Year: 2005

Penned by the pixie-punk ex-Minnesotan Lisa D’Amour, Nita & Zita re-imagines the story of immigrant sisters turned “international dancers.” Settling into the New Orleans French Quarter at the height of the Jazz Age, Nita and Zita dazzled audiences with their productions that mixed burlesque with contortionist acrobatics. They performed in lavishly ornate flapper-cum-freak show costumes that they hand-stitched and beaded themselves. D’Amour and company re-create the Nita and Zita spectacle with the help of an exceedingly flexible stable of dancers, ragtime and jazz musicians, and fantastic costumes inspired by the sisters’ actual designs. 1420 Washington Ave. S., 612-375-7622; www.walkerart.org

Colorado photographer Tom Quinn Kumpf is best known for documenting Ireland in black and white, as if the situation there were ever so simple. His poignant and sometimes funny book Children of Belfast captured the everyday concerns of children growing up in a very screwed-up world. This exhibit, “Dancing Down a Dream,” brings together diverse images created over the past thirty years, including subjects as beautiful and untroubling as a horse mooning over a stone wall. Kumpf is well acquainted with mist, and when a scene isn’t influenced by the weather, he brings his own playful sense of visual ambiguity to his work through odd and wonderful processing techniques. 1500 Jackson St.NE #443 (Northrup King Building), Minneapolis; 612-788-1790; www.iceboxminnesota.com

There are so many photographs in the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society that you will never get to see even a fraction of them. There simply isn’t enough time in anyone’s life, and most are tucked away in storage, waiting only for someone on a research mission about fishing lore, or disappeared buildings, or fashion moments in northern climes. Now the Society has culled a few choice images from that vast collection to display at the swell “new” ruins along the Mississippi. A few of them are quintessentially Minnesotan moments, locked forever in black-and-white. Other pictures are so funny and urbane you won’t believe they were taken here. 704 Second St. S., Minneapolis; 612-341-7555

Swiss artist Niklaus Troxler knows exactly what jazz music looks like. It’s unembraceably big, it doesn’t hold still for a second, and it’s as colorful as an untended wildflower garden. The MIA recently acquired twenty-five of Troxler’s jazz posters, created for European jazz festivals during the sixties. How this two-dimensional medium can capture so much sound and energy is a successful demonstration of the impact of Pop and Op Art. With subjects as varied as Thelonious Monk, Elvin Jones, and the Sam Rivers Quartet, and with a host of bold experiments with style, color, and type, no two posters are remotely similar; they all, however, are riffing on the same theme. 2400 Third Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org

No, we’re not talking about those hunting-porn prints where big-chested mallards flash their downy underparts as they ascend from a dewy cornfield. This is more thoughtful, eclectic stuff—bird art for people who’d rather point binoculars than shotguns at our avian friends. Culled from a respected annual show at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, it’s a vivid reminder of why artists have always loved the graceful lines, vibrant colors, and mythological import of birds. Sixty artists take the theme and fly with it in contemporary paintings, drawings, and sculptures, that, for casual viewers, will show a dignified side of the oft-belittled wildlife art genre. And for mourning-dove lovers and albatross aficionados, it’ll provide a fine wintertime diversion. 10 Church St. SE, Minneapolis; 612-624-7083

You thought ice fishing was harrowing. Grotesque, fascinating, hilarious, and apparently true: In Oklahoma, there are folks who obtain catfish by reaching deep into the muck of the river and yanking those bad boys out by the jaws. Let’s say that again: These Okies reach into a hole, under a rock, underwater, find themselves a big ol’ catfish, stick a bare hand into its gummy maw, and pull it flip-flopping to the surface. It’s called “noodling,” or handfishing, and itÕs as bloody a mess as any sport could be. Meet several brave noodlers in this documentary, which features an instrumental score by the Flaming Lips, another offbeat (to say the least) Okie institution. 17th St. and University Ave. SE, Minneapolis; 612-331-3134; www.mnfilmarts.org

The other day, my friend Carl sheepishly asked me a funny question while we were at the gym. I could tell he wanted a serious answer.

“What would you say if your wife told you she wanted a boob job?”

“Rachel wants to get a boob job?!” I almost yelled it. “What do you think I think? Duh!”

I was joking, but if I were to play the classic, dumb, buzz-cut bruiser at the gym, I’d say, “That’s like asking the pope how he feels about communion!” My actual answer was that Rachel looks great just as she is, but it’s certainly OK if she wants to do it.

For a guy who is not all that boob-obsessed, I’ve written quite a lot about boob jobs here. I’ll acknowledge that men sure do love breasts, big, small, perky, bodacious, ad infinitum. Women, of course, know this and act accordingly—even while they feign outrage and point their fingers and call us misogynists or chauvinists. To my testosterone-addled mind, it’s similar to the argument about makeup and sexy clothes: If you don’t wish to be “objectified,” why spend so much time making your body look its very best? This is a rhetorical question, ladies, so no need for angry letters. My point is just this: Be honest about enjoying your body. And if it’s what you really want, go ahead and modify it. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re being shallow or you’ve been brainwashed by a paternalistic, sexist society. It’s your body, you only get one. Life is an adventure, right?

Wrong. See, there’s a new plastic-surgery craze among a certain kind of woman: vaginoplasty. It’s designed to “perfect” your nether regions, from tightening perineal musles to reducing labia. Listen, girls: Your boys do not want you to do this.

I think Americans are so used to the idea of boob jobs that we don’t even think twice about them anymore, not in any serious ethical way. But when it comes to other, more radical bod-mod procedures, things get pretty weird pretty fast. I’ve always felt iffy about elective facial cosmetic surgery, especially if it’s a nose or chin job that suddenly turns you into another person. I guess I don’t have any serious ethical point to make, but on some weird level, your face is you. It’s the window of your soul, whereas your breasts are … well, the knockers on the door. (Oof. OK, you can send angry letters now. I deserve it.) And when it comes to vaginoplasty, I think this procedure, which must be almost wholly elective, points to some deep, serious (and somewhat bizarre) issues that women have about their genitals.

I’m not sure where these come from—in my view, this anxiety seems a lot more visceral and personal than any kind of cultural conditioning could ever account for. Women seem innately to feel that there is something essentially unfeminine about their most feminine parts, something unpleasant and messy and ugly.

This is no great insight, of course—other than the part about maybe not blaming men for this uneasiness. (And, in the interest of equality, I would like to add that lots of men I know, especially thirty- and forty-something liberals, have had the same feeling about their own parts, and it’s why we can be surprisingly meek, almost apologetic, under the covers.) Of all of my gen-x and boomer-aged friends, this is a universal truth: We enjoy giving oral sex to our women more than our women enjoy giving oral sex to us. This is probably just more evidence of the fallout from growing up with feminism (more men learning to enjoy giving and more women not feeling obligated to give), but that’s not my point.

My point is: Shaving! Experts say this rise in interest in vaginoplasty, particularly among more aesthetically motivated folks who are way too worried about how things look down there, reflects a broader new level of anxiety with our bodies. Women are growing comfortable enough to leave the lights on, pull out hand mirrors, and allow their husbands unlimited walk-abouts down under. They are watching and enjoying pornography, and they are emulating other women who seem to be thrilled with their Brazilian wax jobs and so on. But it seems that one person’s comfort is another’s anxiety. If you like what you’ve got, you should show it off. And if you don’t—why?

It was still early in the game, but Mary Atwood was feeling confident. She had just stacked “NOVA” atop “VOX” to take a 177 to 62 lead over Jim Kramer, and the triple word was blocked. But Jim’s fortunes shifted when he ran “POETIZER” down the center of the board for 54 points. He then outflanked Mary’s “BRO” and “TENTER” with “IMAGE” and “QUIDS.” The match was now tied. While Kramer made his comeback, Lisa Odom watched her chances of victory disappear as her husband, Steve Pellinen, dropped “BLEARED” to complete a 225-point trifecta with “FIDDLERS” and “ERECTING.”

One Tuesday night not long ago, thirty-two members of the Twin Cities Scrabble Club were hunched over their racks in the cramped, wood-paneled basement of the Twin Cities Bridge Center in South Minneapolis. Mostly, there was silence, but for the sporadic rattling of tiles and announcing of scores. This is a scene repeated nightly all across the nation, in libraries, community centers, and coffee shops. But few of the two hundred and fifty-odd groups that are affiliated with the National Scrabble Association are as dedicated or talented as Club 42. John Williams, the NSA’s executive director, calls the Twin Cities “one of the world’s great Scrabble towns.”

Williams and the NSA sponsor two hundred official tournaments a year in the U.S. and Canada. They estimate that there are twenty-five thousand competitive players worldwide. Last year’s Scrabble All-Stars Championship in Providence, Rhode Island, had a $100,000 purse and was televised on ESPN. Even Hollywood has noticed; two feature films about the tournament scene are in the works.

As the din of postgame socializing began to fill the room, Kramer dropped “TYPED” to seal a hard-fought 365–331 victory. It was an impressive comeback, but he’d been the heavy pregame favorite. Atwood has a respectable tournament rating of 1417, but Kramer’s rating is 2012—the highest in North America. And Lisa Odom, who ended up getting whupped 472-395, is no slouch on the national scene, either. For most of the last decade she has been a regular fixture on the continent’s top-ten list, as well as being both the highest ranked woman and the highest ranked African-American.

Unlikely as it may seem, both of these nationally ranked players regularly lose on club nights. The random nature of the game accounts for some of this—even players who have memorized all 120,000 words in the Official Tournament and Club Word List (this includes everything from the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary sold in stores, plus the naughty words) are still at the mercy of the tiles. Mostly, though, it speaks to the quality of the competition. Despite stereotypes, the room has few of the “blue hairs” that Stephan Fatsis mocks in Word Freak, his best-selling book about the competitive Scrabble scene. Club members, in fact, are as diverse as their vocabularies. Rob Robinsky is an eighteen-year-old chemistry major at Macalester. (He landed “CTENOID” during his game.) Angelina Scroggins is a forty-nine-year-old data specialist originally from the Philippines (“CHRUMB”). Patrick Suglia is a forty-one-year-old chiropractor and holistic counselor (“EPINAOS”). Ebrahima Sallah is a twenty-seven-year-old phone repair tech born in Gambia (“YONI”). Sue Hoehn is a sixty-year-old travel agent (“KAIF”).

Word knowledge is not word comprehension, necessarily. “I don’t know what it means,” Hoehn admitted regarding ‘kaif,’ “but I’ve been studying my four-letter words.” (It’s “hemp smoked to produce euphoria.”) In fact, only Scroggins knew the origin of her thirty-point play—and that’s because she made it up. Playing a phony might start a family feud during a living room game, but in the tournament and club scene, bluffing is a respected, though risky, strategy. If your opponent correctly calls your bluff, the word comes off the board and you lose your turn. If your opponent challenges and the word proves valid, the humbled opponent loses a turn.

One of the great things about Scrabble—and no doubt a major reason why Hasbro sells two million units a year in the U.S., with virtually no marketing—is that you don’t have to memorize all twenty-one words that contain a Q but not a U in order to garner some intellectual cache from a game well played. A few championship-caliber Scrabblers do trade tiles in search of glory, but most play for the same reason Odom does. “It’s just a fun game,” she said. “But I do want to win.”—Tim Bewer

The house stands on a barren corner lot, across from a vacant, industrial patch of Northeast Minneapolis. Nearby, the tracks of the Burlington Northern cut a swath to the Mississippi. And in the other direction, just around the corner, there is a busy grocery and liquor mart called Sentyrz, which one neighbor calls “the store of hard white people.” For its location in a dense, urban neighborhood, the smallish stucco house looks oddly isolated and vulnerable, on the way to all kinds of potentially terrible places.

Since April 15, 2003, the house has been empty. That’s when a young man named Jonathan Carpenter broke in through the back door window and murdered its occupants—an eighty-eight-year-old man and his fifty-year-old disabled daughter. Carpenter, who said he’d been up for twenty days straight snorting crystal meth, was in search of easy money. His father lived in the area, so it’s possible that he knew there was jewelry inside the house and thousands of dollars hidden in a filing cabinet. Or maybe he just happened to be passing by.

While the man and his daughter lay bleeding on the living room floor, their throats slit, Carpenter swept through the house gathering valuables. Then he summoned his accomplice, a man named Christopher Earl, who helped complete the robbery. With the money, the two bought a Ford Crown Victoria. Then they went on to kill another family, in Long Prairie, and got caught. Carpenter hanged himself in his cell. Earl went to prison.

Now, with the human drama largely concluded, what is left behind, the remnant of that awful night, is the house. The place where it happened. Sometimes, if a crime is bad enough, the home can’t overcome tragic events and is demolished—as was Jeffrey Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment building. In other cases, such as the 1997 Heaven’s Gate mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California, the street name is changed. Anything to give the illusion of a fresh start, to make people forget or at least allow them to feel a little distance.

Inside the lonely house in Northeast, the hardwood floors and linoleum and countertops have been replaced. The walls are freshly painted surgical white. Upstairs, there is new, plush carpeting. But the place still feels creepy. And I feel ghoulish for wanting to see it. (The Century 21 agent in charge of showings, who asked not to be identified or quoted, watches me with muted disgust.) I can’t help but imagine the brutal murder. I picture the murderers themselves, rummaging through drawers in the dark. As humans, we want to believe that the universe smiles down on us. At the very least, we don’t want to contemplate death. Yet there are echoes inside the house—or inside my head—whispering, this is where Carpenter put his arm through the window, this is where he dragged the old man from his recliner.

In Minnesota, real estate agents are required to disclose “physical conditions … that could adversely and significantly affect an ordinary buyer’s use or enjoyment of the property.” And the house, thus far, hasn’t sold. It’s been on the market since July in a neighborhood that’s considered hot in real estate circles, though not as hot as it was a year ago. Even the “price reduced” sign out front hasn’t drawn a buyer.

“Houses don’t have memories,” promised George Lutz to his wife in the film The Amityville Horror. And then his eyes turned red and the house itself—in a hoarse, angry voice—started yelling at priests to “GET OUT!” Houses do have memories. Or, certainly, we concoct memories for them. Even rational people will admit that some places feel good and some places feel bad. Homes are psychologically momentous. They protect us and keep us warm, exoskeletons made of brick and wood. When we lock the front door at night, it’s as much a symbolic as a practical gesture. I’m inside now, inside my world. So, when a house fails us or, in the worst case, becomes a vessel for burning evil, the best recourse is to move out, calmed by the knowledge that the house can’t pick up its foundation like a skirt and chase after us.

There is a little-known science to valuing these tainted houses, to calculating the cost of a breach in psychic comfort. Randall Bell, who calls himself a “real estate damage economist,” is known nationally as the “Master of Disaster.” Based in Laguna Beach, California, he measures in real dollars the intangible impact of violent tragedy. He was involved in selling the JonBenet Ramsey house, the Heaven’s Gate mansion, and Nicole Brown Simpson’s Brentwood condo, which languished on the market for more than two years before selling cheap. According to Bell, who says he got into the business to battle “junk science,” properties are rated on a salability scale of one to ten, ten being hopeless. Hopeless properties include the bombed-out Oklahoma City federal building and the San Ysidro McDonald’s where a gunman killed twenty-one people in 1984.

Depending on where the property falls on the “Bell Chart,” the stigma of a crime can linger for up to ten years. Owners who sell too soon, warns Bell, can expect to lose between ten and twenty-five percent of current market value. “Generally speaking,” he says, “you are not going to see any market activity for two to three years. It could sell, but at the biggest discount. If you wait, things will gradually get better.”

Bell is a font of practical advice. He recommends taking a renter for a while before putting a murder house on the market. “It’s more difficult to sell a house like this when it’s vacant,” he says. “There is a better sense of comfort when they are occupied, instead of that eerie empty feeling.” Bell handled the home where Charles Manson’s followers killed Sharon Tate in 1969. “Sharon Tate was a renter,” he says. “The owner moved back in and lived there for years. It was a smart move because he sold it for full value in 1990.”

For impatient, motivated sellers, there are two options. One is to renovate. Besides working to make the inside “spotless,” Bell recommends changing the home’s façade, so it doesn’t look the same as it did on the six o’clock news. That may mean painting the garage, planting trees, or maybe cutting trees down. At his suggestion, for example, before the Brown Simpson condo was listed, the landscaping out front was radically altered and a new retaining wall was built. “I’ve seen tourists take pictures of the house next door,” he says with pride.

The other strategy is to cut the price to the point of irresistibility. It’s an equation that sets practicality against superstition. In November, the price for the Northeast house dropped more than ten thousand dollars, from $235,000 to $224,900. But that still may be too high. Fair market value doesn’t mean much when it comes to houses like this one, because the others in the neighborhood haven’t been similarly “stigmatized.” In the end, even the grand Amityville Horror estate had to hit the astonishingly low price of $80,000—a quarter of its estimated value—before the Lutz family pushed aside their fears and moved in.
—Jennifer Vogel