they’re willing to send you to all these places and help you sell your book, and you’re acting like you don’t like doing it!” she says.

    What writer likes the anxiety of not knowing what to expect when she walks in the door of a Barnes & Noble? “If you go thinking there are going to be ten and there are a hundred, it’s scary.” Guest raises her palms and sighs. “If you go expecting a hundred and there are three, it’s aaarrrgh.” She laughs out loud, and then goes on to describe showing up for a television interview in Milwaukee only to discover that the studio had no record of her scheduled appearance. In between segments, the unfortunate host went behind a curtain to madly flip through a copy of The Tarnished Eye. “It’s just totally stressful,” she says. “Sometimes you are being interviewed by someone and you think, if I knew this person they’d be my best friend. Other times you’re being interviewed by a complete jerk.”

    Like many writers, Guest finds it disorienting to talk at length about herself. “It’s maddening,” she says. “It’s alienating. I’m constantly standing next to myself, saying, ‘Is that true? Why are you saying that? That seems like a weird thing to say about yourself.’ There’s no way around it. I can’t imagine anyone talking about him- or herself that much and not feeling self-alienated.” Somehow Guest is able to say these things without making it seem like she’s terribly uncomfortable with this very interview at this very moment, as her husband Larry moves about somewhere in the other room, the dog keeps watch, and leaves float through the air in the window behind us.

    Instead, it seems as if she is relieved to speak plainly about the odd stresses of being a public figure. “I notice when I’m on these trips, I read like mad. It’s the only thing that seems to center me, bring me back to remembering who I am. Or forgetting who I am! It’s more like forgetting. Not being so doggone conscious of everything you’re saying.” This self-consciousness is a burden that was predicted by a best friend of Guest’s, whom she’s known since second grade. When Guest telephoned her to announce that a publisher had accepted Ordinary People, her friend burst out in laughter. “Now you have to be really nice to everyone,” she said. “To prove that you haven’t changed!”

    Has Guest changed, given the enormity of her success? Not really at all, say those closest to her. “We didn’t move, we didn’t buy anything significant. This is the way my mom is,” said her oldest son, Larry, a local realtor and screenwriter who was in high school when Ordinary People was published. “I didn’t suddenly have a car, and we didn’t suddenly have a boat. I don’t even know that she made that much money on Ordinary People at the time. She was a first-time author, and she was signed to a very boilerplate kind of book deal which didn’t have a giant advance. They didn’t know it was going to become a movie. But even when more money came, it just made things easier. She is very generous with me, with all of her sons, I think.”
    If she keeps fame at arm’s length, Guest surrounds herself with relationships steeped in the bonds of history and continuity. For example, when she received the Mailgram from Viking accepting Ordinary People, she ran to share the news with her new next-door neighbor Linda Lew, who broke out a bottle of champagne. The two remain close friends. “She is very modest,” Lew told me over the phone. “I tout her name more than she does.”

    Guest sees herself as someone who prefers the company of friends to the adoration of strangers. “With my friends, I don’t feel pressure to be someone other than who I am,” she says. “The people who really know you—who know your faults and your prejudices, your little weird foibles and your quirks—those are the people who are the easiest to be with, because you don’t have to fake it and you’re not even tempted to fake it. It’s always obvious to me when someone is looking at me with an idea of who I am and hoping that that’s the person I’m going to be. No matter how subtle it is, it’s there, and you want to give them who they really want. But it ain’t me.” Guest still writes most every day. She craves the solitude of being immersed in her work, and during the hustle of her book tour she found that she missed the sustenance that writing offers. “The fame part doesn’t nourish in that way,” she says. “The problem is that it feels kind of good for a few minutes a day, so you keep wanting more of it. But it’s like eating carbs. The more you eat them, the more you want to eat them. If you don’t eat carbs, you don’t get hungry.” She bursts out laughing at her analogy before abruptly concluding: “There. That’s it. That’s all I’m saying about this subject.”

    When morning turns to afternoon, Guest and I move from the front room to the side porch, where a breeze flows through the windows and sounds of traffic and children filter in from the nearby avenue. The topic has shifted too, from fame to ideas about ancestry and the bonds between people over a span of time—themes that recur in conversation with Guest as well as in her writing. When she wrote Ordinary People, she was trying to explore the inner workings of a family—their “everydayness,” as she has said. She was also trying to examine the anatomy of depression, with which she has struggled at times. A key question in Ordinary People was how a family might pick itself up and carry on after unthinkable tragedies: One son drowns and the other slashes his wrists.

    Themes of overcoming pain and loss thread through her subsequent novels, as well. In Second Heaven, Guest probed the possibilities of an unlikely fresh start for an abused child; and a mass murder comprises the central plot line of The Tarnished Eye, whose detective protagonist is wading through the emotional debris caused by his infant son’s death from SIDS. Readers often assume that the author, in revisiting these themes, is diving in and out of the wreckage of her own biography. When I suggest that many people would expect Judith Guest to bear a close resemblance to Mary Tyler Moore’s portrayal of the cold, controlling Beth in the film Ordinary People, Guest guffaws. “That’s amazing,” she says. “But I think I know what you mean. One time, soon after I had moved here, I had to give a reading. A whole bunch of people were reading that night. I didn’t want to go by myself, so I called up my neighbor Linda. We listened to Michael Dennis Browne, Tom McGrath, Phoebe Hansen—a lot of interesting local writers whom I didn’t know at the time because we hadn’t lived here that long. And then I got up and I read from my second novel, Second Heaven, about when this kid is in juvenile hall. Afterward, Linda told me how a lady sitting next to her turned and said, ‘Oh, what a life this poor woman has led.’ So you just don’t know how people are going to identify you with your characters.”

    Guest admits she has been lucky. She spent her childhood in Detroit and the surrounding area with her parents and four younger siblings—two sisters and two brothers. “We moved around a lot,” Guest says. “I went to a lot of grade schools in Detroit. Dad had many interesting reasons for moving. When I was eight, we moved to Oscoda, Michigan, because he had started a paper company—cutting down trees and making and selling a special kind of saw. I don’t know what ever happened to that saw as a business. But anyway, Mom didn’t like it up there; she said she was a city girl. So we moved back to Detroit. We lived with my grandparents, then we moved to an apartment, then we bought a house. But through it all, we had this family cabin that my dad built on Lake Huron, and where we always spent summers with our mom. We still own it, we five siblings. Now I have my own cabin about twenty miles down the road, but I still go down there all the time whenever any of them are there. It’s like the ancestral home.”

    Guest seems a master at keeping tradition going, at staying in touch, and sticking with pursuits over long periods of time. She keeps close ties to her siblings, her children, her grandchildren, her childhood friends, her neighbors, her editors, her former editors, her pets. She and a friend have led the same annual women’s retreat for eleven years. She holds a writing seminar every year with Rebecca Hill. She goes on a yearly vacation with her sister and a few friends, each time picking out a place in Michigan they’ve never been to before. She is a founding member of a small, distinguished group of seven who call themselves the Women of Pilford Pines—a shrouded reference to the way the group originated with four women “pilfering” small pines for their own gardens from areas of dense overgrowth in the woods. Subsequently, the group mandated that in order to join the Women of Pilford Pines, new members had to steal something that would enrich their lives in some significant way, and feel no remorse for doing so. Like the other members of Pilford Pines, Guest is a passionate gardener of the rough and natural genre. She’s also devoted to sewing and opera and cooking and reading and traveling. And, lately, politics.

    On the day of our interview, Guest has been writing a response to a request from Slate magazine, on her opinion of the presidential candidates. She gets up to fetch the official request and read it aloud: “There’s an election coming up, and Slate would like to know what you think about it. Our staff has drawn up a list of about fifty prominent American novelists—I went, ‘Well how can you turn that down, you’re one of fifty prominent American novelists!’—and we would like to hear your frank response to the following question: Which presidential candidate are you voting for and why?”

    Guest thinks she just wants to say how she feels: that she loves this place, her country, and is surprised that so many people in it feel differently than she does. Most of her friends are Demo-crats, but some very close ones are not. “And I don’t know how to talk to them about politics anymore,” she says, looking into the distance, then snapping back. “It’s not just, ‘oh well, you like to-may-toes and I like to-mah-toes.’ It’s not like that for me anymore. It’s way more important than that. So we just don’t talk about it, basically. I’m not about to change friends after forty years of friendship. I’m not. But I don’t understand how people can vote for a man who’s so arrogant and so dumb and so scary.”

    “Ours was not a political household, when I was growing up,” Guest’s son Larry told me. “But now, for better or worse, it’s a topic of conversation a lot in my family. I think my mom’s political activism simply comes straight from who she is and how she encounters the world. In Ordinary People, Conrad says at a certain point, ‘Life is a big deal.’ I think he’s responding to something the therapist is telling him, to relax, not take everything so seriously. And I think that is how my mom is feeling about the political world right now—she is not happy about the attitude that some people take, that this is a contest that’s kind of fun, it’s our side against your side and I hope we beat you guys and you wanna place a bet on it? I don’t think she understands that, and, frankly, I don’t either.”

    “In a way, I’m grateful,” Guest muses as she ticks off everything she feels is nefarious about our current administration, which has catapulted her to a new level of political action. “It’s like, well, it’s about time. I’m sixty-eight years old. I should have been thinking like this for a long time. I feel as if I have to say what I think,” she says. “And it’s not always comfortable or easy. You can be in situations where you’re going to tear the social fabric if you say something. I’ve never been one to tear the social fabric. Now I feel like, well, you’d better do it. You’d better stand up for what you believe and say what you think. So that’s what I’ve been doing. I put a lot of money into the Kerry campaign, I read everything I get from MoveOn.org, and I do about a third of the things they ask me to do. My sister Marjorie said to me once, ‘I know you don’t like being this famous person, but you are, so how about just hanging out your coattails and letting people ride, ride, ride.’ And that is fine. That, to me, is what fame ought to be used for.”

    Guest’s latest novel is about murder at its grisliest, with a protagonist sheriff, Hugh DeWitt, whom Guest claims to have “fallen in love with.” The story itself is a satisfying blend of genres, dark but artfully restrained, with enough character development and emotional substance to draw me in and with enough crime and mystery to satisfy my Agatha Christie-addicted daughter. The Tarnished Eye isn’t climbing the bestseller lists at the moment, but, like Guest’s other post-Ordinary

    People novels, it has been praised by critics and—if the public commentary on Amazon and other bookseller websites is any indication—it’s been enthusiastically received by readers. All in all, this is something of a surprise, considering that crime writing seems a leap for the author best known for her insightful rendering of everydayness.

    In fact, Guest has long been fascinated by murder. In that 1976 radio interview with Studs Terkel, she talked about the “tyranny of chance” in considering whether the victim of a particular murder could just as well have been the person who reads a report about it in the morning paper. When I remind her of this statement, she says, “I might have said that, but it doesn’t sound original; it doesn’t seem like my thought. I was probably thinking of Iris Murdoch. She has a phrase that goes, ‘There is no order in this world, there is only chance, and the terror of chance.’ Now, that seems very true to me, and very compelling.”

    Also compelling is the question of what pushes an individual across the line. “The idea of why a person would commit a murder still draws me to read every single article about murder in the newspaper,” Guest tells me. “I just try to figure out what drives people to that extreme of behavior, to that point where they can’t see any other options in between. My friend Rebecca, with whom I wrote Killing Time in St. Cloud, did a book tour with me. And people would ask us, ‘You guys are straight novelists, what would ever make you want to write a mystery novel, a murder mystery?’ Rebecca would say, ‘Well, our other novels are about people who try to solve their personal problems in any way they can short of murder, and in this book we just decided to go right to the whip.”

    The Tarnished Eye draws its title from a line in the novel Diana of the Crossways, by George Meredith, and its plot from the unsolved 1968 murders of the Robison family—Richard, his wife, Shirley, and their three sons and daughter—at their summer cottage in Michigan. Their corpses were discovered about a month after the killings, which were particularly brutal. Guest remembers reading about the killings at the time. “I was so fascinated with the case, and still am. I just needed to figure it out, and the fact that no cops ever did was intriguing,” she said.

    During the Robison investigation, police made connections between the oldest Robison son and John Norman Collins, a clean-cut and suavely good-looking Eastern Michigan University student who was eventually convicted for the murder of eighteen-year-old Karen Sue Beineman, an EMU freshman. Collins, known at the time as the “Ann Arbor Co-Ed Killer,” was implicated superficially in fifteen murders and, as outlined in the book The Michigan Murders, is considered by authorities to be responsible for at least seven and probably nine horrifically brutal murders of young women between 1967 and 1969. “When I heard that those two were roommates, it just clicked for me,” says Guest. “How strange is it that a serial killer who has murdered all these women is also the roommate of this son of the family that was murdered at the same time? How likely is it that there would be no connection, that it would be pure coincidence?”

    In 1970, Collins was sentenced to life with a twenty-year minimum behind bars. Guest thinks he ought to be questioned now about the Robison killings, since he’s incarcerated and thus readily available. “The lawyer from Scribner [her publisher] asked, ‘Hopefully he’ll be in for a long time?’” Guest recalls. “I said, ‘yeah, hopefully.’” Indeed, one has to hope that Collins’s history of attempted escape by tunneling out of prison will help to eliminate any possibility of parole. “They tried and convicted him for the last murder, because they knew they had enough evidence to convince the jury on that one. But they are totally convinced that he murdered those other girls.” For her part, Guest is convinced that Collins also killed the Robison family. Meanwhile, the publication of The Tarnished Eye piqued the interest of many others close to the real case. Guest notes that the Robison investigation focused on the father and the suspects who knew him. “It just didn’t make sense to me,” she says. “So in my book, the wife is having an affair, and the guy she is having an affair with becomes one of the main suspects. I’ve already heard from people who knew the Robison family who are saying, ‘You’ve slandered her name! She would never have done that, she was a wonderful woman.’ And you have to keep saying, it’s a novel, it’s a novel, I’m not writing about the real Robisons. It’s a tough distinction for people. It’s tough for me sometimes, especially having gotten to know Tom Mair like I do.”

    Tom Mair lives in Traverse City, Michigan. “I was Randy’s best friend from age two,” he told me, referring to the twelve-year-old Robison boy who was killed. “I had been invited to go with the family on the same trip north when they were murdered.” This is just the sort of terror of chance that has fascinated Guest for decades. “Tom was actually supposed to have been on this particular vacation,” Guest tells me, but his dad was a steelworker, and the steelworkers in Detroit were on strike at the time, and so instead of taking their vacation in August like they usually did, they decided to take it in June.

    Mair first heard that Guest had written a book based on the case when a reporter from the local paper called him. He immediately ordered a copy online and purchased another from the local bookstore. It took him a couple of days to pick it up and start reading. Once he did, he took it in small bites. “I was cautious because I didn’t know where she got her information, or how the story would be told in fiction. The point she makes in her book—that the infamous Ann Arbor co-ed killer was connected—shocked and surprised me the most. Partly because this angle had appeared before, and partly because she hadn’t disguised it much. I wasn’t sure this book would help or hurt the investigation.”

    Mair eventually contacted Guest through her publisher, and the two set up a breakfast meeting in Traverse City while Guest was on her book tour. “I came to the bookstore the night before and introduced myself,” Mair said. “I only stayed long enough to hear her speak a few words. It was emotional for me to hear her speak. There was a crowd of people, strangers, who would be hearing a story I was close to. I left. But then at breakfast, there was a certain level of knowing about the case that was a sort of intimacy. We had both looked in on another family and we saw how ordinary and how naive people can be. This story still scares me.”

    Mair’s website, UnsolvedHomicides.com, contains information about the actual crime and the status of the investigation, and it offers a reward for tips. “He really hopes the book will help someone remember something or come forward with something new,” says Guest. “He’s so intense, and that made me feel very intense about it, too.”

    She finds that the notion of the Robison murderer being locked up in prison without anyone looking closely at him is eerily sad. “I thought it was so amazing that Tom reached the same conclusion I did. They really limited the search immediately and only focused on Mr. Robison and his acquaintances and his business connections.” Guest asked Mair if anyone had ever confronted John Norman Collins about the Robison murders. “Tom said, yes, and what Collins said was, ‘A) I’m not talking to anybody until I can talk to my lawyer, and B) I don’t want to talk about that case.’”

    Guest is more than a hundred and fifty pages into her next novel—a roaring start for a writer who’s known to take her time (after the tenth year of writing Errands, her fourth novel, she finally stopped counting). White in the Moon, whose title comes from a poem by A.E. Housman, will be a follow-up to The Tarnished Eye and will again feature detective Hugh DeWitt. “I love Hugh,” says Guest, fetching a folder containing a stack of green paper that is her work in progress. She offers to share the Hausman poem, but happily agrees to read from the novel as well. She flips through the folder to a particular scene, where DeWitt is complaining to his wife, Karen, about their adolescent daughter’s boyfriend:

    “Bad enough he’s a biker, now he’s a Catholic biker.”

    She turned from the sink to look at him. No words, just the look.

    “Karen,” he said patiently, “we’re not Catholic.”

    “We’re not anything. We’re lapsed Lutherans. We don’t get to be prejudiced.”

    “I’m not prejudiced,” he said. “It’s just…fish on Fridays, Catechism on Saturdays, Mass on Sundays. It’s too much organized religion on a daily basis. That’s all I’m saying.”

    “Is what you learned about it in grade school all that you know? They don’t eat fish on Fridays anymore, not since Vatican II.”

    “Oh, great. That’s a relief. Do they still go to confession? Do the girls still have first communion and dress up in fake wedding dresses with veils so they can marry Jesus?”

    “Becky isn’t marrying Zach,” Karen said. “Or Jesus.”

    In the next room, Larry can tell we’re wrapping up. When I’m gone, the Lavercombes will take a nice afternoon bike ride together. Maybe later, Guest will work a little on White in the Moon. When that’s finished, she can return her attention to the sequel she had once begun to Second Heaven. “It’s kind of nice having that going and having this going. I’ve got my work cut out for me for the next ten years. And I like that.”

    It’s odd, in a way, that this attractive, fortunate, highly regarded writer looks forward with such chipper anticipation to the chance to spend her next ten years in fictional worlds of carefully constructed chaos rife with violence and dysfunction. But it makes perfect sense to Guest, who can’t leave alone the inexplicable variations in how one individual or the other deals with the terror of chance in a world without order. “I think human beings manufacture order, because we need it. We manufacture religion, because we need it. You need something to get you through.”

    What about Guest, who manufactures disorder, but whose life looks from all angles to be one in which most everything has fallen neatly and blessedly into place? “I think living the blessed life is the luck of the draw,” she says. “You don’t get control over the cards you’re dealt—whether it’s fatal illness, death, accidents—but we do have control over how we face those odds, how we play the cards. Some people with awful cards can be successful because of how they deal with the tragedies they’re handed, and that seems courageous to me. That’s what interests me, more than the fate of the blessed life.”

  • Zenon Dance Company’s Fall Concert

    Zenon Dance Company serves up another feast of new choreography that, as always, is precisely executed by this superior troupe. This year’s fall concert features a sampling of new work by two of our local favorites as well one New York import. Local choreographer Wynn Fricke—whose poetic, individualistic and often fantastical work was recently performed by James Sewell Ballet and Ragamala—will premier a complex and intimate composition. Myron Johnson, best known for masterminding Ballet of the Dolls, rounds out the evening’s ticket with a campy jazz ballet. Zenon also tackles the work of New Yorker Keely Garfield, whose Scent of Mental Love promises to be a power-struggling, sexually charged duet. 1420 Washington Ave. S.; 612-340-1725; www.zenondance.org

  • The Miser

    If you saw Jeune Lune’s Tartuffe a few years back, you won’t want to miss this second helping of farce à la Molière. The Miser was market-tested in Boston earlier this year, where Jeune Lune co-created the production alongside Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre. Now Jeune Lune is returning the Bostonians’ hospitality by inviting them to Minneapolis for a restaging of the show. Jeune Lune director Dominique Serrand, long known around these parts as a disciple of the great physical comedy tradition, seems more interested in deeper humanistic themes these days. His Tartuffe, for example, played as a thundering warning against the dangers of religious extremism rather than the sex farce to which it is often reduced. 105 First St. N., Minneapolis; 612-333-6200; www.jeunelune.com

  • Permanent Collection

    Mixed Blood Theatre is tackling another heady subject; this time it’s the space allotted to African and African-American artists by the whitewashed institution of fine art museums. In Permanent Collection, a new-on-the-job African-American museum director squares off with a white curator concerning the space made available to nonwhite artists. This new play by Philly playwright Thomas Gibbons is inspired by the true-life story of the Barnes Foundation, a suburban Philadelphia museum (currently embroiled in similar controversy) whose collection of impressionist masterpieces is smattered with African folk art. Gibbons and Mixed Blood challenge us to consider what we see when we enter a museum. Who gets to decide what is art? And how do their decisions reinforce a certain narrow view of the world? 1501 Fourth St. S., Minneapolis; 612-338-6131; www.mixedblood.com

  • Under Milk Wood

    Close your eyes and listen to the Jungle Theater’s reprise of Dylan Thomas’s dreamlike Under Milk Wood, which it’s staging for a fifth time to stretch through this year’s holiday season. While there’s little to see in this radio play, there’s plenty to hear—a beautiful, lyrical ramble of poetry, all spoken during a day in the life of the average, unhappy folks living in a Welsh fishing village. Artistic director Bain Boehlke reappears onstage alongside Claudia Wilkens, an adroit local performer who thrives in text-heavy productions (largely on the Jungle stage). Together, they weave a cozy, lyrical collage of language out of Thomas’s script, offering listeners a meditation on what it is to be content together in hopeless misery. 2951 Lyndale Ave. S.; 612-822-7063; www.jungletheater.com

  • Madame Butterfly

    The Minnesota Opera vows to pump up the authentic Japanese flavor of Madame Butterfly this time around. Productions of Puccini’s masterpiece about a geisha who gets crossed by an American sailor rely too often on caricatures of Japanese culture—especially the geishas in their campy kimonos and sets festooned with rice paper. Up to now, the Minnesota Opera has followed suit with their many seasons of Butterfly, which pops up every five years or so. This time they’re under the direction of Colin Graham, a veteran kabuki and opera director, who will undoubtedly infuse the production with subtle influences from real Japanese theater. Without the distraction of those pesky and frequently comic geisha-girl clichés, the Opera can focus on distilling Puccini’s gorgeous music to its heart-wrenching core. Sung in Italian with English super-titles. 345 Washington St., St. Paul; 651-224-4222; www.mnopera.org

  • Jamie Hook

    Just last month, Jamie Hook took over as executive director of Minnesota Film Arts, which is responsible for the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and the repertory movies shown at the Oak Street Cinema. In Seattle, where Hook spent much of his adult life, he was known as an unconventional and talented wild man (once, at a party, he was spotted slapping his own ass with a giant Mickey Mouse glove). He and his wife, Debbie Girdwood, started a nonprofit film production company called Wiggly World, which had a lot to do with reviving Seattle’s independent film scene. And then he was invited to move to Minneapolis, an offer he couldn’t refuse.

    THE RAKE: Don’t you just hate Citizen Kane?

    No, I don’t just hate it, but I do think that The Magnificent Ambersons is the superior film, botched ending and all. How can you not love that staircase in the Amberson mansion? Plus, the shot that concludes with George Minafer asserting that he wants to be a yachtsman when he grows up is one of the sacraments of the cinema. And I could watch Joseph Cotten disembowel my mother and it would make me smile.

    Has Minneapolis been nice to you?

    Minneapolis has been very nice. My landlord even reduced my rent, just to be “nice”—which of course made me paranoid. But now it’s fall and I am a bit concerned that, having arrived only recently, I won’t have time to build up those unvoiced, longstanding, passive-aggressive Lutheran animosities that stay burning in the belly through the deep Minnesotan winter. Otherwise, the city is as lovely as a well-made sandwich. I saw Mark Mallman perform his fifty-six-and-a-half-hour-long song the third day I was here, which truly inspired me.

    How is this city different from Seattle?

    Seattle is very dreamy, which is both an asset and a liability. Living in Seattle is like dating a Pisces: When things are good, they are very, very good, and when they are bad, they are rotten. Minneapolis seems a bit more Cancerian. People hoard their goodness, and dole it out like candy when you most need it. The city is more realistic, pragmatic, and diverse, which is a refreshing change. I would add that it is not a more staid city, however. I have heard more public swearing in Minneapolis than anywhere else I have ever lived, which is a good thing. Certainly, the Twin Cities would really benefit from having more alcoholic public intellectuals. Seattle took a lot of its character from the alternately brilliant and pompous rantings of various public drunks.

    What’s your goal at Minnesota Film Arts?

    I would love Minnesota Film Arts to grow into the hub of a local filmmaking community that exists independent of the wider industry, at least in terms of artistic accountability and ambition. In so many smaller cities with hefty artistic egos—Seattle, the Twin Cities, Boston, Portland—there is an unfortunate provincial tendency to want to pander to the cultural taste-makers of New York or Los Angeles, without recognizing that the most influential cultural movements inevitably emerge from the artistic basement, so to speak. Music provides the clearest example of this pattern, both in Minneapolis and Seattle.
     
    You just made a film, The Naked Proof. Tell us about it.

    The Naked Proof is a screwball comedy about a philosopher whose life is undone by a mysterious pregnant woman who may or may not actually exist.  It has been called “a corker,” and Twin Citians will be happy to know that the venerable August Wilson makes his screen debut in the film as a German professor. Whenever we can’t afford to rent another film, you can expect it to show up on the Oak Street calendar.

    Your films usually involve your friends as writers or actors. Do you plan to shoot something here in Minneapolis?

    I am working hard at making friends so as not to stall my filmmaking career. That’s why you can find me at various sleazy bars most nights of the week. According to my plan, as soon as the universal lubricant has brought about the boost in friendship and popularity that it so recklessly promises, I will embark on a new film. Then, having exhausted and/or destroyed those hard-won friends through the filmmaking process, I will have to flee the Twin Cities to begin the whole silly cycle again in Fargo.