Month: March 2006

Cell phone chirps, caller ID says it’s my wife calling. “Hi Honey!”

“Do you have a minute?” Uh-oh. I can tell by the clipped tone of her voice that this is not my lovely, doting bride, the future mother of my children, calling to say she loves and misses me while I’m away for a conference. This is business; and I already have the fear.

“Um, yeah, I’m just taking a break between speakers. What’s up?” Wait for it.

“How much money have you spent?” Gulp. This is a loaded question. As the household chief financial officer, she knows exactly how much I’ve spent.

“I dunno, a few hundred dollars, something like that? Vegas is kind of expensive sweetheart … ” Sweetheart. Thrown in as an act of desperation as I try to take mental tally of how much it’s been. I realize I have no idea.

“Expensive? I guess so. You’ve spent more than six hundred dollars. In less than twenty-four hours.”

Shit. “No I didn’t. I couldn’t have. Six hundred dollars? Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am sure. Yesterday you had withdrawals of $200, $280, $100, and then $100 today. So actually, that makes $680.”

Blink. Blink. The click-pinging of slot machines and other casino din, which I’m sure she can hear in the background, mock any attempt to account for having spent six hundred dollars, constructively, in Las Vegas.

“What on earth did you spend all that money on? I thought this was a corporate thing.”

“Well, um, I dunno, Vegas is expensive, you know cabrideslimosdrinksdinneralittle gamblinganothercabridetceteraandsoon—are you sure it was that much sweetheart?”

“Why do you keep calling me ‘sweetheart’? You never call me that.”

“Well, you know, honey, stuff just kinda, adds up. I’m really sorry sweetheart.” I am in full retreat. I am pathetic. Dear God, why didn’t I let this go to voicemail.

“Sorry? What the hell is wrong with you? And stop calling me ‘sweetheart’! We’ll talk about this when you get back. And try to make it home without spending too much more. I love you.” Click.

My wife and I rarely fight, but when we disagree, it’s usually about money. Yes, we fit that textbook example of domestic discord. We have one bank account, which collects both our paychecks. As a mortgage banker, I deal with other people’s money all day, helping them budget and plan for what is normally the largest expense in their lives. The last thing I want to do when I get home is account for my own finances. (The very thought of balancing even my own checkbook gives me jaw-clenching anxiety.) So rather than being the carpenter who lets his own house go to ruin I entrust my wife, a sales representative by day and domestic goddess by night, with handling all the finances. She manages our money, pays all the bills, keeps us on budget, and does a fantastic job. I love her for it. It’s an arrangement that works well for us—that is, until I periodically screw it up.

For the record: The CFO occasionally blows off budget, too. But here’s the thing: I’d been blowing dough as if it were all my own—we’ll chalk it up to a twenty-four-hour bug. Even though those dollars were being spent on things my wife and I would agree are valid social/business purposes, the fact that I didn’t track it, or at least warn her I’d be high-rolling, was what put me in the doghouse. Between the two incomes, our account was plenty padded. There wasn’t a cash-flow problem. This wasn’t about money in the least.

Six hundred dollars at Target? At Sam’s Club? At Pottery Barn? That’s no problem for her (and for me, just to be clear). These are legitimate expenses; food for the family, household maintenance, and nesting materials to make for a happy home. But six hundred dollars in Vegas with nary a throw pillow to show for it? You have no idea. —Alex Stenback

Recently, the American College of Emergency Physicians issued a national report card on the state of emergency medicine, and the whole country received a grade of C-minus. Minnesota, which is generally the slightly smug and self-satisfied Lisa Simpson character amongst its peer states in these ratings, was issued a slightly improved C-plus, a devastating blow to our “quality of life”-based ego. (Granted, one of the college’s five criteria was Minnesota’s medical-liability climate, where we were rated a D-minus, a grade which one presumes would be improved by a medical-liability damages cap or by exporting HMO hawk Mike Hatch to Wisconsin.)

Recently, I had a firsthand opportunity to test our state’s emergency

preparedness at an early morning bio-terrorism drill at one of the metro area’s major hospitals. I was forwarded an invitation that went out to hundreds of public-health students at the University of Minnesota, soliciting volunteers. It may have been the fact that the drill started at 6:00 a.m. on what turned out to be the coldest day of winter thus far, or that we were advised to wear a swimsuit under our clothes in order to retain modesty during a decontamination shower, but in the conference room where the drilling team assembled, I was one of only three volunteers who weren’t actually employed by the hospital. Our small but brave cadre of outsiders received many thanks, complimentary coffee, and a single powdered doughnut that we were asked to smear on our clothes and faces in order to simulate an anthrax exposure.

While I yearned for more fully developed backstory (“OK, you’re a renegade genetics researcher, and your attempts to create the world’s first pig-soybean hybrid have drawn the ire of animal-rights extremists. One day you receive a suspicious envelope … ”), we volunteers were merely asked to run into the emergency room and tell the attendant we believed we were exposed to anthrax at a building across the street. Emergency-room workers were not supposed to be tipped off to the drill, but some may have grown suspicious at the post-midnight assembly of two shower tents, one in a heated garage and one outside the main entrance, in below-zero windchills.

The organizers staggered our arrival at the emergency room. I was volunteer number seven, so by the time I walked in, the novelty had worn off for the nurses on duty. They barely raised an eyebrow, and, from behind protective glass at the desk, they directed me back outside to the ambulance garage in order to be decontaminated. In the garage, the mood was not so blasé, and there was a lot of muffled consultation going back and forth between hospital staff members clad in hazmat suits who, with their bright-orange boots, looked like a cross between Oompa Loompas and astronauts. In a barely intelligible voice, one of them told me to come with him to the outside shower, but before I could even protest, news arrived that the waterlines to the outside shower had frozen. My relief was short-lived as I stripped down to my swimsuit and was herded into the garage’s shower tent, blasted with water that was only slightly warmer than ice, swaddled in towels, and then rolled in a wheelchair into the ER, where I and my fellow victims were “monitored” for signs of infection by the nursing staff.

At a debriefing that followed, the problems were enumerated: the hazmat suits took too long to don, there was a shortage of bags for contaminated clothing, and the “victims” did not receive quick or understandable instructions. But these problems paled when compared with the adventures of one of the hospital staff’s more entrepreneurial victim-volunteers: When he found himself undirected and unsupervised in the garage, he wandered into the ER and beyond, presumably “infecting” entire wings of the hospital. What’s more, a hospital security guard who had been in an infected area returned to the situation-control room, thereby “infecting” the response-management team. The drill organizers assessed these events soberly. Clearly, this exercise was a starting point, but there would seem to be many more early mornings—and powdered doughnuts—in all of their futures. —Dan Gilchrist

Tri Mai is a bachelor, though not of the beer-and-babe-poster variety. He keeps his South Minneapolis foursquare house immaculate. Precision and aesthetics rule the roost in equal measure, and this balance is everywhere. It’s in the play of light through three stained-glass panels suspended in his front windows. It’s in the careful arrangement of living room chairs, all nine of them, into intimate groupings.

At thirty-five, Mai runs his own business building high-end audio equipment in his basement and selling it worldwide. He’s also an accomplished culinary artist, creating savory delights with little more exertion than other guys might put into heating a can of chili. Still, he hands me chicken wings and cheese bread in the lid of a to-go carton before we settle in to spin some records.

Mai’s stereo occupies as much space as a grand piano or the couch a future girlfriend might want to move in. Two speakers masquerading as bookcases anchor the room. Each is driven by a power amplifier the size of a steamer trunk. A rack of brushed steel components, topped with a granite slab, provides a solid foundation for the turntable.

Watching the needle descend onto the first record of the evening, I am hypnotized by the tonearm silently tracing the groove. I’m conjuring images from under the hood of a sports car as the dulcet voice of Annie Lennox drifts out into the room. Every nuance is audible: the soft intake of breath, even the creak of shoes on the floor.

“Women have all sorts of ways to be flashy: shoes, jewelry, hairstyles, clothes,” Mai muses. “But what do men have? Cars, watches, gadgets—that’s it. Strength is no longer the essential trait, so either our brain, wallet, or dick is bigger.” He gestures at his stereo and says, “I guess these are my beautiful peacock feathers.”

The amplifiers he built for himself glow with electrostatic tubes like a peacock’s iridescent courtship display. But the prime feather in Mai’s fan, the flagship product of his business, is the Tri-Planar Mark VII Precision Tonearm, or simply, the Tri-Planar Ultimate. Among audiophiles it is considered one of the best in the world. One reviewer for the Absolute Sound magazine complained in jest, “Hell hath no fury like a reviewer scorned by a component that refuses to let him down in at least one or two areas.” You can purchase your own Tri-Planar Ultimate from Mai’s website (www.triplanar.com), but at four thousand dollars, turntable not included, it’s not exactly for the average listener.

Mai, however, would love to see that change. “Too many people waste their money on crap,” he says, lowering the arm onto another LP. “Why not spend a little more on something well made, take care of it, and have it last the rest of your life? Everything I make will last a hundred years.”

When Mai was ten years old, he boarded a boat and left his family and his native Vietnam behind. Faced with little opportunity besides mandatory military conscription at fifteen, he set out in search of a better life. After spending more than a year at a refugee camp in the Philippines, he was finally welcomed into a foster family in Coon Rapids, Minnesota.

“Myron and Thelma Nash showed me the good life,” he says. “They showed me unconditional love. If I ever get to heaven, it will surely be because of them.”

While he had some exposure to music from the Nashes—mostly in church—Mai admits he wasn’t really captivated until his freshman year at St. Olaf College. There he dated a German classical violist named Katrine who played him the first vinyl record he’d ever heard.

“It was Heaven or Las Vegas by the Cocteau Twins,” he laughs. “The sound was different from anything I’d heard before. It was fuller but incredibly subtle. It showed me that music could have a body. I was hooked.”

Over the next decade, vinyl addiction would take him into the Twin Cities’ burgeoning rave scene and through a two-year stint building amplifiers for Atma-Sphere Audio. Mai eventually earned a graduate degree in sculpture from MCAD, and ultimately ended up building tonearms with the inventor of the Tri-Planar, a watch-maker named Herbert Papier. When Papier retired in 1999, after a two-decade quest to perfect the Ultimate Tonearm, he handpicked Mai to be his successor.

“I’m privileged Herb had the confidence in me to pass on his business, that I’ve been able to make something out of it, something successful.” He pauses to set the needle on the last record of the evening. “I’ve set up a pretty nice life for myself. I’m surrounded by beauty.” He glances round the room. “Though I’ve been thinking I should get rid of one of these chairs and get a loveseat.”

—Sam Ridenour

Tom Letness could cease his never-ending renovation of the Heights Theatre, in Columbia Heights, and it would remain the finest movie house in the Twin Cities, bar none. Yet he keeps fiddling with it. He knows its history inside and out—from a bombing back in the late twenties at the hands of a disgruntled former projectionist, to its dark days as an ugly second-run theater. As the theater’s current owner, operator, and sometimes beleaguered caretaker, he’s also familiar with all its quirks and charms in its present-day incarnation. Letness didn’t have to dig out the orchestra pit or hire an organist, but he did. He didn’t have to put 152 hand-painted reproduction Edison Mazda bulbs in the chandeliers, but he did. Bringing in the Wurlitzer organ and finding someone to play the thing wasn’t easy, but he did it.

Letness, who bears a striking resemblance to a young John Malkovich, is often fused to his cell phone, trying to set up appointments with inspectors or scheduling future events, sometimes involving vintage films and even, on occasion, an appearance by an aging star. Letness speaks of the Heights with the weary pride of someone who loves what he’s doing but has long since lost his naiveté. “This is a lot easier to talk about now that most of the renovation’s done and we’re headed in the right direction,” he said with a sigh. He shook his head. “Strangers often come up to me and say they have this dream to open a movie theater and what advice can I give them. I tell them the truth. And the truth is, it’s not easy.”

Letness typically works twelve-hour days, seven days a week. He lives in a tasteful, relatively sound-proof apartment above the theater that gives him a bird’s-eye view of his renovated Dairy Queen next door. He begins each morning with a quick walk with the dog, then coffee at a local café, often in the company of a publicist, a journalist, or someone else vital to spreading the gospel of the theater. Around 10:00 a.m., he’ll meet with Chuck Merrell, a maintenance man, to go over projects—the old theater requires a tremendous amount of upkeep. Letness also tinkers around the theater himself, climbing scaffolds for ceiling repairs, cleaning up from the previous night’s screenings, in addition to conducting all of the business work—and also scurrying next door to handle the occasional ice cream crisis. He also consolidates the multiple reels of a new film into one giant reel and threads it into the projector, which he maintains. “I handle the pictures with kid gloves, unlike other places,” he scoffed. “You get a quality print at the Heights.” Around 3:00 p.m., he’ll prep for the first show of the night, throw open the doors, sell tickets, and personally start the picture about 5:00 p.m.

“My employee,” Letness said, stressing the singular as if to drive home his lonely venture, “arrives around 6:00, and I help him get ready for the next show.”

At times, he can become irritable about some patrons. “Oh, I’ve thrown people out. I look at it like you’re in my house. Don’t talk during the movie. Turn your cell phone off. Pick up your garbage. We have this lovely little announcement beforehand, with a mother telling her kids to be polite, and yet people still are rude. Do I have to go up there myself and ask them to be quiet during the show?”

For the most part, though, Letness loves his audience and it loves him. “For me, it’s the little things—like when that curtain rises before a film, there’s a wonderful feeling. And I remember one kid before a Harry Potter film seeing those curtains and asking me, ‘Is this the play or the movie?’” Letness rolled his eyes, and despite his obvious pleasure at pleasing the kiddies, the skeptic momentarily displaced the romantic. “Yeah, kid,” he growled sarcastically, “it’s the play.”

The Heights could screen the typical Cineplex garbage, but instead, Letness insists on bringing in what he believes is quality Hollywood fare and, every now and then, classics like Oklahoma! or White Christmas (this year he has already lined up Bing Crosby’s widow to croon beforehand). And sometimes he’ll indulge his taste for films like It Started With Eve, an old and virtually forgotten Deanna Durbin flick from 1941. “One of my favorites,” he admitted. “That’s one of the joys of the Heights—I know that if I didn’t show that film, no one else would.” —Peter Schilling

Despite Daunte Culpepper’s departure for Miami, he’ll be making a few non-voluntary return trips. That’s because the Vikings Sex Boat scandal continues to play itself out in the legal system. We trust our courts of law, of course, but it was never clear to us what laws precisely were broken in that unseemly episode. Last time we checked, casual, consensual sex between adults was discouraged but not illegal. Lap dances, on the other hand, are perfectly legitimate and generally considered protected by the First Amendment as a sort of artistic expression. (To be sure, lap dances are supposed to take place in a licensed establishment, with the other trimmings of public performance—you know, stage names, soft-lighting gels, costumes of sorts, those sorts of things.) We’re not saying that makes lap dancing good; we’d rather not have to adjudicate that subject. It is easier to say that people ought to be able to express themselves, than to dictate how they should do it (or what they should wear while they’re doing it). Incidentally, the word is that the post-Culpepper era will begin with a bold move on the franchise’s part. The team is redesigning its uniform, including the risky sartorial proposition of purple pants. If they could also eliminate that faux-military script Vikings logo that has long polluted end zone and sweatshirt, we’d be grateful.

As it turns out, the Twins will be tweaking their uniforms, as well. In honoring the late Kirby Puckett, the players will wear number 34 patches on their sleeves this season. It was ennobling to see Puckett’s send-off in March, and we felt bad that he’d retreated so far from the public eye in the years after his retirement. Of course, it didn’t help when, three years ago, his private life was blown wide open in a Sports Illustrated cover story, and the self-righteous colloquy that proclaimed his good-guy image a “sham.” Sometimes public figures remember these injuries much longer than the public does. No one wishes to excuse the man’s flaws, but it was nice to have so many reminders of the joy Puckett brought to doing his life’s main work—or, really, to playing a game. What Puckett’s story underlines is how much media have changed in the past fifty years. There was once an assumption that pro athletes were role models for our youth, and the media helped prop up this felicitous myth in part by leaving alone the private unpleasantries that are, in some degree, visited on every life. In later years, plenty of pro athletes kicked back by getting tattooed and dying their hair and getting in fistfights at nightclubs. If their private lives were to be scrutinized and publicized by the press, then they would stop pretending to be ambassadors for their corporate owners, stop dropping into elementary schools and pediatric wards and tousling the hair of towheaded young fans. By those standards in his public life, Kirby Puckett was a throwback. He loved being a baseball idol and representing the honorable values of hard work, mutual respect, self-sufficiency, loyalty, and generosity. Whether these values carried over into his private life is probably a question we should all turn on ourselves.

The other day, another franchise player expressed his loyalties to our fair cities. Columnist Nick Coleman pleaded with his bosses at McClatchy, the overlords of the Star Tribune, to do right by his old employer, the St. Paul Pioneer Press. At first we were a little startled to hear Coleman explain that loyalty is one of several values that supersede money-making, because we recall Coleman’s surprising jump from the Pioneer Press to the Star Tribune in 2003, after seventeen years at the former paper. (At the time, it seemed odd that the Star Tribune wanted to add yet another reasonable and articulate fellow to its stable of … well, middle-aged, white-male columnists; the paper has since achieved a sort of corrective balance by hiring a shrewish neo-conservative think-tanker.) But this would be unfair. Coleman, after all, spent his first decade as a newspaperman at the Star Tribune. There is a difference between being a company man and being a community man.

If you’re thinking of buying a car anytime soon you ought to test drive the BMW 330i. Hell, even if you aren’t thinking of buying a car, you should do it just for the rush.

Because this is the car that all other sedans have to measure up to. You shouldn’t get to have this car just because you can afford it. You should have to pass a driver-appreciation exam. There should be scholarships, because this car is like Harvard for the driving literati.

The “Road Rake” and I had the pleasure of being given free rein by the nice folks at Motorwerks BMW to take this car for a day, sans supervision. In other words, Steve Rydberg, the sales manager there, trusted us. He probably shouldn’t have, but he did. (We lied and told him we were actual journalists—as opposed to guys who like fast cars and happen to write about them occasionally.) We put the car to the test. Not all the way to the making-it-skid-backward test, but almost. Now that I think of it, Steve is probably glad he wasn’t with us. He just didn’t know it.

The last time I test drove a BMW, it was with a friend who wanted me to advise her on whether to buy one. The test drive was short and uneventful—the usual one-stop up the freeway and back. I drove, my friend was on my right, and the salesman was in the back. As we were returning to the dealership on the frontage road, I decided we needed a little more information about the vehicle. So I accelerated to 60 … 70 … 80 … 90. As the dealership approached, the salesman kept pointing out the turn to me. He repeated himself because he noticed I wasn’t slowing. I took it after a hard brake and downshift. He whimpered a little bit as my friend and I said “Whee.” He managed a “Whew,” as he realized he hadn’t been killed. And he was about to spit out something more descriptive when my friend turned around in her seat and said, “That was fun. I’ll take it.” The salesman felt much better.

That car was a BMW 645i, not the 330i, but you get the picture. If anything, the 330i is even quicker. Not as much weight to haul around, you see. The Road Rake and I took turns driving it one sunny Saturday last month. We zoomed around the back roads of Bloomington and shot up Highway 100, using the 330i’s effortless acceleration, ultra-responsive steering, and lovely Steptronic automatic transmission to pretend we were on the Autobahn and could pass whomever we liked. We could and we did.

We made some very hard turns at high speed to test the vaunted stability control system. As far as I can tell, the engineers at BMW seem to have found a way to eliminate centrifugal force from the precepts of Newtonian physics. In other words, the car turned precisely as asked, didn’t lean at all, even at the point when the tires were losing adhesion, and made the Road Rake and me grin at each other as if we’d just got off the big rollercoaster at Valleyfair and said “Let’s go again.”

The Road Rake and I are both confirmed standard-transmission guys, but it bears mention that we agreed we’d happily give up the left knee pain engendered by the stiff racing clutch pedals in our fun cars for the BMW’s Steptronic transmission. Unlike some of the earlier versions of the concept, like the Audi’s Tiptronic, which once displayed a slight reluctance to change gears when ordered, the manual shift auto transmission in the BMW was instantaneous and imperceptibly smooth. There was no “clunk” even at numerous high-rev downshifts. The car responded with instant acceleration without complaint. On the upshift, it shot ahead as if we were all of a sudden pedaling downhill while everyone behind us was stuck on the wrong side of a mountain on the Tour de France.

On top of all this physical sensation is the sound. Not the audio system (which we really didn’t have time to notice, but I’m sure is fine if you’re not that into hip-hop). I’m talking about the sound we noticed after we turned off the radio. The tuned exhaust system was a perfect accompaniment to the performance. This car even sounds fast.

The version we drove lists for $41,820 and includes the premium package, with auto dimming mirrors, a garage door opener, BMW Assist (OnStar with a German accent), and the Bluetooth connection, in case you feel like you have to talk on your cell and drive at the same time. (There’s also an all-wheel-drive model—the 330xi, for a couple grand more.) Drive one. Use the phone only to call your banker to arrange for the loan. —Tom Bartel

The Road Rakes Tom Bartel and Chris Birt are now online at www.rakemag.com/today/roadrake/.

Clothing designers aren’t yet as numerous as guitar players, but sometimes we wonder if the fashion-show circuit isn’t starting to look a lot like the indie-rock scene. Despite what seems like a near-weekly occurrence of runway events, DIVA Minnesota’s annual affair is among the few absolute must-sees. For its 2006 fund-raiser, which took place last month, some twenty local designers worked a “femme fatale” theme, concocting killer gowns, cat suits, and 007-inspired jackets; we saw shades of Medusa, Cleopatra, and Glenn Close’s character from Fatal Attraction slinking and strutting around. But what really stood out, given the preponderance of bias-cut fabric and plunging necklines, were all the hip bones and clavicles. Sharper than any spike heel in the room.

—Christy DeSmith