Year: 2005

It would be hard to find a more alluring summer show than these luminous, glittering waterscapes. Painter May Stevens first came to prominence in the sixties with pop-inspired, politically charged works, but the expansive canvases here couldn’t be more different. They hang freely, like tapestries, to envelop viewers; trickling across them are gilded words, often only half-legible. The images of pools, streams, and the open sea, variously glowing and brooding, create vivid environments in which you can almost feel the crunch of gravel underfoot and hear water lapping at the shore. Each work reflects a specific memory of Stevens’s, including the childhood canoe trips with her father on the Charles River and sites around the world that she visited with her late husband. The result is an intimate and emotive exploration of our connections to people and nature. 2400 Third Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org

I have a friend who is a stylist in New York; it’s part of her job to read magazines, from the trashiest of titles (In Touch Weekly) to more esoteric fare like Italian Vogue and Surface. When I’d visit, she’d often load me up with back issues, which I’d browse on the way home. Sitting on the subway one evening, I pulled a copy of Lucky, “the magazine about shopping,” from the pile. Like so many others, I had derided this publication as brazenly tacky. I figured I’d flip through it in less time than it takes to get through InStyle—ten minutes, max. But something pulled me in. I spent a good half-hour with that mag. I even did something that I knew, even as I was doing it, was superficial and shameful. But I couldn’t help myself. From the magazine’s signature page of stickers, I pulled off one that read “Maybe?” and attached it to a page of shoes.

I managed to sidestep a full-blown affair with Lucky; that one encounter sated my curiosity. But now its much-anticipated spinoff, Domino, “the shopping magazine for your home,” has arrived. I impulsively grabbed it off the newsstand the other day, maybe because this publication somehow seemed a little more, well, seemly than its sister dedicated purely to shopping (for yourself). So cut me some slack—we all make rationalizations about our indulgences. Domino got tossed in the back seat of the car, where a friend who is not a stylist scoffed at it. The next day, I saw that he had plastered the magazine with its own signature stickers—“gift,” “renovate,” “entertain,” “decorate,” “garden”—mocking me, needless to say, in the process.

Why all this discomfort over a magazine? Partly it’s because Domino and its siblings (Condé Nast also publishes Cargo, for guys) are actually “magalogs.” They are the unholy spawn of catalog and magazine, the perfect synthesis of advertising and editorial. Or is it merely advertorial that’s super-light on the ’torial? Regardless, magalogs are a publisher’s dream. After launching in 2001, Lucky quickly became one of the most successful publications of any kind. Revenues rose from $23.9 million in 2001 to $127 million in 2004, and naturally, dozens of imitators were born. Even more telling is the degree to which other publications, especially fashion titles, women’s magazines, city magazines, and even newspapers, have incorporated tantalizing displays of products with virtually no copy—a magalog trademark—into their pages.

But my discomfort goes beyond the status of magalogs in the publishing industry. While Lucky is devoted to personal goods—clothing, jewelry, toiletries—Domino literally hits home, a much broader target. Consequently, it tweaks all sorts of nerves that are tied to class and taste and materialism. It provokes insecurities and, yes, snobbery. Ultimately, it throws into relief the question of how and why we develop desires for certain things, and blurs the line between wanting something and having it.

Let’s address the “C” word first. People in the very highest income brackets don’t subscribe to House Beautiful or Metropolitan Home; these are “aspirational” magazines for the rest of us to drool and dream over. But Domino is not aspirational in the same way as these other home magazines. Nor does the magalog appeal in the traditional “how-to” sense, as in how to make cool stuff for cheap, which is a mission of the spunky Readymade, a hip magazine published in San Francisco. Domino, like Lucky, is shamelessly, unapologetically, how-to-buy; it’s stuffed with “actionable” suggestions, to use a term that marketers swiped from the legal profession. In the magalog, the how-to-buy and the aspiration merge, which is to say that in many ways, Domino is devoted to showing the masses how to ape the upper classes (to un-mothball a little Marxist jargon).

For example, the premiere issue shows us regular Janes how to buy wallpapers and fabrics that are usually sold exclusively “to the trade”—i.e. to interior designers, who pass on the goods, with a healthy markup, to the people wealthy enough to hire interior designers. “Scalamandré, Brunschwig & Fils, Fortuny… What’s a girl without a decorator to do?” So reads the caption for an illustration of a young woman who, like the little match girl, looks longingly through the window of a decorator’s boutique. Assuming for a moment that these kinds of magazines actually lead to better-informed shopping sprees, Domino shows us how to beat a system set up largely to maintain a certain elitist cachet, and how to obtain some Scalamandré of our own to show off at cocktail parties. It facilitates our step up from aspiration to a quintessentially American, or at least Gatsby-esque masquerade. (Just hide the credit card bill from your husband.)

Whatever other problems we might have with the extremely rich, there’s nothing wrong with the fact that they are different from you and me, except for how resolutely we want to deny it. If Brunschwig & Fils is destined to become available to the masses, maybe by launching a lower-priced line at Sears, then dollars to doughnuts you can bet that the rich will have long since abandoned it for other exclusive goods, which no doubt will be featured in upcoming issues of Domino. In this sense, the magalog falls within that branch of consumer capitalism that manifests itself as a game of hide-and-seek between the rich and those who wish to be.

Many of the images in Domino are partially obscured with arrows and notes (“stash napkins and silverware here”) rendered in computer-generated script. It comes across as a blatant attempt to create “personality,” even though Domino is not about personality—it’s about choice.

A case in point is the “Accessorize My Kitchen” feature, with its picture of a kitchen and a computer-generated note, “has anyone seen my personality?” Presto—the eye is directed downward by an arrow—three choices are offered: “retro cheer,” “French flea market,” and “California rustic.” (This raises a question that has been popping up ever since strawberry kiwi shampoo was invented. Why do we choose California rustic—shunning California modern—even if we live in Illinois?)

It’s the job of Domino’s stylists to “source” objects and arrange them into themed displays, thereby showing us ways to bring “personality” to our homes, or to make them look less humble than they really are. They put together sleek plastic goods and a sparing use of chartreuse for “retro cheer,” and mix up ceramic, bamboo, wood, and stainless steel for “California rustic.” In magalogs like Domino, stylists are often called “editors” or “directors” (a concession to traditional magazine titles), but the fact is, stylists are shoppers, albeit professional ones. This is why they “source,” and then we, following their inspiration, shop.

Stylists, then, do fulfill a real need, other than dressing movie stars for the Oscars and making guest appearances on cable. Certainly you may choose to live your own life, but if you’re interested in cultivating a particular lifestyle—and if you’re a girl without a bona fide decorator—then a stylist will be useful in the endeavor. With so much stuff out there, someone has to show us the things that we really want. The genius of Domino is that it shows these things as various types of visual lists, dispensing with everything extraneous except for basic key-word descriptions, and, of course, shopping information. Its pages are loaded with eye candy. In fact, it’s such a pure formula that the shopping itself—the acquisition of the thing—becomes in most cases irrelevant. Looking is enough. Domino’s main job, of course, is to sell itself, and it will probably do that exceedingly well.

Last year, in a book called The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, the psychologist Barry Schwartz put forth the insight that we are shopping more than ever, but taking les
s pleasure in it. Acquiring goods has become a chore because we are overwhelmed by choices, sometimes to the point of paralysis. Shopping has been perverted into a dysfunctional practice, what with shopaholics, shoppertainment, shopping out of anger or depression, and so forth. Domino, it could be argued, offers shopping as a vicarious experience, in the same way that travel magazines and pornography provide attractive, affordable, and easy alternatives to the real thing.

With actual shopping, displays of abundance are crucial. They’re eye-catching and they make individual items look desirable. (Newsstands finally caught on to this; often they display a dozen or so copies of one magazine, arranged in a grid.) Domino translates this basic merchandising technique to displays of abundant choices. In a charticle on bed linens, for example, the objects of desire are laid out in a grid on a white background, like so many butterfly specimens. The X axis shows five fully made beds; the Y axis breaks down their components: euro square, pillowcase options 1 and 2, flat and fitted sheets, blanket/quilt, and duvet cover. (Who knew it was so involved?)

The other way to show abundant choices is to create still-lifes. Confronting Domino’s seductive spread of twelve chartreuse vases, it’s simple instinct to scan, then pick out the one that appeals most to you. It doesn’t matter if you don’t actually like chartreuse, or vases. It doesn’t really matter if you buy one, either—you have been shopping, if only in your mind.

When it comes to being overwhelmed by choices of things we don’t want or need, Domino is part of the problem—but it also wants, as so many magazines do, to be part of the solution. So its premiere issue includes an article on how to shop at art fairs. A potent example of abundant choice, art fairs have proliferated in the last five years as glamorous and profitable spectacles. Wealthy folks jet to New York for the Armory Show, or Miami for Art Basel Miami Beach, or Basel itself for the original Basel Art Fair; over a long weekend, they might drop tens of thousands of dollars on pieces for their various homes.

True to magalog style, the Domino article includes a spread of ten artworks, branded as “smart decorative” by the author, that had been on view at the AAF Contemporary Art Fair (the upscaled incarnation of what was formerly the Affordable Art Fair). Which one will be yours? Of course, they may already be sold (there’s a caveat at the bottom of the page); even though these artworks are unique (or, in the case of prints, quite limited), they are displayed no differently than the linen hand towels on page fifty-eight.

In truth, there’s something appealingly up-front about this. Art is a product, after all; otherwise we wouldn’t have terms like “art market” and “art object.” It’s the emphasis on the shopping, rather than the art, that’s bothersome. On the other hand, it would be silly to expect Domino to teach us the art of falling in love with art, or the value in cultivating one’s own taste for linen hand towels, or any other type of object. These aspirations can’t be achieved by flipping through a magazine, but that won’t keep Domino’s stylists and readers from trying.

Browsing through Spot On: The Art of Zines and Graphic Novels at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts was something of a jarring experience. As someone who spent (or lost) more than a decade of the prime years of my life as a service sector drone, haunting independent record and book stores, and scribbling furiously in notebooks (not to mention drinking alone, listening to loud music, and fine-tuning my lousy attitude), this exhibit was sort of equal parts flashback and validation, with a little bit of inexplicable melancholy tossed in for good measure.

Modest and extremely user-friendly, Spot On showcases a broad range of past and current pioneers, prototypes, trendsetters, and obscurities from the outsider fringe. It represented something of a cultural version of comfort food for me; everything there, even things I’d never seen, seemed oddly familiar. I can’t recall attending another exhibition that felt so much like a personal attic library of the sort of life I once led. Despite the nature-or-nurture question, we all inevitably make ourselves (and make ourselves over, some of us time and time again). The raw materials we use in this ongoing project, whether acquired through deliberate adventures in curiosity or mere serendipity, become in time almost genetic components of our personalities; they exert a pull on our desires and dissatisfactions that is almost as powerful as the blessings and handicaps we inherit with our DNA.

That’s my old crackpot theory, anyway, and the world of zines and graphic novels has always been crowded with crackpots and crackpot theories, not to mention all manner of desires and dissatisfaction. I certainly know that I’ll never shake some stuff hardwired in my brain by formative influences like Mad magazine and Ernie Bushmiller, or the Minneapolis agitprop street manifestos of Earnest Free Man. Those sorts of influences (along with, of course, the emergence of punk and indie rock) made me highly susceptible to the weird world of free expression and underground art that is celebrated in Spot On.

My own introduction to that world occurred during the Reagan/Thatcher years, which, coincidentally or not, was when zine culture, as well as punk and indie rock, really exploded. This was, of course, mainly before personal computers, let alone desktop publishing, became ubiquitous, and the zine aesthetic was largely defined by copy machines, typewriters, and the crudest sort of cut-and-paste collages and guerrilla design. In Spot On, you can also see the clear influence that early punk zine artists like Raymond Pettibon had on some of the later graphic artists, and it’s surprising to find that even many quite recent efforts in both forms are refreshingly free of obvious technological monkey business.

I was curious, actually, about what sort of connection the Minnesota Center for Book Arts would try to posit between the worlds of zines and graphic novels. Despite the fact that I have loved, hoarded, and even dabbled in both over the years, I’d never really thought of the two as precisely either consanguine or contemporaneous. To the contrary, they’ve always been entirely separate things in my mind, springing from different sets of impulses and influences. Yet the first display encountered in Spot On places a selection of zines alongside a batch of covers and spreads from graphic novels. Spending some time looking at this assortment, it became apparent that—of course—these two print forms were intrinsically related, in precisely the ways that ensured that the person I was twenty-five years ago would have been helplessly attracted to them.

What they share most obviously is a fidelity to realism in even its grimmest forms, but that’s hardly all. There’s also a sense of loneliness and futility, often existing almost side by side with some notion, however vague, of an ideal community; a code of fiercely personal ethics; a melancholy nostalgia for lost people, places, and art forms—and, finally, a helpless and tangled absorption in the mundanity of that most sullied of concepts, the real world: shit jobs, family dysfunction, sexual frustration, sexual confusion, depression, suffocating boredom, the challenges and hassles of urban life. The frequent presence of drudge work, and the examination of the inevitable effects it has on the human spirit, particularly distinguishes many of these projects, whether zine or graphic novel, and that’s also a subject that has been largely missing from most other American literature of the last twenty years. In this sense, certainly, the pioneering zinesters and graphic novelists seem most often to be the burnt-out progeny of the Beat Generation rather than products of graduate writing programs or art schools, so their typical protagonist is, say, the exhausted civil servant of Harvey Pekar’s work, as opposed to the neurotic academics who populate so much contemporary fiction.

At least early on, you also never get the sense that there was ever any real financial incentive behind these labor-intensive projects, or if there was it was a product of pure romantic delusion. The early examples of both zines and graphic novels were obviously motivated first and foremost by self-expression, control, and a weird combination of defiance and defeatism that was essentially built into their severely limited models of production and distribution.
It’s all too easy to oversimplify the origins of both forms. From the very beginning of the first boom, there were as many different types of graphic novels and zines as there were subcultures and scenes, and none of them were without precedent or forebears. Punk rock was obviously a huge influence on early zine culture. It was not for nothing that one of the true pioneering modern zines was called Punk, and for a period in the late seventies and early eighties, scads of Xeroxed fanzines were available in every independent record store in the country.

Other zine templates, from the political to the literary, had their origins in older models, from Addison and Steele’s eighteenth-century pamphlet The Spectator and Poor Richard’s Almanac to Paul Krassner’s 1960s counterculture newsletter The Realist and Ken Kesey’s sporadically published little magazine, Spit in the Ocean. Literary history is likewise full of examples of small, short-lived journals that were often as inexpensively and poorly produced as many modern zines, and writers like James Joyce routinely published stories and excerpts from works in progress in flimsy and impossibly limited journals and privately printed editions.

The graphic novel has also evolved from long-established forms, and many of the modern practitioners, from Art Spiegelman to Chris Ware, readily acknowledge and celebrate their predecessors (nostalgia for the old forms is almost a religion for the current generation of artists). Included among them are European pioneers of the strip form, early American serial artists, or true graphic novelists like Lynd Ward and Franz Masereel, who composed stark, wordless novels from woodcuts in the 1920s and 1930s.

These days, zines have mostly transmogrified into more easily and cheaply produced blogs. Graphic novels have become, well, Graphic Novels. They’re increasingly recognized for what the best of them have always been: art and literature, plain and simple. That said, there’s still a certain prevailing discriminatory attitude about this work, particularly in mainstream publishing circles. Folks have gradually been coming around, and you’re seeing more and more of the sort of critical attention these artists have always deserved, but, still, check out the tiny ghetto such books typically occupy in the chain bookstores. Strip away the Japanese Manga and the straight funny pages anthologies, and you’re generally left with barely a few shelves of the obvious suspects: guys like Pekar and Daniel Clowes sharing shelf space with Frank Miller and Joe Matt.

The variety and quality of stuff that’s being produced today is truly mi
nd-boggling, but to get the full range of it, you still pretty much have to depend on the specialty stores like Minneapolis’ indispensable Big Brain Comics. (That store carries a much broader selection than its name suggests, and, conveniently, is just down the block from the MCBA.) These same stores, along with the handful of remaining indie record shops, are also the last marketplace outside the Internet for what remains of zine culture, and their proprietors are generally equal parts historians, curators, and obsessive boosters of the stuff they carry. Increasingly, in fact, such establishments, along with junk shops and old-school used bookstores, are the last American retail enterprises that still manage to retain the cluttered and exotic feel of a museum cum curiosity shop. In that sense, they’re the ideal repositories for the art they peddle.

Last month was a good one in the annals of human sexuality. Early in May, a Winona, Minnesota, student got kicked out of high school for wearing a button that said “I Heart My Vagina.” Carrie Rethlefsen, an eighteen-year-old senior, had seen a recent college production of The Vagina Monologues, and decided to take up a cause that adults at her school felt would be disruptive. A week later, a small town in Brazil celebrated “Orgasm Day”–and a part of the day’s serious programming included a production and discussion of The Vagina Monologues.

Lots has been written about that vagina play, but I guess it won’t keep me from weighing in as a benighted married man. It seems that if people don’t unapologetically love it (it’s about female empowerment!), then they are dead-set against it (God hates obscenity. And sex. And women).

I think Winona school officials have carved out an interesting middle ground. They have certainly bent over backward to show their sensitive sides–yes, yes, we know all about the oppression and the repression of women, and we’ll schedule seminars and discussions and panels and lectures and all that–but we have to be realistic here. We know this slogan will make kids giggle, and point, and joke, and skip classes, and blow up condoms like balloons, and sniff glue, and write graffiti on the bathroom walls, and steal the banisters out of stairwells, and smoke cigarettes, and disrespect the custodial staff, and so on … My paraphrasing is an exaggeration, of course. But honestly. We’re not talking about preventing school shootings here. Why don’t school officials worry about the disruption if it happens, rather than speculate about the potential disruptee? Why expel the messenger before even seeing what the reaction to the message might be?

The v-word itself has become a point of agreement in the culture wars–not so much for the troglodytes of the religious right, who hate sex and women, or in our high schools, but in various sects within feminism. This vagina activism works in two different ways, as I understand it. The post-feminists (or, as some like to say, lipstick feminists) promote a pro-sex, positive body image. Among the second-wavers, it is about exposing the history of female victimization (from both men and women). The nice thing is that feminists of any age can agree on loving their vaginas. So what’s the problem?

I think it’s just fun for women to say it out loud, and it’s fun for them to talk about it. It’s liberating to turn the word into a slogan on a button, a bumper sticker, or a T-shirt. Maybe they enjoy indulging in what has long been a male practice–speaking frankly and maybe a little proudly about their genitals. When I heard that one of Carrie’s male friends made his own T-shirt that said “I Support Your Vagina,” I thought, now that was a fine way to get behind the cause. Then I thought, Sheesh, what a dork. I’d make one that said, “I Heart Your Vagina, Too!” or “Let’s See It!” (Kidding… I’m kidding!)

Just by way of contrast, I like to imagine The Penis Monologues. (I don’t doubt there are dozens of parodies and maybe even a few serious, men’s-movement oriented treatments along these lines. Besides, you might say, most of modern life is already a perpetual penis monologue.) The subjugation and victimization of men is a hard sell. You have to believe in the hippy-dippy sophistry that to be a victimizer is also to be tragically unfulfilled. A Penis Monologues would invariably seem silly or self-indulgent, and it would certainly run the risk of trivializing The Vagina Monologues. But on a personal level (and there, by the way, is where The Vagina Monologues really triumph, I think), men have a lot to gain by thinking and speaking more openly about our own tragicomic equipment, and some of the indignities we suffer from in the daily, below-the-belt struggle for self-respect and fulfillment.

A reader recently commented that the Viagra paradox (mentioned in last month’s column–how many men and women seriously want to deal with a six-hour boner?) may be a result of widespread circumcision. There is surely a growing awareness that there are lots of reasons why we should call this what it is: a form of ritual genital mutilation. On the other hand, I’m not sure I agree with the theory that this has somehow made American men less capable of having sex or obsessing about sex. We may be twenty to fifty percent less sensitive than if we still had our foreskins, but I don’t see that stopping my circumcised friends from having sex at every opportunity they get, and then some.

Maybe that would be a good place to start with our proposed penis monologues. Maybe we should all talk about our genitals a lot more, until it is no longer disruptive or even very interesting, like talking about our elbows.

America-bashing is so in vogue. Teenagers, especially, are vulnerable to this general sense of “how bad we are,” based on a couple of tragic elections and a war of lies. I’m brokenhearted over these things, too, but the “how bad we are” mantra grows wearisome when it comes from what is, according to a recent study by the Representative Democracy in America Project, the most apathetic generation of American youth on record.

Here’s what I tell the kids in my life: Stop whining about how bad “we” are in between trips to the mall and viewings of Austin Powers, and do something. I have a friend who serves soup once a week at a homeless shelter, and the best thing about it is that she sits down and eats with the women she serves. A couple of families I know stick to one car by biking nearly everywhere, year round. And I’ve grown genuinely attached to the “peace people” who stand, rain or shine, at the east end of the Franklin Avenue Bridge.

Another old friend was born in Zaire and raised in France. Years ago, when I was homeschooling my kids, she tutored them in French. She now has her own son, who is two. Just recently she told me how grateful she is to be raising him here, because in her very worldly experience, this is the place that offers the most possibility. Maybe I can relate, because a sense of possibility is something I fought for and won.

When I was ten and my mom got divorced for the second time, we hit the skids pretty bad. We had to take in a series of boarders to make ends meet. Strange were the folks who sought rooms for rent in the home of a single mom in Casper, Wyoming, in the late seventies. Mark kept porn magazines under his bed and bacon crackers in his closet. Karen was actually living in sin with her boyfriend, and using her room at our house as a place to store clothes so her parents wouldn’t know. Diane had two little kids of her own and was fundamentally Christian in the worst sense of the word. She ended up storming out within a couple of weeks without paying rent (but she did teach my sister how to make a terrific grilled-cheese-and-tomato sandwich).

Meanwhile, I had a knack for seeking out friends who, by contrast, only made my own situation seem more extreme. Norah lived on the edge of downtown in a Victorian home so large and rambling that I sometimes got lost in it. There was a whole room on the third floor for her gigantic dollhouse, and a widow’s walk on the roof where we’d hang out and write poetry. Norah’s dad was a partner in his own law firm. On weekends, I’d join the family for trips up Casper Mountain to the construction site of their enormous A-frame “cabin.”

Renee’s family owned the largest car dealership in town. We would walk from school over to her family’s stately brick colonial for lunch, and her mom would send us upstairs to play while she cooked us a hot meal. When our toasted peanut butter sandwiches were ready, she’d buzz us on the house’s intercom system.

Holly was probably the friend I loved best of all. Her dad was in oil and her mom drove a wood-paneled station wagon. They were Mormon, so their house was overrun with kids and toys and general hubbub. Still, Holly enjoyed her own room with a waterbed in a house ample enough to include a living room and a family room, a piano room, and an enormous fenced yard. I spent some of my happiest childhood nights sleeping side by side with Holly, afloat on her bed after a day of warmth and fun.

As I scrutinized these other lives, I realized two things: One, I wanted my life to look like theirs someday, and two, I wanted to be a writer. I was hell-bent on jumping over the tracks, and beyond that, I was willing to work my ass off to do it. So I did, and while I’ve never gotten lost in my house and I don’t have a mountaintop A-frame, neither does my life look like the one that boarder Mark waltzed into with his bacon crackers. I’ve even had enough left over to join the Sierra Club, give to the food shelf, and lend a bit of support to my favorite candidates. Maybe I could have done this anywhere–after all, in England, J.K. Rowling got rich and famous by writing Harry Potter in cafes while she nursed coffee paid for with welfare checks. But that’s just what I love about writing–which is the very thing I appreciate about this country: possibility. As I tell the kids, you gotta grab it and run.