Month: October 2005

These designs are intended more for the mind than the body. Take Geum’s “web dress,” an ephemeral creation that weaves wire and air to represent the worldwide web, the hold technology has on our lives, and the rise of an interwoven global culture that is blurring the distinctions between countries. The Korean designer works in cloth, as well, and has swathed actual bodies in it for major theater productions, but her “body works” remind us that all clothing is really just a distraction, or a place to hide. Incorporating wire, silk, beads, stones, and feathers, the elegant gowns and coats in this exhibit aren’t exactly wearable, but then, we think the same thing of the saggy-butt jeans and Ts with rude messages (“Shut the F’ Up”) that we see on the street around here. 1985 Buford Ave., St. Paul; 612-624-7434; goldstein.che.umn.edu

The Foreign Service Exam, that portal into the exciting world of international diplomacy, is given once a year, in the spring, on the same day in thousands of locations across the country. Results of the test arrive in the mailboxes of test-takers in the fall. For some, these are not pretty.

There are four parts: multiple-choice General Knowledge, short-answer Biographical Information, an essay on a Controversial Topic, and an English Usage section. All sound benign and easy. Which is part of the plan.

Nationally, about ten thousand people take the exam. After the exam and a rigorous oral assessment, 150 to 200 people are actually chosen to be foreign service officers. The average age of an incoming foreign service officer is 28.5 years; seventy-five percent have a master’s degree. An entry-level officer can expect to earn between $29,000 and $49,000 per year—or about as much as a full-time bagger at Kowalski’s.

The exam lasts six hours, with twenty minutes reserved for lunch/self-doubt, though the emotional scarring can require up to six months of cocktail therapy. Allowed items include: two number-two pencils, a black ink pen, and a photo ID. Restricted items include: calculators, reference guides of any sort, artillery, egg salad sandwiches, and dignity. Because I compulsively put myself in awkward places, I chose to take the exam. Locally, it was administered in a lecture hall on the East Bank of the University of Minnesota, which contained 116 other candidates. Seats at the tiered tables were spaced to discourage viewing your neighbor’s answer sheet, and numbered. I was at number forty-nine, which was in the back row of the room, allowing me to observe everyone else feverishly filling up their answer sheet with general knowledge and international smarts.

Needless to say, I went down in flames. My failure of this exam set a new standard for lack of mastery, and I felt pretty bad about it. It’s true, I did not purchase the study guide. I don’t like people who buy study guides, so naturally I could not toss out my code of ethics in an instance of this importance. Instead I relied on my decades-long history of involvement in life and good standing with the public library to get me through.

General Knowledge implies the sort of pragmatic stuff that keeps a person from needing a bib—black is slimming, don’t ask if she’s had the baby yet, bloodstains come out with cold water, and blotting, blotting, blotting. I saw Hotel Rwanda.

I was shaken when it became clear I had no general knowledge. But honestly, in service in Libya, how relevant will it be to know whether it requires a two-thirds majority of the Senate or a simple majority of the House to fill the vice president’s position should he or she die in office? Anyone with more than a thimbleful of brain cells would see this section as hazing, the U.S. government way. The insidious, condescending tenor and creepy colonial overtones were carried doggedly through more than one hundred questions. At first I was troubled by being so knowledge-free, but this gave way to a ghastly parting of the veil: If this is what passes for knowledge, it’s no wonder “Death to Americans” is the national anthem of so many nations.

I was a bit fragile at the outset of Biographical Information, but how hard could it be? There were no wrong answers, but I never imagined there would be so many wrong questions. Example: “How many times in the past year have you volunteered for an unpleasant task such as cleaning up after an office party? Please describe the occasions and your tasks in the following two-inch by two-inch space.” Choices ranged from “never” to “four or more times.” Of course, “never” comes closest to the truth (if it’s truly unpleasant, I.T. does it), but how shirksome does that sound? Also, it’s general knowledge that anyone in the Foreign Service who volunteers for more than four unpleasant tasks per year is gathering more than used cups—and selling it to North Korea. First, the question practically demands a lie, and then asks you to document the perjury in detail. On and on, the same questions with minute variations. How many times in the past five years? How many times outside of work? How many times with a goat, on a train … These festering wounds were interspersed with “Did you do it?”

My will to live drained out through the number-two pencil. By the time I got to the one question I could ace—“List the names of books you’ve read in the past year dealing with other cultures”—I could not name the book I’d put down only hours earlier. In fact, I couldn’t remember any title. I searched the barren smoking plains of my mind and found zero entries under the concept “book.” And I didn’t care.

Effectively lobotomized halfway through, I was glad I’d gridded my name by darkening the appropriate ovals before the procedure. Assuming all of our foreign service officers have passed this exam, as well as the oral assessment and a spanking machine, it’s perfectly understandable that you will rot in Turkish prison over a traffic ticket.

In recent years, young women have begun to reclaim labor-intensive, old-fashioned “women’s work” like knitting and quilting, which their grandmothers perfected and their mothers likely shunned. Some of these women, such as Jessica Rankin, a thirty-four-year-old trained as a painter, aren’t just reclaiming these crafts; they’re elevating them to high-art status.

A few years ago, Rankin gave up oils on canvas for embroidery on organdy—the translucent, almost extinct cotton fabric that harks back to Victorian ladies’ summer fashions. She sews together rectangular panels in various shades—crisp white, midnight blue, the palest gray or green, an earthy brown—creating frameless pieces that hang a few inches from the wall; the seams and embroidery cast faint shadows that become a second layer of the work.

The six pieces currently on view at Franklin ArtWorks in Minneapolis (through November 19) range in size from about ten to almost fifty square feet. It’s a heroic scale that contrasts with the delicacy of the organdy, as well as the forms and words that are rendered upon it with careful, patient, deliberate marks—fly stitches, running stitches, French knots—made of shimmering thread.

For Rankin, care and deliberation don’t equal cogency. In fact, her work doesn’t attempt to make any traditional kind of sense. There are mountains and clouds, comets and constellations, and forms that recall topographical maps—all suggestive of exploration, both terrestrial and celestial. Arabesques evoke great swirls of time and distance, and other elements recall symbols used in the Aboriginal dream paintings from Rankin’s native Australia: Swoops or curves can refer to clouds, cliffs, or rainbows; circles interspersed with short lines might indicate rain.

Nor does the text woven into and around these forms serve its usual rational role; stitching the letters so that they all run together, Rankin pushes language back into the elusive realm of thought, even dreams. In Coda, where sinuous lines of brown thread suggest a mountainside, one string reads: TIMESTUTTERSDASHINGFROMMOMENTTOMOMENTTHEN SUDDENLYAMOMENTOFNOTLUCIDITYBUTARETURNTOTHROW

AWAYTONORMAL. Words and phrases might also overlap, or break off capriciously without necessarily picking up somewhere else, refusing to deliver a concrete message. These words are present as pointers, as symbols in themselves.

However, THISFINEMESHOFMEMORIESANDPRESENCE, another fragment from Coda, actually does provide a relatively clear explanation of what Rankin is creating, with a focus on process that manifests as a beautifully crafted product. Stitched together as meandering mental maps of life experiences—past, present, possible futures—these works sway intriguingly between intimacy and infinity.—Julie Caniglia

Sometime this winter, once the tourist season winds down, the owners of Morell’s Chippewa Trading Post in Bemidji will remove a giant taxidermied wolf from the glass case out front, say a few solemn words, and send it off to be destroyed. It’s likely the end will come by fire, though the store’s assistant manager, Julie Petersen, doesn’t know for sure and, frankly, doesn’t even seem to want to think about it. You see, this animal—which has been on display in one location or another for more than sixty years—wasn’t just any ordinary wolf. The dusty, cracking pelt with the broken leg and refashioned nose is all that remains of Lobo, perhaps the most notorious and bloodthirsty creature ever to cast its dark shadow over the northwoods.

Legend has it that in the winter of 1926, hunters in and around Itasca State Park began noticing wolf tracks larger than any they’d previously encountered. Alarmingly, they also noticed that wherever this wolf traveled, he left a gruesome and bloody trail. Locals took to calling the predator Lobo, which means wolf in Spanish and also sounded pretty bad-ass to hunters back then.

The wolf seemed to possess an insatiable hunger; it was estimated that he killed a deer every three days. He also apparently never returned for a second feeding, preferring fresh meat to that which had been sitting around. The average pack of wolves, according to Andrea Lorek Strauss, information and education director at the International Wolf Center in Ely, kills approximately eighteen deer in an entire year. Clearly, it was determined, Lobo had to be stopped or there would be no deer left for hunters to shoot. The authorities called in professional game wardens, with all their expertise and experience, to find and kill the marauding wolf.

Ah, but it would not be so easy! Lobo, people said, was crafty, seldom traveled on trails, and hunted exclusively at night. It was almost as though he knew where the traps were and tiptoed around them. Also, it’s alleged that Lobo never had a mate, more evidence of, and possibly even a contributor to, his ornery disposition. For years, the wardens tried to catch Lobo, but finally conceded defeat. A reward was eventually put on the wolf’s head, and every fool with a gun, a snare, or a bottle of poison could be found skulking around in the woods at all hours. One of these entrepreneurs was Algot Wicken, who was clearly no fool. Wicken closely studied Lobo’s tracks for weeks and discovered that he favored a particular clump of spruce trees. Wicken set a snare between two of the trees and Lobo walked right into it.

Yet still, the mighty wolf was not to be stopped. Lobo broke free and roamed the forest for two more years with a snare around his neck, barely able to swallow and surviving solely on blood and soft tissue.

In 1938, Wicken finally caught Lobo in a steel trap. He approached the wolf, shot him dead, and that was that. People came from all over the area to view the vanquished Lobo, who was said to weigh 140 pounds, an unheard of size for a wolf in Minnesota. In fact, Lorek Strauss sounded rather doubtful about the figure. “My God,” she said, and pointed out that the largest wolf ever documented in the state weighed 112 pounds, while the average wolf weighs closer to ninety. She did allow that perhaps Lobo had been killed in the winter, when his fur was at its thickest, making him look as though he weighed 140 pounds. But then, of course, she wasn’t around in 1938.

Gid Graham wrote of Lobo in his 1939 book, Animal Outlaws. He explained what hunters of the era could not, or chose not to, understand. “The career of this renowned animal hero cannot be measured alone by man’s standard and viewpoint,” Graham wrote. “Man condemned him because he killed deer and wild creatures. According to the standard of the wolf, he did no wrong.” Lorek Strauss agrees with that assessment. And so does Julie Petersen. “The poor thing,” Petersen said. “He was so misunderstood. He did what he had to do to survive. We have little tear sessions for him every once in a while.” That’s why, after Lobo’s pelt is destroyed, a new one will take its place, so his legend might live on and future generations will have the honor of admiring him (or at least his understudy).

Roxi Mann, Julie Petersen’s sister, who recently bought Morell’s from their parents, had to send all the way to Alaska for a wolf pelt large enough to do justice to the original. Lobo’s skull will be set inside the case with the new Lobo, in dedication. And this time, the taxidermied wolf will be kept inside the store, safe from the cold, the sun, and those mice and bats, which Petersen said manage to “sneak in” to the outdoor case. Sounding a bit morose, she added, “This is very sentimental for us. The first summer I worked here, I painted his cage, so we became good friends. I call him ‘Bobo’ sometimes. It’s sad to see him go.”

—Jennifer Vogel

Even within the obscure subcult of fire truck restoration buffs, Jeffrey Schadt is a bit unusual. Most of these gentlemen are ex-firemen or have always wanted to be one, and most own just one truck, which gets polished and brought out for special occasions but will never be returned to service.

Schadt (pronounced “Shade”) is a dealer, primarily of working trucks. At any given time he is likely to have two or three in various stages of restoration and in the pipeline to the sale block, all stored in an oversized garage that he had built next to his house in Maplewood. There is a thin but consistent market for these machines, he explained the other day. New ladder trucks can cost more than a million dollars. He typically sells his refurbished models for prices ranging from ten thousand dollars to one hundred thousand dollars.

Schadt is unusual as well in that he is an active on-call fireman for the city of Maplewood, and for many years he was the department’s chief engineer in charge of equipment. (His day job is as a health and safety official at 3M.)

Normally, St. Paul electoral politics are not one of Schadt’s major interests, but thanks to his interest in fire trucks, lately he has found himself in the middle of them. St. Paul firefighters, many of whom he knows personally, have not been happy with St. Paul Mayor Randy Kelly. On weekends they’ve been making the rounds on a 100-foot ladder truck—air horn, loudspeaker, and all—campaigning for his DFL opponent, Chris Coleman.

“People love it,” according to Pat Flanagan, president of Local 21, the St. Paul firefighters union. “They look shocked, then they smile. We get honking and thumbs-up from all kinds of people.”

When the firefighters started their Coleman runs, local, right-wing bloggers briefly seemed to be going into full-swarm mode. It looked like a case of city employees commandeering municipal property for a partisan campaign against one of their own. But the attack petered out when the union posted a notably civil response on one of the blogs, explaining that the truck was leased “from a fire buff that is a friend of St. Paul firefighters.”

That would be Schadt. But he has no plans to sell this truck, a 1975 Seagrave, which has quite a story behind it.

For Schadt, it began in the winter of 2003, shortly after he had sold a ladder truck to a fire department in Bernice, Louisiana. At that point he was down to two vehicles and was again in acquisition mode. Thumbing through a magazine, his eye lit on a used ladder truck that had come in on trade to an American LaFrance dealership in Landisville, Pennsylvania. He called for details, then asked to be sent a video. “‘Hit all the bad spots,’ I told them, ‘so I can see what I’m getting myself into.’”

“I watched that thing a bunch of times,” he said. “Too many times.”

He flew out to Pennsylvania for a final look, closed the deal, and had the truck shipped back on a flatbed. It sat for a few weeks, until March, when he started getting “a little antsy” and began tinkering. Among the things he discovered was an identifying tag that told him the truck had come from a town called Fairview, New Jersey. He decided to give the department there a call, mainly to see if they had any of the operator or service manuals. “When I sold the truck I wanted to have, you know, kind of a complete thing,” he said. “That’s when they told me it was used at Ground Zero.”

Fairview, it turns out, is only a few miles as the crow flies from lower Manhattan. With virtually the entire Manhattan equipment fleet destroyed after the towers’ collapse, Fairview firefighters were among the first non-New York crews on the scene, Schadt explained. His ’75 Seagrave was at Ground Zero for forty-two days, they told him—in “rescue-recovery” for a few days, then just recovery.

When he discovered what he had, Schadt sold a pumper for cash and went to work on a total restoration. Now the truck is pretty much cherried-out and he rents it as a package, along with Benson, his Dalmatian, and himself, as driver.

“I just had a wedding last Friday,” he said. “A St. Cloud fireman got married and he hired me for the limo.”

But he considers the St. Paul deal more than just a gig. “If I didn’t support the candidate, I wouldn’t be doing it,” he said.—David Rubenstein

One of the things we try to be vigilant about is a sort of inflexible all-or-nothingism. We recognize it as a minor character flaw, and lately we’ve been working on it. It’s not that the dough of our idealism has lost its leavening. It’s just been punched down by a bit of realism. Nowhere has this been a harder biscuit to swallow than in the area of the environment. We frequently argue that the minimum acceptable level in our lakes of, say, mercury, E.coli, or cigarette butts is zero. But no one seems to take us seriously. Thus, we now pledge to meet everyone halfway.

***

Progress comes in fits and starts, if it comes at all. So we’ve been rededicating ourselves to counting our blessings. While we’d love to see a car that gets a hundred miles to the gallon, or, for that matter, one that runs on orange-juice concentrate, we can be happy with one that gets fifty miles on a gallon of the standard stuff. Also, a hybrid vehicle, like the one our mayor and our publisher each drive, should not make people giggle, or natter about empty gestures. Sure, that old Ford Fiesta, running on nothing but regular unleaded, got the same mileage. But it doesn’t represent a dramatic future, and it’s lousy at impressing the ladies.

***

The other day, Governor Pawlenty got our attention. It had been months, possibly years, since he’d said anything we hadn’t already heard from more powerful and charismatic Republicans. The governor made an unusually progressive and heartfelt speech on behalf of alcohol—specifically, the controversial fuel additive ethanol. He promised to get for himself (at government expense, of course) an automobile that runs on E-85, a fuel mixture that is eighty-five percent alcohol derived from corn—a sort of industrial, forty-five proof bourbon. Shortly after these announcements, the governor started cussing in public. This was impressive; frankly, we may need to take new bearings before the next election. The rationalist naysayer has developed many complaints against the use of ethanol: It is a subsidy to farmers, who are already drunk at the teat of public largesse; the production of ethanol consumes great quantities of energy, which seems rather like pouring water out of one boot into the other; it also excites worries about engine trouble. But the naysayer is wrong. So far, ethanol additives show no harm to automobiles other than a tiny reduction in mileage; it is odd that subsidies to farmers always get a certain type of person exercised, but never the numerous subsidies given to the oil, coal, and natural gas industries for exploration and extraction; and most important, ethanol production today adds up to a net energy gain, which is to say that you have more energy at the outcome than at the outset. Since ethanol can be produced just as easily with domestic coal or natural gas, it could mean a measurable reduction in our reliance on foreign oil and the medieval governments that provide it to us.

***

Ethanol can be made from almost any vegetable matter, even municipal waste. In the U.S., the corn-producing states like Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa create eighty percent of domestic ethanol. Elsewhere on the planet, sugar cane and sugar beets are used. Fuel-grade ethanol is produced the same way as any other liquor, and is actually drinkable, sweet in dilution but caustic at higher concentrations. (The intoxicating element in beer, wine, and whiskey is ethanol, too.) Environmentalists have raised legitimate objections about the petrochemical farming used to produce large quantities of ethanol vegetables, and nutritionists worry about the surplus of corn syrup. But only the callous would argue that it would be better to do nothing, to let the marketplace sort it out in the sudden panic of global warming, terror, and energy crisis. That’s no way to act.

***

This is one area where leaders are supposed to lead, not follow. A progressive state like Minnesota, which also has a tremendous wind-power charter, stands on the brink of becoming an energy exporter—that is, producing more energy than we use. On this issue, we have to admire Governor Pawlenty. His commitment to an E-85 car should be appreciated as an important symbolic gesture. The fact that his vehicle will be a behemoth Suburban—along with the Hummer, an icon of suburban solipsism—does not cancel the gesture. We’ll still award him a gold star of merit.

***

In this, Mr. Pawlenty is merely ensuring continuity of government. Minnesota has been working toward energy independence for decades. It was the first state to require all fuel to contain ten percent ethanol, and the governor is busy lobbying other states to do the same. This is the correct role of government: mandating enlightenment, in cases where market self-interest runs up against the public interest. Quibbling about profit margins and nanny-state legislation can be dumped on the doorstep of supply and demand. If you require the entire fuel supply to meet a certain standard, then it obsoletes the demand for anything else—just the way leaded gas was phased out three decades ago. This is how necessary progress is subsidized.

***

In the short term, we can expect a cold winter. We’ve already pulled out extra wool and goose down to take the edge off the high cost of natural gas. Even the price of cordwood is going up, which proves that we’re not the only ones in a panic. But we feel reassured that there a few politicians who are willing to tiptoe across party lines to embrace the idea that the moon shot of our time must be the serious development of renewable energy resources and technologies. (Wouldn’t it have been interesting if the current administration in Washington had spent two hundred billion dollars on hydrogen cells, wind power, and biodiesel initiatives as the best way to fight terrorism? We heard someone say renewable energy is homeland security. Yes.) These are cold, sobering times—but we’re gratified that Minnesota cars are running on a shot or two of bourbon.

***

Before ethylene glycol coolants, the parched man whose car stalled in the desert could, in a personal emergency, uncap the radiator and find succor there. Just so, the nation in energy crisis could find a taste of its future in Minnesota’s gas tank.

It’s a happy coincidence that Theatre Unbound’s all-female version of The Tempest opens on the heels of the all-male “original practices” production of Measure for Measure by Shakespeare’s Globe Theater company, which is a guest of the Guthrie for this presentation. We’re waiting on the edges of our seats to see what these talented actresses do with Caliban, the deformed, bestial slave boy. The Tempest is a fantastical, supra-human play, richly layered with spirits, magic, young love, and, of course, spellbinding prose. 2301 E. Franklin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-721-1186; www.theatreunbound.com

Here’s a marriage made in heaven: The very imaginative yet relentlessly unpretentious Frank Theatre company produces a new farce by Sam Shepard. Written on the eve of the 2004 election, the play has been described by Shepard as “a takeoff on Republican fascism.” This story interrupts the quiet lives of two Wisconsin dairy farmers, holdouts in a land swept by agribusiness, who start getting hounded by government operatives and the patriotism police. We can’t think of anyone better than Frank to satirize overzealous flag-wavers and Wisconsin’s barely blue countryside. 1633 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-724 3760; www.franktheatre.org

Apparently, every Icelander who isn’t a musician is a filmmaker or actor, judging by this mini-festival of Icelandic films. Iceland’s filmmaking culture is still young (this year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the “spring of Icelandic filmmaking”), and its younger filmmakers are less interested in traditional storytelling, and more interested in work that reflects their increasingly urban and decreasingly isolated world. Oak Street presents several short works, as well as Dark Horse, Dagur Kari Petursson’s film about a slacker graffiti artist who tries to transform himself into a responsible adult when he falls in love. 612-331-3134; www.mnfilmarts.org/oakstreet