Year: 2005

Up to the 1960s, the apron served as a potent symbol of American womanhood. These lovingly adorned little swatches of cloth represented comfort and security and perfectly browned pot roasts. Then the women’s
movement came along and the frills fell away. Since then, aprons have mostly been utilitarian and unisex, of the
“Kiss the Cook” variety. That’s what makes this collection
of oldies so impressive and so fascinating. Pulled together by Dorothy Sauber, a women’s studies professor at
Anoka-Ramsey Community College, it includes more
than one hundred specimens, on display at the
Hennepin History Museum through December 31.

Libby Larsen has an athleticism and youthfulness that’s unusual for her fifty-four years. Her tiny, five-foot frame is lithe and wiry like a marathon runner’s. And she talks as fast as it looks like she can run. From the moment she walked into the D’Amico & Sons café near her South Minneapolis home, she was holding forth passionately on such varied topics as the restaurant’s dessert display, the addition to the Walker Art Center, and the broken institution of classical music criticism. (“He’s okay,” was the best compliment she could offer on Alex Ross, the esteemed critic for The New Yorker.) Sometimes, Larsen can’t keep up with her thoughts, and will interrupt herself to explore a new,

parenthetical notion. As she does so, she gestures dramatically—waving her thin arms or cutting her long fingers through the air, her straight brown hair spilling over her sharp collarbone and shoulders. The Current, the station Minnesota Public Radio launched last spring, also came up in polite conversation, along with Radiohead and Björk. But what Larsen went on about with the most enthusiasm was jazz and orchestral music, her two favorite genres, and how she’s been trying to marry these in some compositions she’s been writing in the past few years.

Just as Brahms drew on contemporary gypsy melodies and Verdi was inspired by Neapolitan folk music, Larsen’s compositions borrow from jazz, gospel, and pop—not unlike the work of Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. And if critics so far haven’t elevated her to the status of those two, that’s not for a lack of work to assess. Having produced more than two hundred pieces in all, including sixteen operas and fifty recordings, Larsen is one of the most prolific and often-performed living American composers. She’s awfully busy. Why? “I’m trying so hard to communicate what it’s like to be alive—right now,” she explained.

As someone born in the United States in 1950—sixty-two years after the invention of the gramophone, and in the middle of a century during which the U.S. utterly transformed both music and the ways we listen to it—what she’s talking about is plugging in. “My ears have been trained on music that’s been mixed, recorded, and played through speakers,” she explained. “I love the concert hall. I love live music. But I also love the produced sonic experience where there’s compression and bass boosting.”

Larsen has long been interested in combining acoustic, classical instruments—even operatic voice—with prerecorded, studio-produced sound. In 1991, for example, she wrote Schoenberg, Schenker, and Schillinger, a synthesizer-meets-symphony honoring Mozart. For the most part, she wrote straightforward acoustic music for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s set ensemble. One section, though, consisting entirely of prerecorded sounds, was to be played on a sampler. Unfortunately, the orchestra’s pianist had never touched such an instrument. Just before the concert, she approached Larsen backstage. “She said to me, ‘I was out there testing and the sampler doesn’t work.’” Larsen tried to go have a look, but was prevented from doing so by a union stagehand—only union members were allowed onstage at that highly regulated moment between songs. The stagehand investigated and reported back with the same grim news: The sampler was not functioning.

“To make a long story short, they played the piece without the sampler,” said Larsen, rolling her eyes. “The problem was that the power was off. It didn’t occur to the pianist or the stagehand to turn the power on,” she said solemnly. Suddenly, she threw back her head and laughed. “It was hilarious and wonderful,” she said between chuckles.

Larsen’s music, like her personality, is highly likeable—both friendly and visceral. “She’s just so irresistible as a person. You want to engage with her,” said Robert Neu, general manager of the Minnesota Orchestra and an admirer of Larsen’s who has commissioned her music. A range of other heavy hitters from classical music world have commissioned her work, from the Minnesota Opera and the esteemed British men’s choir the King’s Singers to pretty much every major American symphony. A number of works, such as Parachute Dancing and Water Music, pieces for full orchestras, went on to become near-standard in the American orchestral repertoire.

Even so, many devotees of modern classical music can’t identify her music by ear—perhaps because it doesn’t challenge the ear, per se. Larsen’s work seems unconcerned with twelve-tone composing, for example, a contemporary technique made famous by the twentieth-century composer Arnold Schoenberg (which, according to Neu, “has never resonated with the audience and never will”). Nor is Larsen a minimalist along the lines of Philip Glass and John Adams. It “sounds like music to the average listener,” said Sam Bergman, a Minnesota Orchestra violist and an editor for

ArtsJournal.com. But it does have a certain playful ring. Sometimes, the sounds feel improvised. In one of her art songs, for example, an operatic soprano suddenly compromises her pitch to dig up a bluesy snarl. In All Around Sound, which the Minnesota Orchestra commissioned for its Young People’s Series, Larsen instructs the percussionist to dribble a basketball. Along those lines, her scores often get musicians clapping, slapping knees, or even stomping their feet.

Larsen is well known for her “programmatic,” or narrative music, operas and song cycles that borrow from such literary sources as E.B. White, Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams, as well as historical figures like P.T. Barnum and Eleanor Roosevelt. “Her work has an American feel—a sort of Coplandesque, open sound,” is how Stephen Paulus, Larsen’s colleague and longtime friend, encapsulated her oeuvre. It’s airy. Melodic. Your ears hang on its heavy jazz and street drum influences. Her pieces for orchestra, like Parachute Dancing, also follow a storyteller’s slope. They feel almost cinematic.

“The flow and pitch set of a melody, the rhythm, really comes from the language of the culture it comes from,” said Larsen of her music last spring, when she gave a lecture at the Minnesota History Center. To demonstrate, she played Bright Rails, a song for soprano and piano; set to a poem by Willa Cather, it mimics the choo-choo of a nineteenth-century locomotive trundling over the prairie. Then she played Salute to Louis Armstrong, a work she calls “a fully notated jam session for chorus.” For this song, she asked the VocalEssence singers to shoop-shoop, scat, and doo-wop.

“She’s really brave to do it,” said Abbie Betinis, a burgeoning young composer whom Larsen has mentored, of Larsen’s penchant for injecting opera, orchestra music, and art songs with jazz and other American influences. “It could mean writing herself out of a job, because the more she goes outside the realm of classical music, the less classical musicians feel akin to it.”

Betinis, who is a composer-in-residence at the Schubert Club in St. Paul, may be onto something. In an environment where minimalist, almost mathematical music is highly in vogue, the “openness” of Larsen’s music, to some erudite ears, sounds embarrassingly basic—and, to be fair, Copland’s music suffered some of these same criticisms in his day. “That’s where there’s been some backlash against Libby,” said Bergman. “Her music is never difficult. And we’ve reached a point in this industry where that’s seen as a derogatory thing.”

So why, then, does a comprehensive survey of hundreds of critical reviews of Larsen’s work, published in major American newspapers during the past five years, turn up nary a single column-inch of negativism? By and large, classical music critics see themselves as champions of new music, said Bergman; at the same time, orchestras and opera companies tend to focus on the classics. He believes that in some cases, whispered backstage criticism might be attributable to orchestra musicians’ hostility toward new music—after all, if Larsen’s music challenges anything, it’s the way these musicians regard the concert hall and their own instruments.

Larsen’s unorthodox views about the institution of classical music can be traced back to her graduate school years, in the early seventies, when she was studying at the University of Minnesota under another renowned Minnesotan composer, Dominick Argento. One day Larsen and her then-classmate Stephen Paulus had the radical notion that their music should be heard. “We were sitting on the steps of Scott Hall, the old music building,” said Paulus, “and we said, ‘Here we’re writing all these pieces for our music composition classes. What a shame we don’t get to hear our music played!’”

This compelled the pair to found the Minnesota Composers Forum, an organization dedicated to producing contemporary classical music concerts, in 1973. But neither Larsen nor Paulus was selfish about programming those first shows. “We always made sure we had just one work in each of the concerts,” said Paulus. “We’d say, ‘What do you got?’ ‘I’ve got a piece for guitar.’ ‘Well, I’ve got a piece for soprano and piano,’ and we filled other people’s work in for everything else.” While Larsen and Paulus are no longer involved, they helped the organization grow into the American Composers Forum, a national group dedicated to helping composers get their work performed.

If finding an audience was a concern in the seventies, by the eighties, Larsen was engaged with new questions. In 1984, as a composer-in-residence at the Minnesota Orchestra, she began to wonder why people her own age were not coming to concerts—and why non-European composers weren’t integrated into the orchestra’s programming. “I started studying classical music in America and its intrinsic value [to American culture]. It’s a very hard thing to study because the question of its value is a new frontier—it’s yet to be explored,” she said, slapping her palm against the café table for emphasis.

Several awkward seconds passed. For someone so deeply connected to the concert hall experience, rumors of its demise are painful. Larsen looked down at her hand, now pressed flat against the tabletop. “The first thing that came into my mind is that we’re all in our cars.”

That flash of inspiration about car culture and classical music was borne out many years later, when the McKnight Foundation published its landmark study, A New Angle: Arts Development in the Suburbs. The 2002 study hinted that the foundation might, in the future, direct more of its funding toward suburban arts centers. To say the least, the study put urban artists and arts institutions on alert, especially those like Minnesota Orchestra and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, who regularly received McKnight funding and subscribed to the notion that suburbanites must drive to the city for serious art.

Intrigued by the McKnight study, Larsen applied for an “educational chairwomanship” with the Library of Congress—basically a grant that allowed her to study issues surrounding American orchestral music, such as the ongoing battle to sell tickets, the resistance to performing works by American composers, and the withering social status of the concert hall. She will recount her findings in The Concert Hall that Fell Asleep and Woke Up as a Car Radio, a book she plans to finish in the coming months.

Through her research, Larsen has come to believe that 1902 is a key date in the evolution of orchestral music in the United States. That’s when the Victor Talking Machine Company launched a simple marketing effort, packaging its gramophones with Red Seal Records. The recordings included works by Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms—the basic German canon. “It was very avant-garde because no one had records,” Larsen said. “Then once people heard the recording, they wanted to hear it live.”

Around that same time, railroad transportation was burgeoning, too, which not only led to the construction of more concert halls, but also allowed full orchestras to embark on cross-country tours. Suddenly, fans everywhere had a chance to hear their Red Seal recordings performed live. Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, Brahms’s Symphony No. 1—these were among the first hits of the recording age.

In 1929, the Radio Corporation of America bought the Victor Talking Machine Company and used its catalog of recorded orchestra, opera, and oratorio songs to develop music appreciation courses for radio broadcast. The courses were designed to indoctrinate the masses with classical music and, perhaps, get a catchy waltz or two stuck in their heads. Though RCA discontinued them in 1944, their legacy lives on. “That’s where the core of our classical music canon comes from,” said Larsen. “That’s what we’re dealing with, even today.” As a testament to her point, she pointed out that Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 is being played this season by major orchestras in New York, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, Dallas, and Phoenix.

Since 1944, of course, the way we listen to music has changed. The rich textures of vinyl records have given way to reels, cassettes, CDs, and MP3s. The static of AM broadcasting was displaced by the crisp, clear hum of the FM airwaves. Our ears grew accustomed to music that’s recorded, studio-produced, and, above all, pristine. This doesn’t bode well for the concert hall, where the slightest sniffle or cough, or even just shifting in your seat can pollute your neighbor’s appreciation of the unamplified sound. “It finally hit me—this isn’t any fun!” Larsen wailed about concert hall performances. “I cannot be in my body! I can’t let my body respond to the music!”

At the same time, the burgeoning popularity of jazz, country, and rock ’n’ roll created venues where concertgoers can, as Larsen said, “be themselves.” Clanking beer bottles, loud conversations, or even a brawl are no match for the sound systems at, say, First Avenue or the Dakota Bar and Grill. Larsen likes the no-holds-barred quality of music heard in rock and jazz clubs, where the experience is not dispelled by the shuffling feet and commentary of listeners (and often is diffused with earplugs). But even with all that, and even though she can’t fully explain it and it puts her body in a stiff, awkward place, she loves, above all, the concert hall and its gentle wall of acoustic sound that washes over her ears. She loves how concert hall music sounds.

The founding of the Composers’ Forum, along with Larsen’s epiphany about how the fate of the concert hall and all the rest of her scholarly work, have spawned something of a secondary career—that of a contemporary classical music thinker, educator, and author. Larsen is entrenched in many rather philosophical projects. (“I’m very bored,” she joked at a recent lecture. “I spend a lot of time alone so I do all this thinking.”) She has an appointment at the Department of Defense, of all places, to develop new musical curricula for schools on military bases. And in addition to working on The Concert Hall that Fell Asleep and Woke Up as a Car Radio, she’s been approached, by a publisher about updating What to Listen for in Music, a classic written by Aaron Copland in 1957.

Has Larsen become more a scholar or figurehead than a composer? “She’s got her fingers in a lot of pots,” said Paulus. “It’d be difficult to be involved in all those things and write music the way she had.” Larsen concedes that side projects may have interfered with composition, but says that’s soon to change. “I’m completely done with my work for the government,” she said with a laugh during a conversation last month. “My life, by design, will be composing and writing.” She’s slated to begin two new operas; one of them, Every Man Jack, is based on the last twelve hours of Jack London’s life and was commissioned by Sonoma City Opera in California. She described the piece as “combining standard operatic techniques with electronic techniques in the orchestra.” The popular American music reference will come from an original player piano from the early twentieth century. “I’ve collected a number of piano rolls [London] would have heard during his time,” she said.

If there’s a single musician with whom Larsen feels the greatest kinship, it’s Louis Armstrong. “I should have dedicated my third symphony to him. I think I will now,” said Larsen. “It was my first challenge to an orchestra. In the third movement, I asked the orchestra to tightly play bebop.”

We were talking in teh living room of Larsen’s spacious, three-story Tudor just off Lake of the Isles, which she shares with her husband, James Reece, an attorney. Shoes were off, so as not to soil the rugs. The grand piano was shining and spotless. The place is impressive and elegant; it hardly looks like Larsen’s chief workspace. But in fact, much of her composing is done, pencil-to-paper, at the dining room table. Upstairs, in a carpeted, loft-like office, an assistant, Brad, worked on the business side of Libby Larsen operations.

Armstrong and his swing ensemble, Larsen said, had the amazing ability to rigidly follow their musical scores, which were often very complicated and densely arranged, and yet still give one another license to leave the score, once the music compelled them to riff on their own.

Those unscripted jams embody what Larsen calls “groove” (and, yes, for all her love of popular music, she managed to sound rather prim pronouncing that word, ensconced in an oversized Provençal armchair in her living room). Groove, she said, is an indescribable energy that emanates from jazz, honky-tonk, blues, and rock. It’s something that musician and listener feel together; it both feeds and is fed by the audience. As the basis for beauty in African music, groove is, by extension, in American music, too. European music, on the other hand, is more concerned with pitch, traditionally valuing high pitches above all else.

Armstrong was unique in that he recognized the beauty of both groove and pitch, of improvisation and exactitude. He quoted Mozart and Brahms in the midst of his own jazz and swing compositions, for example. He spoke many musical languages and, as a result, attracted listeners with varied, sometimes opposing musical histories and tastes. Larsen aims for her music to do something similar. She wants to bridge the schism between popular and classical music. This reflects her own experience of music: When songs form in her head, she often hears classical elements ringing with pop influences. But it’s also her contribution to reinvigorating—and in the long term perhaps even preserving—the acoustic concert hall experience.

Armstrong’s music was embraced by Europeans long before it found an audience at home. Similarly, Larsen finds herself working in the “old world” more often these days, even though much of her music continues to get off the ground in the United States, where it is written and most often premiered. For example, the Armstrong-inspired doo-wop-wop she wrote for the VocalEssence choir has since become popular in France and Spain. Furthermore, because American orchestra unions command such steep recording royalties on behalf of their musicians, Larsen is forced to do most of her recording abroad. “This is a real frustration for me. The music that I write pushes through the language of jazz and rock ’n’ roll. American musicians can play it because they live it,” she said. “In Europe, the musicians are fabulous, but they don’t sing gospel. They don’t breathe the same musical air.”

Some of America’s popular contemporary composers—John Adams and Philip Glass, for example—continue to experiment with minimalism, and others emulate the European masters; Larsen, however, has kept her ears tuned to folksy, hookier influences—not just Armstrong, but also jazz pianist Art Tatum, Leonard Bernstein, and blues singer Bessie Smith. Like them, she finds herself increasingly concerned with blues, boogie-woogie, and the kind of beats that give American music its kick. Sometimes that means borrowing from the rhythm of basketball, or mimicking the cadence of a preacher or auctioneer. Larsen has a soft spot for the Old West, too; besides the work inspired by Willa Cather and Jack London, she’s also penned odes to Calamity Jane and Billy the Kid. And she likes cars, too—fast ones. “Four on the Floor,” a dense, almost impossibly fast piece for violin, cello, bass, and piano, is about joyriding in her dad’s 1957 red Thunderbird convertible. In it, you can hear the crank of the V-8, the open road rushing underneath. Finger-picked notes race past one another. Apparently, Larsen has a lead foot.

Number, Name—Identifiers; Description

0, Calm—Skin tone normal; Passive agreement, no apparent problems

1, Flap—Dirty looks cast Long periods of silence, punctuated by grunts

2, Squabble—Eyes narrow Widespread nitpicking, mild name-calling

3, Dust-up—Some color in the cheeks; Ungrounded accusations, small threat of physical contact

4, Spat—Clenched fists, jaw; Open name-calling, disagreement on facts

5, Row—Notable presence of spittle; Listening stops, continuous mutual belittlement

6, Fracas—High color in cheeks; Third parties get involved

7, Tussle—Some damage to hearing possible; Third parties and damned “peacemakers” begin to interfere

8, Kerfuffle—Personal space no longer observed; Local newspaper takes notice, credible threats of violence

9, Donnybrook—Stuttering; Punches thrown

10, Brawl—Eyes bugging; Legally actionable punches thrown

11, Melee—Head-butting; Stay away. Stay far away.

12, Republican Majority—Lifeless eyes, communication primarily through blogging; Loss of all respect for dissent, and non-fetal human life

We’re always invigorated by a brisk autumn of theatergoing; this year, the season has been even more robust thanks to a trio of theater-themed parties. There was no shortage of spectacle on the opening-night galas at the Guthrie Theater and the Children’s Theater, where the line between costume and couture was wonderfully blurred. Where else can one strike such an effective pose in an Elizabethan collar? At the brand-new Ivey Awards, a tony (and Tony-inspired) to-do replete with a red carpet out on Hennepin Avenue, it was clear that this event is destined to be fêted as far as fashion sightseeing goes. With an abundance of suited-up dandies and women displaying imaginative uses of slinky acetate, we were happy to see that theatrics were not limited to the stage.

A disheveled man paced the intersection of Snelling and University avenues, waving his arms as he described to passersby how his car had broken down and he’d been sleeping at the nearby Catholic church. If somebody would spare some change, he promised, he’d be on his way. The man had plenty of pedestrians to talk to, as the Midway is an area of the city where people walk, whether to Ragstock or the Safarii coffee shop or Big Top Liquor. The panhandler finally approached an older woman leaning on a cane. She listened to the man’s story, and then scoffed, “That’s a Baptist church,” and hobbled away.

In the 1890s, University Avenue was a streetcar line and Snelling was a bumpy path leading to the fort of the same name. The intersection was largely populated by military men waiting for various streetcars. Both routes were soon paved and the Midway became St. Paul’s industrial epicenter. Workers here fixed streetcars, shoveled coal, loaded trains, and filled orders for old-style department stores like Montgomery Ward. With the workers came houses and shops and bars, like the now-hip Turf Club, which once served doughboys on leave from overseas, and has since been dubbed University Avenue’s “best remnant of the 1940s.” A half block away sits Big V’s Saloon, the Turf’s main competition for local rock shows. Some of the drums hammered on both stages come from Ellis Drum Shop on Snelling, which outfits the Bad Plus’ Dave King, for one.

The Midway is lousy with old-style, one-of-a-kind places, like the somewhat claustrophobic Midway Used and Rare Books, which opened its doors in 1965. It has since supplemented its collection of pulp novels and other pop culture ephemera with an impressive selection of literature and books on art and photography. And, while you can’t buy the hulking iron lung at Ax-Man Surplus on University, you can pick up a bucket of glass beads, a gas mask, or a wagonload of old wooden fruit crates.

In recent years, the Midway has evolved. Mainstays have been supplemented by stores and restaurants opened by newcomers to the neighborhood—Hmong, Latinos, and African-Americans. Now you’ll find the tasty Mirror of Korea, the Black Sea Turkish restaurant, and a host of ethnic groceries and gyros joints. The streetcar garage that used to anchor the intersection’s southeast corner has become a mall that stretches across two blocks, where locals can have their nails done, buy groceries, bowl, and play bingo.

But one thing remains stubbornly the same. The Midway still bleeds blue-collar frugality: Whatever is here must be cheap and it must be good. The Turf Club’s prices, for example, have hardly risen in six decades. A person can still get a pint for little more than bus fare, though it’s always wise to have both, lest you be forced to beg from old locals leaning on canes.—Brian Voerding

Not long after the new Design Collective boutique opened in Uptown, its display window featured a two-tiered, amphibious-looking skirt whose ruffles, shaped with wires, were so impressive they stopped a passerby in her tracks. “It makes me think of a nudibranch,” explained Barrett Johanneson, months later, as he fished the skirt out of the trunk of his Volkswagen, where it had been stored since a fashion show some weeks ago. “It’s a sort of sea snail,” he added, before there was a chance to ask.

Johanneson is the soft-spoken founder and leader of Labrador Style, an ensemble of five friends who are also clothing designers, and who share a fascination with sea life. (They take their name from the coastline-rich northeasternmost province of Canada.) Other one-of-a-kind Labrador designs include a top made from layered and hand-stitched strips of terrycloth and a men’s white dress shirt with hand-painted aqua blue stripes—a watermark, so to speak, of Labrador’s oceanic motifs.

It’s hard to believe all this plum, avant-garde fashion comes out of the unglamorous, garden-level apartment near Cedar Lake that Johanneson shares with his friend Adrianne. “I do feel bad about the times I leave it kinda dirty,” he said, typifying male roommates.

Johanneson and his fellow Labrador designers use the apartment’s spartan, bare-walled living room as their studio space. There’s a sewing machine, a mannequin bust, a tiny cabinet stuffed with notions, a glass-topped worktable, and an overhead projector used to throw patterns onto fabrics and tees, so as to allow hand painting. “When we’re getting ready for a fashion show or photo shoot, we basically all live in this room,” Johanneson said.

He opened up a hallway closet, where some of Labrador’s most interesting creations are stowed. Out came a squid-shaped hand bag, dyed with squid ink and part of a whole line based on a squid motif. “This is a bikini constructed out of East German surgical masks,” he said, holding up a particularly puzzling item from the stock.

While the wire, squids, and medical equipment attest to Johanneson’s avant-garde leanings, he also has a special affection for vintage fabrics, which he acquires from antique stores, thrift shops, and on eBay. He even keeps a few sentimental swatches close at hand, such as a remnant of seafoam silk with gold accents, which his mother used to make her prom dress. He likes busy patterns as much as the next guy, but prefers materials with a softer touch that, again, remind him of the sea. He picked up a rich, azure-colored fabric. “Feel it. It’s watery,” he said. “That’s going to make a fantastic dress someday.”

That dress will have to wait while the designer works through his current obsession with jeans. A couple of just-finished pairs are tossed over an end table, one with a dramatic surf-like curve at the front pockets, the other with wavy panels running along the outside seams. “These are a study in tiny jeans,” said Johanneson, a tall fellow, holding an unfinished pair to his legs. They looked like they’d fit a five-foot fashion model. But oh no, he said. Exuding the sort of whimsy and drama that come through in Labrador’s clothing, he whispered, in all seriousness, “Someday these will be mine.”—Christy DeSmith

Not so long ago, if you heard “wipe” used as a noun, you probably thought of a baby’s bottom. That was in the late nineties, when baby wipes made up eighty-two percent of the “wipe market.” Now, of course, you can buy disposable cloths soaked in just about any kind of fluid and stuffed into an airtight plastic container. There are wipes to clean your car’s dashboard, wipes to clean up stray dabs of paint, wipes to clean your dog’s ears. But it was the recent arrival, by mail, of a Palmolive DishWipe sample that gave me pause. I don’t think of myself as old—on a good day, I’ll get carded at the liquor store checkout—but I realized that I’d somehow missed this revolutionary wipe wave, been left, so to speak, in the dust.

When I was a child, my siblings and I had cleaning duties to fulfill every week in exchange for our allowance, and I guess the methods we used back in those pre-wipe days have stuck. We stuck our little hands into the too-big yellow rubber gloves and scrubbed, dusted, sudsed, or vacuumed according to Mom’s instructions. She seemed to know best then, and to this day I still save old T-shirts for dusting and toothbrushes for getting into nooks, and I have worn holes in the knees of my “cleaning jeans.” Housework is work.

But that kind of work is about as old-fashioned as a Chore Boy copper scrubber. Apparently, the new way to clean involves a lot of wiping, misting, Swiffing, and tossing. Sponges (like “dishrags” before them) face extinction because cleaning implements should immediately be thrown away after use. At this rate it won’t be long before good old elbow grease is eradicated with a squeal of disgust by consumers brandishing plastic cylinders of grease-cutting Mr. Clean Wipes. While manufacturers are making big bucks on these presoaked disposable cloths, one has to wonder why it took so long for them to invent cleaning products that work the same way we want everything else to work: immediately, and with as little effort as possible.

Still, there’s a contradiction brewing. While wipe culture enables a quick-and-easy approach to cleaning, at the same time it cultivates a rapid-growth disgust of bacteria, dirt, and germs. I began to look more closely at the offerings in the cleaning aisle at my local Cub Foods. Along the bottom shelves, plastered with big yellow “PRICE CUT!” labels that made them seem desperate, were the same powder cleaners my mom swears by. It’s no surprise. Using those involves a whole lot of scrubbing, and why scrub when we can wipe or, better yet, mist? On an eye-level shelf, I zeroed in on an improbable-sounding Scrub-Free Disinfectant and Bathroom Cleaner. Disinfect with no scrubbing? Tell me more! The instructions began, “Remove gross filth or heavy soil prior to application of the product.” Now, I’m no expert on what it takes to remove “gross filth” (which sounds suspiciously like a euphemism for “dirt”), but I bet it would take some scrubbing.

Okay, so a product that sounds too good to be true probably is. It turns out that wipes and many of the “scrub-free” products are meant for use between those occasions when we get in there and really scrub. But this raises another contradiction: Why put on ratty jeans and a sweatshirt and spend a whole Saturday sanitizing the house when we can take care of visible grot with a few wipes? Why scrub a floor that has that “just Swiffered” glow? If it looks clean, isn’t that good enough? Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, in the course of writing Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, took a job at Merry Maids, where she was trained in the franchise’s techniques for housecleaning. In addition to working as quickly as possible, she found, cleaning consisted of dampening a cloth with the appropriate fluid and then wiping down every surface. She felt like she was merely pushing dirt around instead of banishing it the way her mother taught her: with buckets of scalding sudsy water. After checking in with an expert who confirmed her suspicion, she came to the conclusion that “the point at The Maids, apparently, is not to clean so much as to create the appearance of having been cleaned.” And thousands of Merry Maid customers are just fine with that. But at least they’re keeping their homes presentable, even if they’re not doing the work themselves. For those of us who don’t hire Merry Maids, or even less-merry housecleaners, it’s often a different story.

Somehow we’ve raised ourselves above the indignity of unpleasant household tasks that were once commonplace. The respect that was once accorded to getting things spic-and-span with a good hard scrubbing has been replaced with squeamishness. I was struck by a scene in Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections in which a son watches in disgust as his mother, raised during the Depression, scrapes bits of food from the sink trap into the garbage can. Our revulsion over such tasks translates into profits for those manufacturers who produce wipes and other gadgets that promise to virtually eliminate cleaning. At the very least, they ensure that we don’t come into direct contact with dirt, and that we can throw away anything that does.

More easily grossed-out consumers and easier profits for manufacturers of cleaning products do not necessary equate to cleaner homes. From 1999 to 2004, while sales of air fresheners went up thirty percent, the household cleaning products market declined almost nine percent. No matter how many air fresheners we spray around, light up, or plug in, we eventually have to clean up the source of our stink. And when that happens, the Clorox ToiletWand is there.

Let’s look at the evolution of no one’s favorite cleaning job. The old way to clean a toilet was to kneel down and get up close, making sure to scrub the throne in all its awkward angles, thereby developing a forced intimacy with this place where we crap. Once the toilet brush was invented, we could remain a full twelve inches or more from the worst parts. This was a great improvement, but now we had the problem of storing a brush—soaked in toilet water, possibly contaminated with flecks of feces—right there next to the commode. There are two solutions to that problem: Go back to kneeling and scrubbing, or throw away the offending brush after each use. Faced with this choice, it seems consumers are more than willing to spend extra on disposable brushes.

Of course, the cleaning revolution didn’t come without a reason. We need our cleaning problems wiped away because we’re all busier than ever and many of us, especially those in the burgeoning class of one-member households, are home less than we used to be. We stop in for a bit after being at work all day, and then go out again for the evening or park ourselves in front of the TV or computer. On top of that, houses are getting bigger (in the last thirty years, the average new one-family home has grown by 670 square feet), even as the time spent cleaning them shrinks.

In Outwitting Housework: Brilliant Tips, Tricks, and Advice on Housekeeping… and Life, much of author Nancy Rosenberg’s advice involves using stolen moments to keep up with cleaning. Wipe the bathroom mirror while brushing your teeth; straighten a closet while waiting for the shower to run hot. That all sounds fine, but should we really be using those precious extra minutes for spot cleaning? Why not sneak in a little cardio, eat some whole grains, catch up on e-mail, weed the garden, or do any of the other million things that constantly need doing? Rosenberg, however, doggedly attempts to turn our values back to the days when a sparkling home and the work to get it that way was a point of pride. “Don’t think of housekeeping as cleaning, or chores, or drudgery. Don’t think of it in negative terms,” she writes. “Instead, see this as a gift you give to yourself. See this as a tool that will make your life easier, less complicated, and more manageable.”

I’m willing to try, but I’d prefer to give myself the gift of a Roomba Floorvac, the little robot that “automatically senses, finds, and eliminates dirt!” Then I’ll never have to vacuum or even Swiffer again. I’m going to hold out until they invent a disposable Roomba that rolls itself right out to the garbage after filling up with my gross filth. Then my conversion to the new clean will be complete.

Every year there’s a ritual in my house: My wife gathers all of her Jane Austen novels from the bookshelf and reads them in chronological order. Once that liturgy is complete, she devours all five hours of the landmark BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, or Bridget Jones’s Diary, the Laurence Olivier Pride, Bride and Prejudice, or one of the many other adaptations of her novels over the course of a long weekend. My wife is either devout or obsessed. I’m still not certain.

Then there’s my dentist. A real bookworm, she nonetheless loathes Jane Austen. In fact, while visiting London, she took a special trip with her eldest daughter—who shares this bitterness, especially after having to write a college essay on all six novels—to Winchester Cathedral, where Austen is buried. There, they both danced on her grave. And she was delighted to hear that had Mark Twain been alive to join them, he would have dug Austen up and, in his own words, “beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

Such passions are common when it comes to the bard of Hampshire and her works. While my wife and the legions of Janeites are in heaven, eagerly anticipating the newest film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, due in theaters this month, my dentist and her daughter (not to mention the spirit of Sam Clemens) must be particularly vexed. For this last decade has seen the cinematic market for Pride and Prejudice explode; with five variations released in the last five years alone, it’s a legitimate phenomenon and one that spans both space and time. If you’re reading an article on Pride then you’ve got to be as familiar with its plot as you are with your morning ablutions. Essentially the story of the mutual misunderstandings betwixt prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet and the prideful Mr. Darcy (or is it vice-versa?), Austen’s 1813 tale reigns as one of the hallmarks of British literature: Its humor and wit make it probably the greatest page-turner from England’s fluffy Regency period. But is that enough to justify so much devotion, and so many different interpretations?

The first major film production of Pride came at the suggestion of, of all people, Harpo Marx. Harpo—the silent one with the flowing blond curls—enjoyed a lively stage production of Pride in London and immediately wired MGM’s Irving Thalberg, urging him to produce it for the silver screen. Thalberg didn’t live long enough to see the film into reality, but MGM hired Aldous Huxley to write it (along with Jane Murfin), and cast Greer Garson and Lawrence Olivier in the starring roles. The Huxley Pride is my personal favorite: the plot, light and perfectly designed as a box kite, is compressed into a swell little production, with added bon mots that Austen herself could have written. It’s brilliantly scored by Herbert Stothart, whose leitmotif for Mr. Collins is delightful, and acted with verve by all parties involved, but containing two particularly impressive performances—of Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins—by two of the most underrated character actors, Edna Mae Oliver and Melville Cooper, respectively.

Watching this Pride, we can see exactly why Austen’s story works so well on the big screen and in modern times. Pride boasts some of the most memorable characters ever set to paper: the Bennet girls, from the intelligent older sisters Elizabeth and Jane to the flighty Lydia and Kitty to the brainy Mary, hovered over by the matrimony-mad mother, Mrs. Bennet; Mr. Darcy, the haughty rogue whom female readers (and viewers) hunger for; Mr. Collins, a cousin come to take his pick of one of the girls as his bride, and one of the finest comic creations I’ve ever read; Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr. Darcy’s aunt and the dowager who screams to be portrayed by a Dame like Judi Dench (and who does so in the new film); and Mr. Bennet, the father of the clan and the cynical soul of the book whom Martin Amis once called the “the dark backing behind the bright mirror” of Austen’s work. All of these people mill about the cozy confines of Meryton, an idyllic village so far removed from politics and strife it could be heaven itself. But in Pride Austen accomplished in three hundred featherweight pages what it took Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina, nearly a thousand somber ones to do: Pride is not simply about falling madly in love, but about what it means to be married. Her light tone allows the story to shine even in truncated forms. In the space of a two-hour movie, we see not one marriage begin, but four, each one simultaneously a prototype, a warning, and an example. And with Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, Pride and Prejudice captures, in the words of art critic and historian Robert Hughes, “the microcosm of marriage, an Ideal Republic of two.”

These Republics were on treacherous ground when Huxley set to work adapting the novel in 1940. With the Luftwaffe threatening London, he wrote Pride as a subtle summons to urge American involvement in the war, to show exactly what would be lost without our participation. The story was moved forward in time just a few years, in order to include a reference to the defeat of Napoleon—a victory that would not occur for another twenty years after Pride was written, but England’s last great military victory. Austen’s Meryton, olde England, and marriage itself would soon be lost under Hitler’s bootheel if we Americans did not act.

Pride fell out of favor for some time after that—there were a few television productions catering to England’s insatiable appetite for dry costume drama, unmemorable versions virtually unwatched today. But in 1995, the BBC took a chance on a Simon Langton and Andrew Davies production that once again reflected current tastes. Their first triumph: casting Colin Firth, who took what is arguably the strongest and most complex male character in all of Austen’s work and shaped him into a vibrant human being. Firth is outstanding: seething throughout most of the film, haughty, and then just right as his arrogance melts away and he falls for Elizabeth Bennet (Olivier’s Darcy is fine, but far from brilliant). Cinematically, Firth made Darcy just as Brando made Stanley Kowalski.

Langton and Davies’ second triumph: having the selfsame Mr. Firth’s Darcy take a dip in a pond. He emerged dripping wet and climbed into the fantasies of Janeites forever. This Pride was not explicitly sexual, but unabashedly erotic. Thus, it took only fifty-five years (in film time) for Pride to acknowledge that married couples have sex.

Austen’s examination of the complexities of marriage, weaved into a seemingly effortless plot, makes Pride a story that can be perfectly adapted throughout the ages, even in different countries. Since 1995 we’ve seen Pride in more than a half-dozen adaptations: Furst Impressions, a children’s television show starring Wishbone, a Jack Russell terrier; the two Bridget Jones movies, starring Firth again in the Darcy role, once again dampening his shirt but not his sexuality; a modern-day production by, of all people, the Mormons; an English-Indian Bollywood musical Pride set in latter-day Amristar, India, featuring the sexiest Bennet sisters yet; and, coming full circle, this newest Pride, which is supposedly a “muddier, cloudier” version, in contrast to the sunny ’95 vintage. Mormons embrace it, Indians dance to it, and even dogs wear the roles like gloves. That is quite a ride for an almost two-hundred-year-old novel, and it is unparalleled in movie history. I’m just waiting for the gay Pride.

Detractors hate Austen in part because of her focus on marriage and the mistaken belief that she is reinforcing the idea of a woman’s dependence on a man. There are also the silly manners and the sunshine and happy-ending world of Meryton. I’d like to think that Twain hated her for the same thing that bugs me the most: Austen’s is a world of the upper classes, where to be destitute is to have “only” a yearly income of a few hundred pounds and but one servant.

However, if you can cast your eye past these differences, you discover a story unlike any other, one that so richly reflects the possibilities of marriage. The Bennets are not dependent women: Lizzy rejects the wealthy Mr. Darcy because he seems to look down upon her family—though his sentiments match her own more than she would admit. She also refuses to consider his money as a source of happiness. If she fails to marry, we don’t doubt that this Elizabeth Bennet will nevertheless succeed in her life. In the end, it is her strength and intelligence that reunites them. Austen covers the other bases—the relationship between Mr. Collins and Charlotte is one of convenience and economy, and silly Lydia and Wickham’s elopement is an example of the perils of reckless love—but Jane’s and Lizzy’s pairings are the ideals of wedlock.

I imagine that I used to resemble Mr. Bennet, harrumphing behind my newspaper while my wife swooned over Colin Firth. But we’ve also sat and watched the various Prides together over the years, and I enjoy the story more and more as time goes on. When we’re through watching one of the movies, I like to reflect on our marriage—I can’t think of another story that challenges me on that sometimes delicate subject. My wife and I are older now, and though we like to be inflamed by the likes of Keira Knightly (Elizabeth in the newest adaptation) and Colin Firth, we also know there’s a lot more than just wet shirts and muddy stockings: Like Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, we’ve grown to have a profound respect for one another. Over the years, marriages are bound to lose some of the fire you’d find raging throughout Wuthering Heights, but a slow burn over time, a loving endurance—isn’t that what we all hope to find in this type of union?