Month: September 2005

Offering perhaps conclusive proof that fewer Americans are reading these days, Best Buy’s health and wellness retail experiment, called Eq-Life, will soon occupy the space vacated by Grand Avenue’s now defunct independent bookstore, Bound to Be Read. It’s worth noting that about a mile down the street, the space left open by Ruminator’s closure is now a Patagonia store. Do Americans prefer fleecy jackets, scented candles, and heart monitors to the comforts of a good read? Mike Marolt, the president of Eq-Life, is hoping they do. Marolt’s own brainchild, the new store bills itself as a neighborhood resource for health, wellness, and technology, seemingly unlikely bedfellows. Its first test store, which opened in Richfield earlier this year, has been successful enough that Marolt has decided to expand the control group, opening both the St. Paul store and another in Stillwater later this year.

So what, exactly, is Eq-Life? And why is Best Buy trafficking in health and wellness? And what the devil does that have to do with technology? Before visiting the Richfield store, I pictured a group of women in hot pink capri pants who’d been lured in by the pedicure stations and had gone ahead and purchased more expensive cell phones and picked up an MP3 player on their way out the door, walking ever so gingerly in flip-flops toward their SUVs to protect freshly polished toes. Surely this was Best Buy’s way of selling computers and corollaries—peripherals? Whatever—to women who are intimidated by geeky techno-babble at the company’s warehouse stores, yes? Well, not exactly.

Imagine that by some magic of origami, O magazine could be folded out into an eighteen-thousand-square-foot retail space, and you’re getting a little bit closer. Borrowing from the Latin root aequilibrium—or perhaps just abbreviating the English cognate—Eq-Life seeks to provide its customers with an array of goods and services that “help people find balance,” said Sue Lee, who handles PR for the enterprise. These include salon and spa services (“Sea Facials,” the “Exfoliating Citrus Spa Manicure,” the “Gentleman’s Buff & Shine”); a range of self-help and health care texts (from He’s Just Not That Into You and What Not to Wear to Conquering Infertility and How Full Is Your Bucket?) to organic towels, tampons, and cleaning supplies, upscale scales that read your body fat and metabolic age, blood pressure monitors, fountains, air purifiers, motion detectors for keeping track of grandma, digital pedometers, nail polish, and herbal supplements. It is also the only retail location in the country licensed to sell something that everybody needs at a good party: defibrillators. And it offers consultations with nurse practitioners, diabetes and diet specialists, and members of the Geek Squad.

Mike Marolt believes that the connections between wellness and technology are untapped and many, and noted that one of the store’s most popular resources has been the health notes kiosk, where customers can tap a screen for information on everything from acid reflux to zinc malabsorption. And he knows what you’re thinking: The customer base isn’t just women. “Throughout our research we kept coming back to an equally balanced demographic, progressively minded around health and wellness, people who are online researching this information—highly engaged health and wellness consumers.”

However, many of Eq-Life’s new St. Paul neighbors are worried about all those highly engaged health and wellness consumers logging off and heading to Grand Avenue. Parking will be a huge issue in the already congested Victoria Crossing neighborhood. Then, too, Eq-Life may threaten smaller businesses in the area that offer similar products and services. While Patagonia seems to have received a warm welcome, so far Eq-Life has suffered a fair amount of conflict. Luckily, it has plenty of stuff to deal with that sort of stress. And if precedent is any sign, Eq-Life on Grand will be fine. When I asked Jennifer, a customer loading up on bath products at the Richfield store, why she had come in that day, she laughed and said, “My friend raves about this place. She’s a product whore!” There is undoubtedly an herbal remedy for that, too.

—Shannon Olson

Over the summer, as a new orchestra season neared, Minnesota Orchestra Artistic Director Osmo Vänskä started cropping up with more frequency and in interesting places. He fell out of the Sunday New York Times, for example. His smiling face was spotted on a friend’s bookshelf, atop a collectors’ edition bobble-arm, and, in one colorful portrait in a local advertising circular, on his Yamaha motorcycle. His name was pronounced during radio ads and underwriting spots. And when a new orchestra season finally fired up again, in mid-September, concerts bore such names as “Vänskä Opens the Season” and “Osmo at Harriet.”

But the most significant Osmo sighting happened at Orchestra Hall itself, where a massive, building-side photograph of the conductor has risen, printed full-color on weather-resistant vinyl, the same stuff used to bedeck city buses and trains in advertising. The image is “wrapped” around the exterior of the concert hall, alongside candid shots of players and audience members. But Vänskä is the centerpiece. Plastered above the box office and front entry, the sixty-five-foot maestro wields a ten-foot baton and gazes up at the sky with an exalted but slightly dopey smirk, as if he just bumped his head.

The project was inspired, supposedly, in New York City one day last February, when Orchestra president and CEO Tony Woodcock took a stroll through Central Park while Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s monumental public art installation, The Gates, was on display. But, according to marketing director Cindy Grzanowski, Orchestra Hall’s new veneer is not without practical aplomb. The intent, she said, was to “turn Orchestra Hall inside out.” To introduce the orchestra to “people who don’t ordinarily come to concerts.” Yes, that.

Vänskä, it seems, is a powerful new weapon in the old struggle for relevance. He is, after all, something of a people’s conductor. Grzanowski confirmed that he is eager, when compared to his predecessors, to front the orchestra’s more populist offerings; namely, its educational, free, and outdoor concerts. It helps that he also possesses the kind of work ethic Minnesotans find so endearing. In just two years with the orchestra, he has led a European tour and spearheaded a project to record all the Beethoven symphonies. Audiences admire his style on the podium, which is animated and solicitous, demanding but gracious. Some say the orchestra never sounded better. Grzanowski said that Vänskä, a modest guy, found the sight of his giant self “overwhelming.” But, she added, “He’s very understanding of our marketing efforts. He’s very supportive.”

Grzanowski declined to say what the exact cost of this campaign has been. But with two major corporate sponsors involved, Target and 3M, and a press release that compares the scale of the project with “wrapping twenty-five buses or an entire football field,” it’s on par with your average Christo budget line. The “wrap” will remain in place through the spring.

Out on Eleventh Avenue the other day, Vänskä dwarfed his target market—the hundreds of passersby who do not attend orchestra concerts. Among them were a nuclear family, a naval officer, two thirty-somethings who live in a nearby high-rise, and a loiterer who also inquired about the availability of spare change.

In all, people said they thought the motif improved upon things. “I put it as a bland building before. It’s got more character now, I guess,” said the officer.

One resident of Orchestra Hall’s downtown neighborhood, a regular on Eleventh Avenue, had been admiring the project as it progressed. She remarked, “I’ve been walking by every day. At first, only the conductor’s face was on there. I forget his name—?” She snapped her fingers. “I sort of liked that better.”

“I hadn’t noticed it. Who is he?” asked a pixie twenty-year-old, her eyes glacial as she scanned the facade.

“I don’t think he’s as visible as the last guy—what was his name?” said another bystander, who also lives within blocks of the concert hall. She squinted as she looked up at Vänskä’s mammoth head.—Christy DeSmith

Adulthood is overrated in many ways, and that’s especially so in Istanbul, according to this comedy set in an apartment building full of nosy folks. There’s the six-year-old who doesn’t want to get circumcised. There’s the teenager who doesn’t want to join the military. And then there’s the poor guy who’s exiting his twenties, but doesn’t want to move out of his parents’ home. And why would he? The grownup world is just so demanding, and oftentimes so stupid. Reha Erdem’s lighthearted look at three phases of manhood is part of the Walker’s “Global Lens” series of films from developing and under-filmed countries. 612-375-7622; www.walkerart.org

In his mid-fifties, New York financier William B. Post developed a new hobby, photographing comely young Edwardian women primping and simpering in sentimental poses. He would have remained a dilettante had he not gone outside for a little fresh air. Post’s country place in Maine set him in the midst of a wild beauty and changing terrain that inspired him to craft a new kind of landscape photography. In exquisitely processed scenes featuring graceful forest paths, unruly apple trees, and waters moving through frozen fields, Post documented what looks like a lost or mythical land (and a century later, it probably is lost). Post’s work was eventually championed by Alfred Stieglitz, proving that the gentleman hobbyist had become an artist, but it was all but forgotten in the years after his death. Now it’s once again on the radar; this gathering of fifty-nine silver prints is the largest exhibition of his photographs to date. 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org

It’s been ten years since this Nobel laureate last published a work of fiction, so the arrival of the English translation of Memories of My Melancholy Whores qualifies as a major event—even though, at just more than one hundred pages, it’s more novella than novel. Still, after a bit of journalism and the obligatory stab at a memoir, it’s nice to see the Colombian master of magical realism returning to his bread and butter. Memories is unquestionably the work of a man with mortality on his mind, but it should come as no surprise that Garcia Marquez’s elderly protagonist (he is approaching his ninetieth birthday) retains a lust for life. Lust, period, in fact. The lifelong bachelor, a bit incredibly, decides to observe this milestone in his senescence by procuring the services of a young virgin. That’s something of an unseemly proposition, but yet there’s something oddly moving about this story of a randy and philosophical codger determined to be done in not by old age, but by love.