Year: 2005

Don Nelson’s white minivan looked pretty much like every other vehicle in the parking lot behind the Green Mill restaurant on Hennepin Avenue. But the moment Nelson opened the rear door, out of the dark interior came frantic grunting. When he opened the gate to a portable dog kennel sitting on the floor, the grunts grew into squeals and the squeals to high-pitched yelps.

Oval nostrils and bristly nose hair pushed hard against the door of the kennel. The strong little shoat—this one a small, white-haired Hampshire pig—flung open the door and ran in tiny circles in the relative freedom of the vehicle’s cargo space. As pigs go, this one was pretty cute: squeaky clean, animated, and noisy. He was about ten pounds of grunting, oinking, and snorting energy. Despite

appearances, the piglet, named Perfect, was not Don Nelson’s pet. After its month on the road, it’s back to the farm for Perfect, its show-business days just a hazy memory. From there, well, its future is pretty much tied up in country-style ribs on a foam tray at the grocery store.

Nelson was once a farmer, and like every farmer, he knows the difference between livestock and pets. For more than fifteen years, he’s visited with thousands of Minnesota public schoolchildren to teach them about where their food comes from, and who grows and raises it.

“A lot of urban kids have this image of a farmer as an unsophisticated hayseed, a guy who walks around in bib overalls and a straw hat,” said Nelson. He tends to show up at school assemblies, pig in hand, dressed rather like a poet—in a natty sport coat, wool trousers, and turtleneck sweater.

For several months each year, Nelson spends his day going from school to school in and around the Twin Cities, talking with elementary schoolchildren about pigs and turkeys and agriculture in general. It’s a job he likes, and according to the teachers and students, he’s good at it. These days, most children think of livestock only in the abstract—their pork chops and chicken nuggets coming from machines at the food factory, not from living, breathing, grunting beings like Perfect.

Even in rural towns like Litchfield and Willmar, kids don’t know much about farming anymore. “All agricultural areas are now suburbia,” said Nelson. “Even the communities that do have livestock are suburbia. The Litchfield area, for example, has livestock, but there’s probably only a single farm kid or two in the whole school, even there. Years ago there used to be a high percentage of farm kids in small-town schools, but no more. If I go into small towns with the pig and talk about hogs, it’s just as new to them as it is to kids in the city. They’ve never been on a hog farm.”

The only problem with Nelson’s gig is how fast his assistants—who are always named Perfect—grow up. “I can only keep any one particular pig for three weeks, and then it’s just too big to take around,” he said. “When I start out with a new pig, it weighs around ten to twelve pounds. Three weeks later, it’s thirty pounds. My arm gets sore from carrying it around.”

In the pizza parlor parking lot, the show was over. It was time to herd Perfect back into his kennel, despite his enthusiasm for the prevailing scent of pepperoni and sausage hanging on the air. Perfect’s little home, I noticed, was outfitted with a heat lamp to keep him cozy and warm—not unlike the to-go counter inside Green Mill.

—William Gurstelle

A hand-lettered, unprofessionally illustrated sign appeared in midsummer outside the university area’s Santana grocery. It said, “We Rent Hookahs.” Now, there are actually two small bodegas that bear the proud Santana name, and they are located within blocks of each other, where Interstate 35W crosses University Avenue and Fourth Street Southeast. But only one Santana has branched off in the unpredictable direction of offering hookah services. Is the Fourth Street Santana the vanguard of Twin Cities leisure? Or is convenience store/hookah rental one of those nonsensical, doomed pairings, like tanning beds/video rental? Luckily, these questions can be answered by anyone with fifteen bucks, an ID, and unobstructed airways. One recent evening, I gathered a few friends and went to investigate.

The process of renting the water pipe is straightforward; predictably, in exchange for the hookah, my driver’s license is held hostage. Unpredictably, an employee of the grocery is posted outside to monitor the situation. Although this employee is not issued a hookah, he may smoke cigarettes at his leisure. The hookah itself is suspiciously ornate, decorated with a riotous combination of embroidered fabric, hammered brass, and painted, colored glass. It’s flashy, with no sense of Scandinavian reserve, an artifact straight out of Alice in Wonderland.

An intimidating moment arises when it is time to choose the moist, moss-like flavored tobacco used for pipe smoking. The options are orange, strawberry, cherry, Jamaican rum, margarita, grape, menthol, and pineapple. Bonnie Bell lip gloss is available in these same flavors, so my mind darts back to junior high. I hazard a guess. “Cherry?” But the correct answer turns out to be pineapple.

The modest smoking area outside Santana is not what it could be. But why cheapen this relaxing ritual with gimmicks, tricking out a space with tufted pillows or draping fabric, crafting a simulacrum of some imagined Middle Eastern oasis, or maybe the inside of I Dream of Jeannie’s bottle? Honest people, puffing on a hookah with a panoramic view of I-35W, have no need for it. A set of gray plastic lawn furniture will suffice.

An attractive, lanky young Santana employee named Chris takes care of packing the tobacco into the water pipe’s bowl, carefully covering the bowl with aluminum foil and then pricking the foil with a dozen little holes, through which the heat will flow on its way down to the glass chamber.

When the tobacco is smoldering like charcoal, the hookah is ready to smoke. Disposable plastic mouthpieces are provided for the squeamish. Our young guide makes a valiant effort to explain the technique without comparing it to smoking a bong, which is tactful of him. As you draw on the mouthpiece, you pull the smoke down through the chambers, into the filtering water, and bring it up the hose and on into your lungs. Withdraw your lips from the pipe and exhale, comfortably—for the sensation is far more gentle than that of a cigarette. The smoke is lighter, and it leaves a very faint, fruity taste on your palate.

We sit, and puff, and get used to the novelty of the pipe. The fifteen dollars includes enough tobacco to last well over an hour, and there is nothing else to do but sit and watch this corner of the world go by. The air is cool, and people are enjoying the respite from summer’s oppression. The Santana night cashier, a Brazilian woman dressed like a tropical bird of paradise, visits leisurely. “Most of the hookah smokers who come in here, I think there are more women than men. It’s surprising, right?” Store patrons, bicyclists, cabdrivers—everyone looks inquisitively at the sight of the rococo hookah bubbling away on the sidewalk. As the 6C bus pulls up and a steady stream of cars come in off the highway, two women passing by on a late-night errand curiously request a trial drag. One of them gives the hookah a level gaze and offers a candid assessment: “I’d be putting a bud in that, for sure.”—Sarah Askari

The other day, a man called the Minnesota Department of Agriculture to ask why the crickets weren’t chirping in the city this summer. “That’s strange,” said Dr. John Luhman, a research scientist, taxonomist, and longtime cricket enthusiast. “I heard them while riding my bike just yesterday. The crickets haven’t gone anywhere—you’d better take another listen.”

Perhaps the crickets couldn’t compete with the air conditioning, which was set to full power for most of July. Or maybe the caller was simply getting ahead of himself; Twin Cities crickets don’t really get up to speed in the chirping department until late summer. But when the time comes, those of us who enjoy a twilight stroll or sleeping with the bedroom windows open can’t escape the cricket’s noble song. And why would we want to?

An insect of the night who doesn’t emerge into maturity until the hottest months, the cricket may be the backyard’s most admired bug. His popularity was first established in ancient China, where aristocrats kept crickets as pets both for nighttime music and afternoon entertainment. Crickets are quite pugnacious, at least when starved, and thus cricket fighting enjoyed popularity among elites from the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) through the Qing Dynasty (until 1911). Some even say the Song Dynasty (AD 1127-1279) met its demise in part because of cricket bouts; Jia Sidao, the dynasty’s last premier, supposedly neglected important political affairs to watch his littlest warriors.

Luhman speculates that crickets’ sedentary nature accounts for much of their popularity, since the insects remain happy in cages and “you can make them do things. Like fight.” Cricket fighting continues even today, though mostly underground—which maybe seems more logical than rational. (Are there any fighting critters too small to attract the anti-cruelty crusaders?) A secret “entomological Fight Club” in Hong Kong was busted by police in 2004, netting one thousand dollars in cash and more than two hundred buffed-up crickets. Little bugs apparently mean big money, though one wonders exactly how many tickets can be sold for a live event of such tiny magnitude.

Crickets may be fighters, but they’re best known as lovers. They play the dating game as earnestly as we do, and males work tirelessly to play “love songs” that will attract members of the opposite sex. A female picks the best “musician” as her mate, then receives what Luhman called “gifts of candy”—a sweet secretion sipped from a small basin located behind the wings of the male seducer. And romance isn’t the only song in the cricket’s vast repertoire. There are distinct chirps for all sorts of situations: soft if a female is nearby, aggressive when challenging a male intruder, and loud and fast when a predator is closing in. Actually, the cricket’s tympanic organs can vibrate well beyond the sensitivity of human ears, which means we’re only getting the low end of the cricket grand symphony.

There’s a cricket celebrity (Jiminy), a cricket thermometer (the number of chirps per fifteen seconds, plus forty), a cricket mantelpiece (a brass good-luck charm), and cricket cuisine. Southern Louisiana’s Fluker Farms is the self-proclaimed “leader in live cricket production” as feed for pet reptiles. It sells boxed quantities of 250, five hundred, or one thousand, as well as smaller numbers of chocolate-covered crickets, which are not for lizards, but humans. Crickets are said to be crunchy and high in protein, and the Fluker variety comes with an “I Ate a Bug Club” lapel badge for “adventurous connoisseurs.”

Though most humans’ affinity for crickets might stop short of a meal (“unpleasant eating,” was Luhman’s considered opinion), their songs and amorous personalities do jibe nicely with our relaxed late-summer sensibilities. “You’re not going to be anywhere outdoors after June where there won’t be crickets sounding,” said Luhman. “It’s nostalgic—people associate the sound with nice memories from the summertime.”—Adam Fetcher

Reality TV is, of course, an oxymoron. There’s reality—pimples and disappointments and paper jams. And there’s TV—Jennifer Aniston. These two concepts were meant to inhabit parallel planes and never intersect. That’s the natural order of the universe, like hot air rising and white pants attracting food. Tampering with this law of nature is an abomination.

Like all natural disasters, reality TV engenders chaos—the sort of localized apocalypse where middle managers are extraordinarily nice to others with no real power. Other symptoms of reality TV in humans include a tendency to stand in long lines, a willingness to share the sort of extremely personal information the government has spent millions of dollars trying to secure, and the most outrageous optimism regarding the interest others might have in those personal details.

All of these symptoms presented at the open casting calls for The Apprentice the other day at the Carlson School of Management and the Arrow Pontiac GMC dealership in Inver Grove Heights. To cope with the stresses placed on the innocents who were unaccustomed to the debasements of the casting call, every one of the four hundred real-people hopefuls repeated such soothing mantras as, “It’s just for fun,” “Those aren’t real,” and “It’s only ketchup.” Very much the same language parents use to assuage the overexposed child. But it didn’t work. They could not find their footing in the hall of mirrors that is reality TV.

“Of course,” the Kendra wannabes snorted, “everyone knows the entire show is scripted and they’re just looking for a ditzy blond or a tattooed dude to draw in viewers. It’s all about ratings.” This was a savvy crowd. They were pretty sure they had reality TV’s number. But a quick poll of the candidates’ qualifications for filling the role of a real fake person revealed they had wandered back to familiar turf, listing such water-cooler victories as successfully managing birthday card routing and selection as I.T. Hero of the Week, achievements that lose ten pounds on TV. Some said they were “just there for the fun of it,” a brand of entertainment that involved arriving at the Arrow Pontiac dealership by 4 a.m. and standing in ninety-degree heat for seven hours or so.

A delivery driver spent the time waiting for her three-minute interview trying to mine some quirk of her everyday life so that she could spin it into something more made-for-TV—the bitch, the driven career woman, the nice girl, the hippy. There was cavalier talk among candidates of being the hunted and the hunter, the participant and the observer, the dabbler and the desperate simultaneously, but for the non-psychotic it just wasn’t working.

This casting call was working, though, for Chandra Holt, of the tight white suit and stiletto heels. She told me the key to being chosen for The Apprentice was confidence. She surveyed the room and declared she was the prettiest one there (she may have had a point, but still). She went on to say she was a merchandising manager at Target, earning her MBA at the Carlson school at night. She managed “a lot of people.” She managed a big budget. She was also, by her own admission, the smartest person in the room. When I noted her busy schedule, she quickly let me know that was only the tip of the iceberg—she predicted a top-ten place at the upcoming Lifetime Fitness Triathlon. There is confidence, and then there is megalomania. When I mentioned the proclivity of reality TV actors to backstab, Chandra lit up like a klieg. “I love when they do those little asides, little digs like that. I’m really sharp, really good at one-liners.” She snapped her fingers, click, click, click.

I had hoped to chat with the two casting agents—Cara and Toby, California girls with their sunglasses on their heads—as a regular person rather than a candidate. Unfortunately, the girls were pure business and spoke only with application-bearing candidates, so I filled out the one-page application, complete with marital status and most embarrassing moment, and got in line. When my turn came up, Cara and Toby perkily called me in and quickly noted my occupation—writer. I confessed, and indicated I was, in fact, performing my occupation even as we spoke. Apparently they missed the exit from TV world, in which people audition to be actors, to the real world, where writers interview people for a story. The disconnect continued. While I asked about the validity of the marital-status and most-embarrassing-moment questions, and how they felt after a ten-hour stint of interviewing real people, Cara and Toby shared that it was possible that I would be selected for a spot on The Apprentice—but not likely, because of my lack of business background. Cara looked at Toby and said, “All of the Apprentices have had business experience, haven’t they? I don’t think there have been any writers.” Toby agreed, “No, we’re looking for really sharp people who can get the job done.”

Despite the close call, Cara, Toby, and I were never in the same conversation. Reality and TV marched on in different directions, and order remained in the universe.—Sarah Barker

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of Canoeing With the Cree, Eric Sevareid’s charming story about canoeing from Minneapolis to the Hudson Bay in the summer of 1930. Thank goodness for something timeless; the Minnesota Historical Society has been in charge of the last several reprintings—including a new anniversary edition—and they haven’t even reset the type. This of course runs against the nap and flow of every fiber in a modern brand-manager’s being.

Sevareid was a seventeen-year-old student who had scarcely been in a canoe when he and his friend Walter Port put in below Fort Snelling on the Minnesota River. Today, the book is an artifact of a bygone, genteel era—precocious gentlemen explorers dressed in canvas and wool, “encountering” wilderness and quoting Kipling, with hardly a thought for “turnkey solutions” or “value-added deliverables.” Sevareid and Port had no Gore-Tex, no freeze-dried food, no global positioning system. But they did have a sponsor—the Minneapolis Star agreed to buy for one hundred dollars the serialized narrative of their 2,500-mile trip. That sponsorship allowed Sevareid to eventually publish his account as a book, and that made the young man’s name. He went on to become one of the twentieth century’s most respected journalists. It is hard today to imagine the daily newspaper taking a chance on a nameless boy in jodhpurs; it is especially hard to make your name in a marketplace that does not need more names. But Sevareid got it right.

Getting it right is not necessarily, you know, getting it all the way right. Of course, the Cree did not call themselves the Cree—it was a name bestowed on them in the eighteenth century by French explorers and traders in James Bay. And much of Sevareid’s account records not so much a wilderness expedition through boreal wastes as an upcurrent slog through southern Minnesota, where the savages were mostly of European descent. In the intervening years, dozens of other canoeists have followed in the wake of Sevareid and Port. In fact, this month St. Cloud residents Scott Miller and Matt Lutz expect to arrive at York Factory on the Hudson Bay, and we’ve enjoyed reading their online journal, which has been published without the assistance or interference of the daily newspaper. Still, followers are inevitably less memorable than pioneers, and bloggers secretly crave print the way Simon Cowell craves to be an American idol.

You surely don’t watch that show, but its reputation has reached far beyond its name. Simon Cowell, the hateful, aggressively British panelist on American Idol, may be in a bit of a legal bind. He recently moved to Los Angeles, apparently to be closer to the source of his ill-gotten fame and wealth, but has apparently not yet taken his remedial courses on American copyright. The other day, Cowell and ABC announced plans to unroll a television program called The Million Dollar Idea, a show that rewards inventors for their original ideas. The only problem is that they seem to have pinched the name and the concept from Twin Citizens Jean Golden and Todd Walker, who have been locally producing a show just like that for two years, and who claim they pitched the idea to ABC a few months ago. Cowell perhaps cannot master the subtlety that it requires to steal an idea and give it the cover of a new name.

Then again, we should keep sharp writing instruments away from the wicked. Creating names has become bloodsport in the powerful economic recovery we’re told is underway. We paused last year when the financial department of Lutheran Brotherhood coined the new name “Thrivent.” It was not a word we’d heard before, and that made us irritable. (We have to admit that “Thrivent” briefly sounded like an erectile dysfunction medication, but then again, everything sounds like that these days, maybe because there are so many erectile dysfunction medications.) Still, it did not produce the same seizures in our copy-editing department as “Xcel” and “Qwest” did years ago. We get surly when commercial enterprises do legal and grammatical violence to the language. One sin leads to the other. Whole industries have sprung up to weld words together in strange spork-like configurations with not a lot of respect for the laws of language. This month, for example, American Express Financial Advisers officially becomes “Ameriprise,” and we’d like to issue a ticket for such a violation.

By now, the fashion police have taken notice that Macy’s has acquired Marshall Field’s, and the buzz around the block seems to be whether Macy’s will rename its new acquisition the way George Foreman named all five of his sons—you know, George Foreman. Twin Citizens probably don’t care one way or the other—most of us still think of that particular store at that particular location as Dayton’s. So we can’t muster a lot of sympathy for the idle Chicagoans resisting change at keepitfields.org.

On the other hand, the torch has finally dropped on one of our favorite local bands, the Olympic Hopefuls. Continuing correspondence with the United States Olympic Committee has resulted in a not-unfriendly caution that the USOC has trademarked the word “olympic,” and even goes so far as to suggest that there are federal laws requiring the committee to enforce the trademark. In other words, meet “the Hopefuls.” We think it’s a shame, and we want to make a stand right now against anyone who wishes to plant their institutional flag on any little dry spot within the borders of Webster’s. In fact, our view is that if the word is in common usage long enough to enter the Concise, then it falls within international waters, and ought to be open to all who wish to travel there. We wonder if the USOC has made special arrangements with the Olympic Penisula in Washington State, or, for that matter, Olympia beer. The Hopefuls are not the first local band to get beat up by the corporate poets; remember when Tilt-A-Whirl became Arcwelder?

If the tradeoff is more companies making up strange names that appear in no dictionary, the better to protect their legal and business interests, then fine. Frankly, we don’t foresee a sudden run-up in the stock of “Lucent” among poets and novelists, and we pledge never to use that word when another will do as well. Though we have taken note of how some of the world’s best-established brands become effective shortcuts in description (“Rollerblades”—an excellent word), other nonsense neologisms are headed for a richly deserved instant oblivion. May they rest in a deep, dark hole capped by a little ® manhole cover.

Robert Altman didn’t see much of Minnesota. During his month-long stay in St. Paul this summer, he ventured beyond the Fitzgerald Theater and his hotel but once or twice. He came, though, and even if he didn’t see much, it seems as if he was out to conquer. He left for Hollywood with footage for a film in which, reportedly, the Fitzgerald Theater gets demolished, at least one character dies, and, most important, our beloved public radio program ceases to be. Who is this guy? And what does he want with A Prairie Home Companion?

For Prairie Home is not just the pride of Minnesota, but a refuge from the anxieties of television and a return to the relaxing pace of radio. For me, the show was a Midwestern haven when I was living in the San Francisco area, where people can’t afford lawns and the leaves never change. After work on Saturdays, I would collapse on my bed and listen to Garrison Keillor’s monologue, which was as soothing as a hot bath and a cold beer. So when I first discovered that Robert Altman was going to direct a movie based on Prairie Home—well, at first I didn’t know what to think.

“No one has ever made a good movie,” Altman has said. “Someday someone will make half a good one.” His own prolific career has certainly yielded some half-good films, such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, and Gosford Park, but I find myself disappointed by most of the others. However, even the worst ones—and Popeye is as awful as anything ever committed to celluloid—trouble me for a long time afterward … and I like to be troubled. Altman has stated repeatedly that he tries to give his audience something to argue about afterward and that he frankly doesn’t care to appease everybody, or even anybody. He also considers his films to be like paintings, which partly explains the distinctively weak plots that irritate many filmgoers, myself included. After producing a litter of small, strange movies—thirty-one in all since 1970’s M.A.S.H.—it’s not as if Altman is suddenly going to change course now. Prairie Home is going to be distinctively a Robert Altman picture, not a Garrison Keillor film (despite his having written the screenplay), and certainly not a Minnesota Public Radio movie.

Curious fans of Keillor and the radio show can examine Altman’s plotless approach by starting with his last release, The Company (2003). The director threw together professional actors (Neve Campbell and Malcolm McDowell) and non-actors (dancers from Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet); filmed the dancing, the squabbling, the parties, the practices; and then draped all this over a story line that, after an hour, was still not entirely discernable. It had something to do with the stress of being in a dance troupe and Campbell finally becoming the star of the company. Fans of ballet loved it; considering its paltry box-office take, I doubt many others jumped on board. But there were moments in that film that lingered with me later on, like a pleasant aftertaste following a bite of bittersweet chocolate.

Such as the sound of feet slapping against a stage. This is but one of myriad sound effects in a single scene of The Company, and it was totally surprising—just some brief, sharp thwacks punctuating the music and the dance. In that same scene, which took place during a performance in a Chicago park during a storm, you hear the zip of hands over fabric as a dancer is lifted; the company’s director whispering to a colleague; the rustle of butts shifting on seats; and, of course, the sounds of wind and rain and umbrellas opening. As is often the case in an Altman film, The Company is aurally confounding; the director places microphones on numerous actors at once, whereas the usual practice is to have a boom mike overhead, or to later dub in dialogue, especially if there’s excess noise. But Altman digs excess noise the way Neil Young hungers for feedback. He likes capturing the background hubbub, forcing us to listen hard and try to figure out who (or what) we’re supposed to be listening to.

With that approach to sound, it’s easy to understand why Altman would be drawn to filming a popular radio show. PHC’s ensemble nature is another attraction. Altman adores the art of acting; he hovers over the shoulder of his performers by utilizing zoom lenses and multiple digital cameras to follow them into every nook and cranny on the set, even if he’s a dozen yards away. This forces actors to remain in character, and in this way Altman captures their spontaneous moments—the gaffes and frustrations and flashes of brilliance, whether accidental or deliberate. In 1992’s The Player, he takes us into a restaurant where Burt Reynolds (playing himself) and a friend chat in the foreground, while the “real” action takes place a good twenty feet behind, at a table with Tim Robbins (playing the fictional Griffin Mill). We can hear and see what’s going on in both places, not to mention the conversations elsewhere in the restaurant.

Almost all of Altman’s movies baffle with this kind of technical innovation. His painting metaphor—the film as picture—is apt: Watching his films, the feeling is not that this is documentary, or a typical Hollywood dynamic in which good guys and bad struggle toward the inevitable climax, but rather a moment in life, captured in sound and light in the way that a painting can capture a moment in oil and light. When we go to a restaurant or a ballet, we are inundated with sights and sounds, and naturally take away more than just the singular experience of food or dance. The moments Altman captures are often as ugly as they are beautiful, with performers opening up like a flower, singing or dancing before moving backstage and flipping someone off. His gallery is made up of these moments, as portrayed in the old West (McCabe), in seventies Nashville (Nashville), in a thirties jazz club (Kansas City), and, coming up, a contemporary weekly radio show.

Spatially, Altman’s films eschew large, open settings, retreating instead to the confines of dressing rooms, recording studios, domestic interiors. There are no expansive valleys in McCabe, but rather everything takes place in the cramped saloons, tents, and whorehouses in the town of Presbyterian Church, which is itself wedged into a high mountain gorge. Prairie will be no different, with its cozy set ensconced within the Fitzgerald Theater, both on and off stage.

In all, the nature and circumstances surrounding Prairie Home seem perfectly suited to Altman’s oeuvre. According to the film’s producer Joshua Astrachan, about three years ago Altman and Keillor met through a mutual lawyer friend, hit it off, and began to discuss the possibility of working together. Altman’s wife Kathryn was a fan of Prairie Home, and after he met the man behind it, the thought of filming this little subculture began to intrigue him. One can see why: As the last of the great radio shows, Prairie Home is a relic and a haven for dreamers, whether they’re performers or listeners. But its dark side suits Altman as well. Though I haven’t read Keillor’s novels (it’s been said that his listeners and his readers are two quite separate audiences), friends have been surprised by the edginess of their prose and the not-so-subtle desire of their author to shake things up in Lake Wobegon. The characters are looking back on wasted lives, dull marriages, probable affairs.

At first, Keillor was working on a screenplay about Lake Wobegon, but it was Altman who persuaded him to shift the focus from the fictional hamlet to the machinations behind the curtains at the radio show, thus drawing the story into the enclosed setting and focusing on the performers. And perhaps in Keillor’s case, this change—offering a glimpse of fictional characters playing fictional characters, mingling with the actual show’s regulars—allowed him to reveal to his fans the darker side of the show we love.

Robert Altman is eighty years old, a Midwesterner, and a World War II veteran who would probably cringe at being called one of the Greatest Generation. After a number of minor projects (a James Dean documentary, a sci-fi flick, a twelve-year stint directing TV shows, and a couple features that flopped), he was chosen—and this would be the last time he would ever be chosen—to direct M.A.S.H. The swinging sixties, the anti-war sentiment, and a hunger for things new made M.A.S.H. his most commercially successful film. It gave him the power and the confidence to demand complete control over the content of his work in ways that few other directors can.

Altman has since become known as one of the last of the Hollywood mavericks. At various times, he has talked openly about his penchants for booze, pot, and gambling; he can be cantankerous with screenwriters and anyone else involved in a film—except for actors, whom he indulges shamelessly; and he seems delighted when his esoteric, utterly personal films alienate audiences and studio heads alike. Actors flock to Altman because he is famous for giving them free rein to interpret their characters, while he watches with few comments or suggestions. This can be heaven for performers used to being treated as meat, but a pain to the viewer who has to watch Lily Tomlin’s brilliance mingle with Keith Carradine’s overcooked ham (in Nashville), Stephen Fry’s juvenile slapstick amongst a well-oiled ensemble machine (in Gosford Park); or Harry Belafonte’s jazzy screed to a vacuous Dermot Mulroney (in Kansas City).

Keillor, on the other hand, has never tasted such freedom. Usually he is, in his own words, handcuffed by “the restrictions of good taste.” Giving himself over to Altman, Keillor suddenly becomes both a limitless performer and a screenwriter who expects—working with this director—that spontaneity is the rule, damn the written word. Now that the film’s in the can, rumors abound that Keillor might soon draw the curtains permanently on his radio show; it is thirty years old, and the film concerns the last broadcast of a radio show after the same. Considering Keillor’s growing pessimism, as interviews and his own fiction can attest, this could be an ideal occasion. What better swan song than a collaboration with one of the greatest directors in American cinema?

Whaazzzaahhp?! It erupted from my niece with as much guttural bass as a five-year-old could muster, accompanied by a grin and a vigorous shake of the head. When asked if she heard that at school, she began hopping around the living room. “Everyone’s saying it!” she said. “The big kids are saying it, the little kids are saying it—everyone!”

This was several years ago (that catchphrase from a beer ad, you might recall, peaked at the millennium), but while reading Leslie Savan’s new book — Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever — I realized that my niece had defined what Savan calls “pop language.” It wasn’t just that “everyone” was saying “Whaazzzaahhp?!”; it was also her exuberance at being part of a large phenomenon, one that involved “the big kids.” That transcendence is a major factor in making a word or phrase go pop, says Savan. Its usage has to spread like wildfire, crossing boundaries of age, class, race, and ethnicity, until even the naysayers are drawn, almost involuntarily, to say it (probably with a slightly contemptuous inflection).

Having been exiled to the island of cast-off catch phrases, “Whaazzzaahhp?!” now dwells with the likes of “Show me the money!” and “Talk to the hand” (one hopes that “Don’t go there” is en route). But, of course, potential popisms are bubbling continuously into the collective consciousness, auditioning for their moment in the spotlight. They have varying life spans, just like celebrities. So, rather than creating a compendium of zeitgeist-y verbiage, one that would become dated faster than The Preppy Handbook, Savan aimed to give her book a longer shelf life (oops) by examining the whys and wherefores of pop language.

The main characteristic that distinguishes pop language from mere slang or jargon is widespread popularity. The corollary: Pop is often slang or jargon that has jumped out of its niche. Savan devotes a sizable chapter to showing how, from “bogus” to “411,” slang that was coined or popularized by African-Americans is “all over mainstream pop talk like white on rice.” Once it ascends to pop status, a phrase can pass through several stages, according to Savan. The crest of its popularity is inevitably “followed by a period of soft ridicule for overuse.” Then there’s the irony stage—people will say it, but only knowingly. After that, if it’s still around, the phrase becomes “like a Raid-resistant roach—and it sheds the irony and begins to seem as indispensable as, say, Do the math or 24/7.” Not all pop language makes it that far, but if it does (consider “awesome”), then it has attained the status of “a thought—or more accurately, a stand-in for a thought.”

Although that might sound like the definition of “cliché,” pop is also distinct from those linguistic shortcuts. The two can overlap, however; “fifteen minutes of fame” is both pop and cliché, Savan says, though as a “senior pop phrase” it has more “jolt” than its cliché siblings (“by the skin of his teeth”). That jolt is essential to pop language—maybe adults don’t hop around when they say “Fuhgedaboudit,” but it does provide a feeling of power, or at least iconoclasm, in the face of dehumanizing cubicle farms, telephone labyrinths, and big-box retailers. It shows that the speaker is in the know, up to speed, down with things.

Not that you have to be down with the history of a given word, even if Savan’s tracing the evolution of various pop terms, including “Yesss!,” makes for some of the most interesting parts of Slam Dunks. In the real world, etymology is for losers. Like, who cares that “fifteen minutes of fame” comes from one of Andy Warhol’s prophecies, or that pearls come from grains of sand? What matters is their lustrous allure, and what they say about you. Except that pop language doesn’t have to say much of anything—which makes it, like pearls, suitable for just about any occasion.

By way of a long but interesting digression into the structure, forms, and rhythms of sitcoms, Savan makes the point that, just as these shows are designed to flatter and excite audiences rather than challenge them, we translate those forms into pop language to flatter and excite each other. She describes pop phrases as “verbal viruses” with the “ability to flash-freeze thought and stun our imaginations with commercial confetti.”