Month: February 2005

Minnesotans have every reason to be proud of the numerous smoking bans on the way for bars and restaurants in municipalities throughout the state. After all, the clean-air initiatives associate us with such enlightened populations as the city of New York, the state of California, and even the entire country of Ireland, where the average pub once trapped air as thick as a good stout. The ashtray may go the way of the spittoon.

Or maybe not. Once the peculiar vice of baseball players, ranchers, and unruly teenage boys, chewing tobacco is now being positioned as the cigarette substitute of choice for urban hipsters. (Yes, for women, too.)

One highly sissified, minty-flavored “smokeless tobacco” has been advertising energetically in alternative weekly newspapers here and elsewhere. These ads have typically been two-page campaigns where a dilemma is identified on the first page. For example, Metrosexual Joe watches the Big Game at the local sports bar with his buddies. He is galled because he must either skip his nicotine fix or miss the action as he and his cigarettes decamp to the parking lot. But turn the page and—voila—a fat dip of Skoal is the answer to his prayers. Now he doesn’t have to miss a single play or dose. It’s like TiVo for your bloodstream.

Of course, Skoal also gives metrosexuals increased exposure to oral cancer and cardiovascular disease, along with decreased exposure to members of the opposite sex, who will surely look askance at that black wad in a petitioner’s teeth as he tries to score a phone number. It is no improvement in the breath category, either.

Joni Jensen, a project manager at the University of Minnesota’s Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center, said chew is a trend we should hope to avoid. “Smokeless tobacco in and of itself is less harmful than cigarettes, but it’s still not risk-free,” she said. “If it’s being advertised to be used not as a substitute to cigarettes but in addition to cigarettes, you’re actually increasing your risk. If people who might have quit because of the smoking bans are instead marketed into using a smokeless tobacco product, it’s going to have a negative public health effect.”

Jensen noted that smokeless tobacco is actually more addictive, because it gives the brain a steady buzz of nicotine rather than the quick spike and slow letdown provided by a cigarette, and the new “starter flavors” (apple, berry, vanilla) clearly indicate a product trying to appeal to a new market segment.

Then there’s the problem of secondhand saliva. Chewing tobacco waned in popularity in the early 1900s when it was banned in public due to fear of exacerbating a tuberculosis outbreak. And besides, it’s just gross. “Anybody who’s ever picked up a Coke can that somebody’s been spitting into and thought it was theirs would complain about the exposure to secondhand saliva,” Jensen said.

But Jon Schwartz, an enthusiastic spokesman for U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company, said the days of spit-filled bottles at bars will soon be a thing of the past, thanks to something called Revel. It is a new smokeless tobacco product that’s being test-marketed in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Dallas, Texas.

“Revel is a blend of premium, one hundred percent American tobacco that comes in mint and wintergreen,” said Schwartz, apparently reading directly from the company’s website. “It’s a small, discreet white packet, smaller than a piece of gum, and adult consumers can place it anywhere in their mouth where it’s comfortable and quickly enjoy tobacco satisfaction.” (Yes, he really talks like this.) “And many adult consumers who use it don’t feel the need to expectorate—or spit. That makes it a little more attractive to use.”

But is it any safer to use than Skoal? Or cigarettes? “Oh, we don’t make health claims,” Schwartz nervously pointed out. “That’s not something that we do as a company. Our objective as a company is to expand our category. There are millions of adult smokers in the U.S., and that universe of adult tobacco users is an opportunity to reach a new audience.” As anyone knows, it will not be identified as a serious new trend until Ikea starts stocking polyethylene spittoons.

—Patrick Donnelly

Unless you happen to be as rugged as I am—which is, I realize, highly unlikely—you probably aren’t familiar with the Peakbaggers, a loose-knit but increasingly large group of highly motivated self-starters determined to scale the highest points of all fifty states (and, for the true completists among us, the District of Columbia).

The Peakbaggers also have an official sub-club, the Highpointers, who publish several fine guidebooks to help climbers in their quest. Peak bagging is, as you might imagine, an arduous, expensive, and frequently lonely hobby. Many of the high points are very high indeed (Alaska’s Mount McKinley is 20,320 feet), and require the sort of courage and mountaineering skill I haven’t yet mustered. I’m working my way up, though, and have already tackled Florida’s Britton Hill (345 feet), Mississippi’s Woodall Mountain (806 feet), Illinois’s Charles Mound (1,235 feet), and Minnesota’s own Eagle Mountain (2,301 feet). If my records are correct, I’ve so far bagged six or seven high points, and last year, in perhaps my most memorable and challenging summit experience to date, I managed to scale Hawkeye Point, the highest elevation in Iowa.

I started my trek to Hawkeye Point from Bigelow, Minnesota, which is, according to the sign just outside of town, the “Home of Swampy Days.” On the border with Iowa, southwest of Worthington, Bigelow is two miles north of Hawkeye Point. It is the launch site for most expeditions to Iowa’s summit. Folks in Bigelow have grown up in the shadow of the fabled Point, and the town’s guides and outfitters do a modest business. There is also a large ranch just outside of town where llamas can presumably be rented to haul gear from the base camp to the peak, and there is no shortage of stout local lads who are willing to provide this service as well.

I, however, was determined to make the climb solo, entirely unassisted, and without supplemental oxygen. I set out from Bigelow early in the morning under a bright and cloudless sky. According to conventional wisdom, there is a ten-week optimal window of opportunity for tackling Hawkeye Point—generally from late March through early June, after the threat of winter storms has passed and before the oppressive humidity of mid-summer in Iowa sets in. While I had a support vehicle along for my ascent, I had vowed to make the trip from Bigelow on foot, and sent my companions ahead to establish a base camp and begin emergency readiness preparations. After a relatively easy two-hour hike I arrived at the Donna and Merrill Sterler farm. The Sterlers are corn and soybean farmers, and Hawkeye Point is located in the north-central corner of their 187-acre tract. There are very few high points in the United States that are situated on private property, and the Sterlers were entirely ignorant of the fact that they were living on the roof of Iowa until Merrill encountered surveyors nosing around his farm in 1970.

These men were members of an official state topographical expedition assigned the arduous task of locating Iowa’s high point. Months of difficult work came to a startling conclusion that day on the Sterler farm, as the surveyors, trudging through the fierce winds that have foiled many subsequent expeditions to Hawkeye Point, planted their flag on the summit and pronounced themselves satisfied that they had reached their goal. Their findings, however, would not be official until 1972, when Hawkeye Point—at 1,670 feet—received formal acknowledgement as the highest elevation in all of Iowa.

After stopping briefly to chat with Mrs. Sterler, who was preparing lunch and has lived on the property virtually all of her life (her parents moved to town in 1946, she says, but six years later Donna and her husband, then recently married, settled back in at the old family home and resumed farming), I set out for Hawkeye Point. The trek ended at the summit, three hundred yards from the back door, and took me across grassy terrain that required navigating around a few rocks and patches of spring mud. I had to pause just below the Point to catch my breath, and there was one brief, harrowing moment when I lost radio contact with my support staff (which was hunkered down in a Subaru station wagon on a gravel road one-eighth of a mile from the summit).

I had no sooner reached the U.S. geological survey marker that officially signals the highest point in Iowa when dark clouds began to roll in and the wind began to pick up, carrying sharp granules of dirt and the whiff of ammonium fertilizer. The always-temperamental Point allowed me one brief but unforgettable vista of fields stretching away far into the distance.

Before I began my hurried descent I took time to sign the official logbook, and noted (with considerable and—if I dare say—justifiable pride) that each year fewer people successfully attempt Hawkeye Point than climb Mount Everest.

—Brad Zellar

According to hundreds of billboards, bus sides, and direct mailings: Do.

Of course, you are already doing something. You are reading a billboard. As you do, you learn this is not enough in the doing department. You should “groove your body for ten minutes three times a day.” Grooving includes such agreeable activities as dog walking, skipping, and snowman building. It does not include reading. (Reading about the Do campaign in a magazine is, one hopes, a sort of awareness-building limbo.)

On the other hand, if this all sounds pretty unambitious to you, you’re probably not in the target market. Even as the Surgeon General is recommending sixty minutes of physical activity per American adult each day, it is Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota that is taking this more direct approach. It is aiming to get the most sedentary—and expensive—Minnesotans on their feet.

“Do is directed at people who aren’t physically active,” said Dr. Marc Manley. He is the director of Blue Cross’s Center for Tobacco Reduction and Health Improvement. That is the rather flat-sounding name of the organization responsible for these upbeat ads. “We’re trying to get them on something that’s manageable. We’re trying to help them understand that moving’s fun.” The campaign’s most guerilla feature is something Manley calls “decision prompts”—strategically placed ads that guilt-trip you into, say, taking the stairs instead of the escalator.

Some people are confused by the bite-sized exercise tips, which are communicated via billboards, television and newspaper ads, bus wraps, and “spectaculars” (that’s ad lingo for 3-D installations, most notably the mirror ball hanging above Block E). There is no indication on the billboards as to who is worried about their health. Blue Cross’s name does not appear anywhere on the billboards, although its logo does show up in newspaper and television versions, alongside its co-sponsor, the American Heart Association. Manley said, “We didn’t want to clutter it up.” As a result, many Do admirers assume it is a state-sponsored public service campaign.

So what’s in it for Blue Cross? Put simply, because fat people contract cancer and heart disease almost as often as smokers, the state’s largest health insurer claims to pay out the nose to treat the inactivity-related illnesses of an increasingly corpulent populace. It would seem, then, that Blue Cross’s strategy is to save money by spending; the company said it expects to save two dollars on health spending for every dollar spent on Do—with the fringe benefit of possibly improving the health of some people whom it does not insure. (By contrast, United Health Care—the Minnesota-based insurer that pays CEO William McGuire around $100 million per year—is apparently too hard-pressed to care about the public’s laziness.)

Dr. Manley’s office is, in fact, now the de facto public health arm of Blue Cross of Minnesota. It was founded in 1999 after the company, which was then preoccupied with smoking, successfully sued a group of tobacco companies. Blue Cross’s very public, very lucrative payout in that lawsuit compelled it to launch the center, which is wholly devoted to spreading good health across Minnesota.

As the center gained momentum over its first five years, a survey of the public-health situation revealed a landscape in which love handles are more pervasive than smoker’s cough. This inspired Do. The $6.7 million campaign—Blue Cross’s biggest initiative ever—buys a lot of billboards and bus shelters. It seems like an earnest effort rather than a perfunctory public-relations campaign, especially since all $460 million of Blue Cross’s tobacco settlement is still tangled up in litigation.

Manley won’t venture a guess as to when the tobacco settlement dollars will be available, but in the meantime, he said, the center won’t be twiddling its thumbs. “We’re going ahead as best as we can with health improvement programs, but not at the level we will once we can use those dollars,” he said. In other words, those commands to “groove your body,” as widespread as they seem, are just the beginning of what may be a permanent ad campaign nagging you to get off your duff. That huffing sound you now hear is the result of a sort of corporate body-groove: It is local ad agencies and media companies hyperventilating.—Christy DeSmith

Some people find great pleasure in a roomful of antiques. Others wonder, not without their own selfish pleasure, who gets to do the dusting. In either case, ever since “Famous” Dave Anderson piled stoneware crocks, license plates, mounted deer heads, and loads of other vintage goods from his personal collection into his Linden Hills BBQ joint, the customers have been delighted—a crucial factor in the restaurant’s success.

Now, of course, Famous Dave’s is a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: DAVE) with more than a hundred restaurants across the country. (It has grown even more quickly than another homegrown chain, Buca, which makes liberal use of Italian kitsch in its décor.) Each one is bedecked as profusely with old-timey goods as the original restaurant. With still more franchises opening all the time, it would be perfectly reasonable to wonder: Where does all of this stuff—hundreds of enameled coffee pots; Paul Bunyan decanters by the dozen; seven-foot chainsaw-sculpture bears; heaps of snowshoes, fishing jackets, tobacco tins—come from?

The simple answer is Famous Dave’s headquarters in Eden Prairie. At the back of its corporate offices, past all of the gray-flannel cubicles, is a door leading to a massive, state-of-the-art warehouse. Thousands of square feet are filled with twenty-foot-high industrial shelves, which shelves are laden with umpteen carefully categorized and inventoried objects, which objects are destined to generate admiration, surprise, nostalgia, wonder, and other generally warm feelings in diners from Smithtown, Long Island, to Tempe, Arizona.

“A lot of people who come back to the restaurant want to sit in a different room each time, so that they can take in everything,” Dave Leach told a visitor the other day. He should know. As head of the décor and design department, Leach presides over Famous Dave’s warehouse of wonders, and has had a hand in decorating quite a few of those hundred-plus restaurants. (Business got brisk enough that he now has a partner, Greg Bartholomew, a former antiques dealer.) Leach is a man of few words, but after talking with him for a while it becomes apparent that he takes great pride in his work, and he’s aware that he has a brand of dream job.

When Leach gets word of a new Famous Dave’s, he first notes which model it will be: roadhouse shack, northwoods lodge, or the just-developed smokehouse design. Then he begins pulling items from the warehouse inventory, creating what he calls “vignettes” for the various restaurant spaces that evoke a farmhouse kitchen, a bait shop, an old-timer’s garage, a hunting shack or fish house, and so on. “It’s not just a display,” Leach said. “There’s a reason for everything to be where it is.” And a reason to stay there. To foil sticky fingers, each item on a shelf or in a cabinet gets glued down, from a Baby Ben alarm clock to a pickle jar of puzzle pieces. “Someone once ripped a decoy off a shelf,” said Leach. “They pulled so hard they took part of the shelf with it.” Once assembled, every last component, from a curio cabinet to salvaged church pews for the waiting area, gets shipped out from the warehouse.

The original Famous Dave’s décor has largely been translated to a series of formulas and templates, such that Leach can note offhand that twenty to twenty-four coffee pots get sent to each restaurant. But he and Bartholomew have leeway to add custom touches, such as Southwestern pottery for restaurants in Arizona, or Big Red memorabilia for those in Nebraska. (And if a sentimental franchisee wants to display a few of his own antiques, well, they’ll diplomatically integrate them.)

Leach maintains the inventory, every last item of which is tagged and registered in a database, with the help of a network of dealers and collectors in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and elsewhere. Once a dealer has accumulated a sizable pile of stuff, someone from corporate retrieves it with a truck. Leach also attends the bigger circuit sales himself, most every weekend from March through October. “I still like to beat the bushes to find something unique that can really help make a restaurant,” he said. But there’s another secret to creating atmosphere at a Famous Dave’s restaurant. Not everything is real.

Leach takes what looks like a can of motor oil from a warehouse shelf. It is actually a carved block of wood that has been meticulously painted, right down to the intricate stipples of black and brown amid silver and red that evoke years of accumulated grease and dust. There are also “Aladdin Angler” prop Thermoses (real ones can fetch sixty dollars) whose lids, Leach says, are grocery-store takeout containers painted a shiny enamel red. The artists and craftsmen who create these fakes are world-class counterfeiters, but Leach is tight-lipped about them. Company secrets. In fact, he’s about as willing to reveal that information as he is eager to hear from people who want to sell their old stuff. In other words, don’t ring him up about the decoys you inherited from Grandpa. He’s got plenty, thank you.—Julie Caniglia

If you were a Minneapolis bohemian ten years ago, you might have found yourself packed into a downtown nightclub for what was then one of the city’s most popular bands, the Beatifics. Back then, the band was promoting its first album, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, a collection of gloomy love’s-lost lyrics and power-pop melodies. The now-legendary radio station Rev 105 was giving it a regular spin right up until the day Rev died, in 1996. As a result, track one—“Almost Something There,” a swell bubblegum anthem—had become a local hit with crusty hipsters and high school cheerleaders alike.

Since the demise of Rev 105, and thus of most programming of local music during waking hours, the Beatifics suffered a fall from radio grace. Their 2002 album, The Way We Never Were, fell on deaf ears at Drive 105 and Cities 97, the surviving corporate FM stations that feign devotion to local music. (The Beatifics remained darlings of the AM dial at the low-powered, student-run Radio K, God bless them.)

Their luck changed in late January when Minnesota Public Radio launched its new station, the Current. Beatifics frontman Chris Dorn and his friends report that the new station, staffed by some of the same Rev 105 personalities who championed his band’s first album, plays a song from How I Learned to Stop Worrying almost daily. (They don’t yet have Dorn’s second album in rotation. “I’ve been meaning to drop it by,” he said.)

Suddenly, Dorn’s music is being blasted again across the prairie on high-powered FM radio. This represents an opportunity to him and many other earnest musicians who wouldn’t otherwise be heard. In its early days, the Current aggressively worked to build a representative library of local music, one that reached beyond the Replacements and Soul Asylum (bands that somehow suffice to define the Minnesota sound farther down the dial). MPR staffers brought in their personal music collections, much of which was residual from Rev 105 days. They also called bands. They called promoters. They called distributors. They went shopping. Mary Lucia email-strafed all the musicians in her address book—all in a blanket effort to invite more local CDs. ’Twas certainly a fertile moment for musicians with stars in their eyes.

“The Current could make celebrities out of some local rockers,” said radio maven Jerry Steller, who owns a St. Paul-based promotion company that helps unsigned and indie bands get airplay. (Now that must be a long row to hoe.) Steller said there are a handful of stations like the Current in cities like Seattle, Santa Monica, and Philadelphia. Depending on their wattage and marketing might, these stations are freed from corporate playlists and can cultivate healthy music communities in their midst—replete with income-earning, recognized-by-fans-on-the-street musicians. In Steller’s estimation, the ninety-eight-thousand-watt Current has that potential, especially under the able watch of Minnesota Public Radio. “It’ll affect CD sales of local artists,” he predicted. “And a lot more people will go to shows.”

The Current is exhuming many other Rev 105 superstars, too, including Matt Wilson, Lifter Puller, and Dan Israel, who got misty about it when he appeared on Local Music with Chris Roberts, a recently added weekend show. At the same time, the station is fortifying post-Rev acts like Valet, the Olympic Hopefuls, and Atmosphere—a group so popular with concertgoers it surpassed the Replacements’ 1985 five-show-feat when it packed the Seventh Street Entry for seven days straight in January (but still hadn’t been played on a local commercial radio station). For flavor, the station also tosses in the occasional unlikely track from local jazz vocalist Prudence Johnson or folksinger Ann Reed. (This may be a consequence of forcing the square-pegged Morning Show with Dale Connelly and Jim Ed Poole into the station’s otherwise hip aesthetic. But it seems to work in the Current’s oddly felicitous iPod-on-shuffle way.)

Although Dorn is happy to be in the company of bands getting airplay, he’s sheepish about revealing his pipe dreams. When pressed, he conceded, “Yeah, it’s nice to have someone saying ‘We like your stuff. We wish you made more of it!’ And when a radio station plays your music five times a day and is constantly telling its listeners you have a show and then parks its van out in front of that show, you tend to bring in more people,” he said, pondering his Rev 105-induced stardom. “I wonder if MPR will get a van.”—Christy DeSmith

Dear Reader, in an effort to clear our accounts and our desks each March, we lay before you our laurels and our brickbats. (We noticed from the account books that we have gone through quite a few brickbats, without really knowing what a brickbat is, or where one might be obtained at a reasonable cost.)

We are proud of our many achievements over the years. You know, no government or private institution has ever been looted, thanks to our vigorous editorial policy. The availability of Chicago-style hot dogs is assured and sustainable. Ever notice how everyone stops courteously when a traffic light is on the fritz? This is the power of a pointed editorial during troubled times! We have also been staggeringly effective, we don’t mind saying, in keeping Whippy Dip stores in Iowa, where they belong.

Contrary to popular opinion derived from this astonishing record, though, The Rake’s influence is not unlimited. Here, in all modesty, we need to clear the air: We did not teach Fran Tarkenton how to scramble, although we certainly did not discourage him from doing it. We would have done everything within our power to stop the great disaster of the Third Avenue Bridge, but we were in traffic court when the City of Minneapolis built it. And despite expending great editorial resources on the matter, we have so far not succeeded in having Spoonbridge and Cherry moved to the city impound lot. (That garish yellow seventies sculpture, however—the one deposited at the farthest possible corner on the grounds of the Federal Reserve Bank? That was us.) We also wish now that we hadn’t cooperated in burning that last Minneapolis streetcar. (We were printed on highly flammable, uncoated paper at the time. Nostra maxima culpa!) We do say, though, that the recent troubling incursion of Asian attack carp has nothing to do with a small boat we keep moored in Northeast, nor the broken aquarium in the closet.

Never mind all that. Let’s try to focus on the good, people. With varying degrees of success, we have applied the full measure of our energy to the popularity of ice hockey, the proper care of Red Wing boots, the Brothers’ pastrami on rye, and that huge Long Island iced tea they used to serve at the Nankin. We have owned a secondhand purple blazer with Denny Hecker’s name embroidered in it.

One certainly cannot assess the success of a publication these days without mention of its “business operations,” and in this respect, we have far exceeded our modest editorial achievements. Our resistance to the “Best of the Twin Cities” issues, not to mention our refusal to print hundreds of alloy medallions and affix them to expensive sheets of congratulatory vellum, signed by our editor—well, there are signs that our efforts have slowly starved that particular illness. It has also saved our handwriting. The fever breaks, the sun rises, and all feel equal under the kind gaze of The Rake.

In other advertising news, we were still trying to land the Sliced Bread contract when it became the most popular campaign in memory—all on the rumor of a single quarter page sometime in the fiscal year! So powerful and relentless is our marketing muscle that the mere suggestion of an ad buy was enough to set off a panic in bakeries throughout the land. It was deemed unnecessary to go through the motions of actually printing that ad. Alas, the check was not tendered, either. The price one pays for being a pioneer!

People understandably want to know how we do it. Here is how: Paper, not plastic. Chocolate. Clarinets and tambourines. Rolling stops. Magic Markers. Big hair. AAA batteries. Yellow. Running in place. And of course, you, Constant Reader.